Greetings traders and welcome back to another In Depth with Chris Guide.
In today's discussion, we'll be talking about what
happens after you finally get that big sack of cash and you
get your funding here at Earn2Trade.
We're going to cover everything that it entails to be a funded
trader and what rules we might instill or not need to adhere to after
We're going to go through all of that, as well as
how the withdrawal process works and all that good stuff,
so make sure you stick around. But before we get going, please do
me a favor, and if you haven't already, click that like and subscribe
button down below because it allows me to keep coming out
with content for you all out there. Without further ado, let's get going.
Congratulations, if you're watching this video, chances are
you've passed the Gauntlet Mini. But if you haven't and
you're watching this video anyway, make sure you check out
the Gauntlet Mini challenge.
It's an opportunity to trade with someone else's money while
still earning profits from that money.
It gives you a chance to risk someone else's money, but make
your own money. It's a pretty sweet opportunity.
But after we pass, we need to know how everything works and
that's exactly what we're going to cover. The first thing that everybody
always asks is; how is my profit split up? What is in it for me?
And what is in it for the person giving me the money?
Let's talk about that profit sharing. The profit sharing
heavily favors the trader here at Earn2Trade.
We do our profit split as 80/20. That means, out of $100
of profit that you make, you're going to bring home
$80 with money that was never even yours to trade with
to begin with. It is money that is provided to you by the proprietary trading firm
that you get to trade with, with the risk being theirs,
and you maintaining 80% of all profits generated
with that money. If you maintain the discipline, you've gotten used to
the Gauntlet Mini challenge itself, and you've begun trading
profitably after being funded, all of that money is going
to be an 80/20 split. Meaning 80% is yours, 20% is theirs.
Once the time to withdraw comes, let's talk about how that
process works. The first thing is to understand that we can really put
in our order to withdraw at any time, assuming that we have
a positive account balance.
Now the minimum amount that we can withdraw is just a small
$100, and considering the account sizes that we offer here
at Earn2Trade, $100 is a very, very small fraction of
the amount of money that you'll be trading with.
The withdrawals are available through a bank wire transfer
and direct ACH deposit. The withdrawals are processed
every Tuesday. Any transaction fees are covered by the proprietary trading
firm for withdrawals of over $500. These fees can vary
although, they are generally somewhere between $30 to $40 maximum.
More importantly, any brokerage fees owed such as
monthly data fees are also deducted during the withdrawal
process to make it easy and simple on the trader,
so there's no extra math or process by the trader that they
have to employ after withdrawing their money. Don't worry,
if you've paid them ahead of time, they won't even be deducted.
If you pay them ahead of time, that's another good thing
for you. Everything you withdraw is just going to you.
Once we are trading on a funded trading account,
it's very common for traders to ask if the rules they had
to follow while trading during the Gauntlet Mini challenge
still apply to their funded trading account.
Now before we answer this, let's think about this question
for a moment. Why would we look to change the rules if they allowed us
to power through the Gauntlet Mini challenge to begin with?
The rules are not there to hinder a trader.
They're not there set as a trap. They're there to help the trader
maintain profits to a consistent degree. Whether it's a virtual or
live trading account, the key to success is discipline.
Yes, breathe a sigh of relief. Once you have passed the Gauntlet
Mini challenge and you have your own funded trading account,
you may not have to follow all of the rules, but this is only
the beginning and it's important understand that the rules
that you used to pass are usually valuable for any type of
trading thereafter. The rules are mostly the same when trading
as a funded trader as they are when you take the Gauntlet Mini
challenge itself. Because the proprietary trading firm
providing the funds takes on all of the financial risks,
your account will have a few safeguards that are imposed
on them in order to protect the firm's capital. This is
meant to guard against situations where traders successfully pass the evaluation, then
can't just handle the real money event, and all of a sudden try to blow up the account.
The first thing we'll talk about is drawdown. The number one safeguard
is the drawdown. Much like your Gauntlet Mini account,
your funded trading account will also include a trailing drawdown.
Similar to the evaluation, it will stop trailing once the drawdown threshold value,
which is the balance where your account gets liquidated, reaches
your staring balance. Once the drawdown reaches the starting balance,
it stays there, it doesn't continue to follow.
If you're doing extremely well, the drawdown rule may not
even be something that you ever encounter
if your account has grown to high degrees of profit.
