and look this is no different than any other prop trading company, except apex happens to have modified their program to make it much, much, much less mentally/emotionally challenging to be profitable if you approach it from a long term goal oriented mindset.




for example. pretty much every prop trading firm would make you wait about 90 days to be able to cash out a single penny from your account. there were 1 or 2 exceptions but they tended to apply pressure in other ways, eg making it harder to get funded in the first place, or providing less tolerant loss limits for 'blowing up' your account.




apex has basically retired that entire paradigm. the theoretical turnaround from registering a test account and getting your first payout is about 5 weeks with apex:




day 1: you register a test account. you need to pass your profit threshold and trade for 7 trading days, at which point you can promote it to a paid account. this costs a single $140 fee per account, or $80 if you want to pay that fee every month which is pure negative EV so dont do that.




day 10: you start trading your funded account. the $50,000/10 contract account requires you to earn $2600 before you can request a cashout, and the max cashout for the first 3 months is $2000 every 2 weeks, providing you trade 10 days between each cashout window.




day 24: its been 2 weeks and you put together $4000 in profit, lets say. you request a $2000 cashout, which leaves $2000 in the account to trade more with.




day 38: it takes 2 weeks for the cashout to be processed and hit your account. you now have $2000 cash in hand, plus you can request another $2000 cashout from the account.




mentally and emotionally, that turnaround time tips the scales in your favor. a lot.




its very hard to say motivated and even keeled when youre not going to see a fucking penny until the fucking season changes outside. and when you lose that sense of perspective and the money stops being real, you do shit like over trade, revenge trade, make stupid gambles, martingale, so on. you just do dumb shit because you get bored, because waiting 90 days to get paid makes it seem very unreal / meaningless when you make a great trade. it really takes the shine off a good days work. so you seek that serotonin elsewhere. and as any compulsive gambler will tell you, the brain will eventually teach itself to harvest serotonin and endorphins and shit from both wins and losses. locking in cash-in-hand after 2 weeks of trading a funded account is a much healthier, much more obtainable goal.




anyway thats the grind.
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and btw im guessing a lot of people are wondering right now; what if i just get a funded account and then make one huge trade to run it up and then do nothing and cash it out? or how about, what if i just start two accounts and bet them each in opposite directions and blow one up and cash the other out? or what if i etc etc etc




yeah you arent slick and you arent the first to come up with angle shoots.




you ever notice whats on the wall of every poker room on earth? its a sign saying the house reserves the right to fuck you over if they decide its in the best interests of the game.




apex and all the other brokers offer you a chance to gamble on the market. you can be aggressive, you can be conservative. but you cant angle shoot the house. if you try to get slick on their dime, they will shut you out and confiscate your money. ive seen it happen on two occasions i can remember, and both times the guilty parties were just trying to run up their accounts in 1 or 2 bets then cash out. basically the new party line is; you need to never make more than 30% of your profit on a single day. if you make $5000 in a day on a single account, you cant cash out until you have a $15000 balance im that account is my understanding, you get the idea. so dont bother trying to work the system, believe me the prop funds have seen it all and they arent going to let it happen.




just show up ready to grind. you can gamble aggressively, much much much more aggressively than anyone could consider long term profitable, but if youre just angle shooting for a quick payout, youre going to get nothing.




anyway, a few words on choosing which account to pursue...




on pretty much every prop site ive seen to date, there is a "50k account" which lets you trade 10 contracts and has something like a $2500 drawdown and a $3000 profit threshold for the challenge phase. and they always cost about $80-120 a month, sometimes much much less; apex had a 90% off sale recently and it cost $20 to get a test account for the 50k challenge.




the other accounts can offer higher/lower drawdowns or more/less contracts but they have significantly more challenging goals. without getting into a granular comparison, for my math, the 50k is the most bang for buck. do your own research of course.
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running multiple accounts:




you can run up to 20 accounts at once and use software to trade them all at the same time. so you place a trade on account1 and accounts2 through 20 will mirror that trade. note that if youre placing market order accounts, they dont all get filled at the same price. but in a high liquidity market like ES, youre talking like, 1 or 2 ticks discrepancy usually.




