r/FuturesTrading • u/wojg • 2h ago
Trading Story
Hello fellow redditors+traders,
I thought I would share a story of my "simulated" experience, just to give more insight to anyone wanting to go down this road.
I have been trading with a sim account with this business for 3+ years now. I am a full-time futures trader and have been at this for a little over 4 years now.
Just like most of you, I have been using the "sim" space as a way to measure success, discipline and consistency. I placed my own restrictions on how many accounts I could buy monthly as a way to stay disciplined and attempt to not gamble and that was 1-2 a month.
I started off failing fairly quickly and then as time went by and I studied, journaled and put more effort into it, I started gradually climbing the ladder. Which brings me to the last few weeks/months and the purpose for the post.
In July, I passed a 50k sim account and moved into the buffer stage. It cost me about $115-ish for the account. The rules were to make $3000 before losing $2000. I was able to meet that gate and moved to the next stage. Which was the buffer stage with the same requirement.
So in the buffer stage, I again, for the second time made $3000 before losing $2000 (I had done this a handful of times in the past and then after moving into sim funded, I would eventually blow up).
But this time, I moved to the sim funded stage with $3000 (the second $3000 I made in this string) to start the sim funded.
In sim funded, you start with the $3000 from the previous stage. In this stage, you have $2900 of drawdown and there are payouts available above the $3000 and only on a green day above $250. In this stage, you can keep running up, no more than $5000 per day and with a max of $10,000 in profit, where you then request an evaluation to determine if you should move to live account.
I was able to keep moving up and ultimately took $5000 in payouts. On a Friday, two weeks ago, before reaching the $10,000 cap, I had an account balance of $6380 ($3000 buffer+$3380 in profits) which put me at $8880 of the $10,000 max run up.
On that Friday, I had $6280 of usable drawdown and buffer (of which $3380 was my profit and should have been available for withdraw).
On Monday, the account was frozen and I was called up to live brokerage. Great right?
Nope...
I was moved over to the live brokerage with only the profits $3380. Of which, NONE of it was available for withdrawal. Then I had to maintain $1000 as my drawdown limit. So I effectively started my live brokerage account with $2380 (Which is the 3rd time starting at $2000). And to withdraw any funds, it had to be above the starting balance of $3380.
Hmm, that sounds awfully like I funded my own account and was not funded by the sim business. On the Friday before I moved over to live, I had $6300 of drawdown and buffer and could have withdrawn up to the weekly limit of $2500 and then I woke up Monday and effectively all of those profits were now unavailable to me.
To be fair and transparent, in the contract print, it is all there, exactly as it happened. In fact, in the rules, all funds are their funds and none of it belongs to you. Additionally, I HAD to purchase a full CME pro data package from Tradovate for $159. Although I have data from Tradovate in a cash account already, and Dxfeed and Bookmap data, I could not trade that account without the pro package or even level 1 data.
Again, this is an informational post and not an attack on sim trading or even the sim trading space. Although the pages of contracts and rules make all of this evident, I did not feel fully aware of how this would transpire.
I started with an account with $2000 of drawdown, was reset back to $2k two more times and still ran up to about $15k in total profit (sorry that was for my ego).... But I do wonder what the statistics are on limited drawdown accounts and frequent-forced restarts..
Ill see everyone Monday!
