Oddbean

Not anymore. I've earned and lost prop funding five different times. Most people can't be successful at it. If you're going to try, do it though a prop firm so that you're not risking thousands of dollars of your own money.

With a prop firm, you pay up front while you're being evaluated, but it's a lot less than you can lose trading futures or options in a real account. Once you earn a funded account you'll have to pay just the exchange data fees. When you make a withdrawal from your funded account, you split it with the prop firm. Usually 90/10 or 80/20, with the larger share going to you. For futures trading I recommend Topstep. They're the oldest and best in the business. They've really simplified the process recently. You trade in sim and just have to hit the profit target once. Then they set you up with a funded account of $50k-150k and have a 90/10 profit split when you make withdrawals.

15 contracts in the $150k account. Which is a fucking lot actually. 10 points of movement in the S&P500 means you make or lose $500 per contract. Even trading just 4 contracts at a time you can blow your account pretty quickly. Once you've built up a profit cushion you have more room to play but when you're starting at zero you can only lose $4500 of their money in the $150k account before they cut you off. Sometimes the market can swing 10 points in like five minutes so if you're slinging 4 contracts around you can lose $2k that fast. I always ended up losing money in the long run. Sometimes I'd get lucky for a while but it never lasted.

I've tried a few things. They all work in certain conditions. Range bound days are easy to print money if you can identify support/resistance levels early enough in the day, but those levels tend to be squishy so you can't use too tight of a stop loss, and can't be too specific with your entries. Trend days are my favorite. Just attack every little pullback and ride the trend. Those days don't happen often enough though. I tend not to have enough patience to stare at a screen and do nothing for days and days until I get the market conditions that I want. Most days are choppy with shifting market conditions where by the time you define your levels the next swing invalidates them. It can be very frustrating. I don't do a lot of TA. It's a craps shoot. Except for wedges. When price action started narrowing down into a tighter and tighter wedge it's usually going to break out and run soon. But a lot of that TA nonsense is just hoodoo voodoo. Astrology for men.