the reason i think its so important to trade multiple accounts is this...; its been my experience that when you dont really give a shit about the amount of money on the line, its impossible to stay emotionally invested in the trades. and thats when you start to do dumb shit. you gotta find your sweet spot.




last week i traded 10 accounts in parallel. excluding one trade where i accidentally doubled down instead of closing out, i never had more than 2 contracts per account in play. at 20 accounts, every point ES moved was worth +/- $1000. with an aggregate $25,000 of drawdown, i had a 25 point risk of ruin. thats not exactly sustainable in the long term but i wanted to be aggressive and it worked out for me. and if i had bombed the accounts, id have been out about $2200. i didnt bomb the accounts, and i earned $9000 a day. and ill probably keep trading 2 contracts per account instead of rushing to scale up because those figures work for me, especially now that ive bumped my risk of ruin tolerance to 45 points more or less. i gambled aggressively but not irresponsibly; i bought myself some breathing room while still earning enough to buy a new tesla model 3, which i might be inclined to do if tesla wasnt donkdown, which you know perfectly well it is.




and again my aggregate up front risk was $2200.




as far as how to trade profitably, im not going to get into systems, TA, etc. everyone has fucking opinions / biases. do you. a mid-tier signal generation system that you trade consistently is going to always be more profitable than a high variance super complicated system, because the former will always fade risk of ruin more efficiently than the latter.




personally, i use a few indicators to generate signals but i also take calculated risks in some ways while absolutely never violating certain other rules, eg i never take more than 3 trades a day.




last week it worked for me, next week it might not. if there is one thing ive learned about the market, its that 'systems' often stop working. the market has moods.




also something else to keep in mind; every so often i see someone who is usually _very new to gambling_ blow their own minds by calculating compounding returns. "omg just X points a day and i can make a million dollars in six months" etc etc. you see it a lot on tiktok, naturally. beyond the obvious lack of awareness on how losses / red days impact that math, with futures you need to consider something much, much scarier; when you start moving size, you become a target for manipulation from algs who trade _real_ size and do nothing but target the stops people like us rely on to survive. so if youre planning on scaling and hunting big game, watch the order tape to see what sorts of orders the market youre trading can really support. if you see a few hundred orders in the morning session and almost all of them are less than 40 contracts, and you think you can market order 200 contracts without someone attacking the book to move the market 10 points against you, youre going to end up someones meal.




but yeah that said, thanks to apex completely changing the game on prop trading payout structures and up front investment requirements, imo the game is +EV right now. if i get my shit rocked and lose half of all the money i made last week when the markets reopen, i can pivot to 10 new accounts and cash out this cluster for 10 times my original investment in a couple of weeks.




and that shit aint bad.




btw im not sponsored by apex. somewhere around here i have an affiliate link i think but i never bothered to complete the paperwork. in short i have nothing whatsoever to gain by you using apex or anyone else. just letting you know that theres a very +EV opportunity if you have a knack for this futures shit and want to limit your up front investment risk in exchange for waiting a few weeks to see cash in hand, letting the house rake your profits a bit, and giving up the tax advantages that come with trading futures from a cash brokerage account.




and btw thats another important point; once my accounts mature towards mid april and im able to request a full cashout, i will probably leave about $2500 in each and take whatever is left as a quality of life booster (paying off stupid debts / nest egg / funding a cash account) because you will get taxed as a contractor when you make money through a prop firm, but as a cash futures trader you get taxed like 17.5% or something on your profits, theres another thread where i go through the math there but be sure you get the final informed opinion from a tax professional if thats going to matter to you. im pretty sure its still the case tho, i remember kamala being up in arms about how it was some sort of 'loophole' before someone got in her ear about how futures trades are used to as institutional hedges and if she rocked that boat, peoples paychecks start bouncing in short order etc etc and i never heard her mention it again. still, caveat emptor and all that.
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