If we look at the $50,000 account as an example,
the drawdown listed is $2,000 currently.
That means after our balance reaches $52,000, our
drawdown stops trailing. After that, your drawdown threshold
stays exactly at $50,000.
That's because $2,000 backwards from $52,000 brings us to
the starting account balance of $50,000.
This means that if we were to increase our account balance
to say $100,000, the trailing drawdown will still be way back
down at $50,000 because that is the starting account balance.
No matter how high our account goes, the drawdown will stop
at our starting account balance.
Now, there are other rules that we should talk about as well
and initially, our funded trading account also starts with
a daily loss limit just like the Gauntlet Mini. The difference
is that unlike during the evaluation, for the funded trading account,
this rule is only temporary.
Once you're trailing drawdown stops trailing, like we just
talked about, our daily lost limit
is permanently removed. The rules concerning approved times
and maximum position size, including the progression ladder
though do remain the same. The only new rule added to the
mix is that our account will get terminated after an unscheduled
absence of five consecutive trading days.
This rule serves a crucial purpose. Capital provided to traders
by the prop. trading firm cannot be allocated anywhere else.
That's why they have an interest in preventing traders from
simply claiming their funded account and not doing anything with it.
It's also critical to the point that the unscheduled portion
of this phrase is important to pay attention to because when
we say unscheduled, that means that it's only if we aren't
told that there will be an absence.
If you left the firm know that you will be out of town or
you won't be able to trade for a period of time, they will work with you.
But the key is communication. Don't just blindly leave without
telling anyone anything because beyond five days without
any communication and no trading, they will close the account.
What costs are you responsible for after getting funded?
There really aren't many. We have two to talk about here.
Once we're funded with a proprietary trading firm,
we no longer need to pay any subscription fees
for the Gauntlet Mini in our case. On the other hand,
we will need to pay for the monthly data fees that are a
pass-through fee directly from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
for providing the live data. This is unavoidable for any type of trader. Data fees are
$105 per month currently, and they must be paid by you, out-of-pocket,
from your credit card. The first month is usually charged immediately
once you're funded trading account is created.
Then you get charged at the end of every calendar month for
the next month in advance.
That's why we generally recommend starting with only one
exchange at first to keep your costs as low as possible and
only adding more once you've built your account up to a substantial
balance and you feel that it's worth paying for the extra
data. We also suggest not starting your funded trading
account near the end of the month, that way you don't get
charged for both the first and second month right away at
the same time. If you already have a data feed of your own for charting
and simply want to execute on the prop firms' feed, you do
not need to subscribe to their data feed and will not incur
any additional data costs. In addition, unless you're using
a free trading platform itself,
you will be responsible, naturally, for your own platform fees,
whatever it is that you're using.
Of course, the proprietary trading firm isn't going to cover your platform fees.
Most of the traders who take the evaluation already
have their own platform licenses,
so they don't need to purchase a new one when they get funded.
But if you do you, will be responsible for it. The Finamark platform
also comes with a three-month free access for all
of the traders that get funded at Earn2Trade.
That's another cheap alternative to getting into the funded
space and keeping your costs low, especially for that
first three months. If you're looking for an outright free
platform for life, then we recommend taking a look at RTrader Pro,
which cost nothing for the entirety of its use.
Another common question that we get is; is there a profit ceiling?
Is there a cap on how much money you can make?
Well, if you stick to the rules and stay above the trailing
drawdown limit set by your starting account size,
there is no upper ceiling.
There is no upper limit on how much you can make.
That being said, don't expect to get rich quick.
That's a poor trading mentality.
Although slowly building up your trading account and showing
restraint may seem tedious, traders who passed the Gauntlet Mini
can confidently say that this method works better than
doing otherwise. As we mentioned, the key factor here is
that we need to stick to the rules because they're there
to help us. They're not there to limit us.
We can keep a close eye on our trading positions,
we can spread our risk and find a balance between maintaining
liquidity and withdrawing our our profits,
there's a number of things that we can do. While there is
a progression ladder allowing us to open more positions as our profits rise,
it is not mandatory for us to scale up. If we see an opportunity
we can work into a position within our restrictions, but if
we don't feel comfortable scaling-up, we don't have to scale up.
While the promise of those short-term profits does seem
tempting, we want to remember that it's a marathon.
It's not a sprint, and the idea here is to do this for the
long run, not for the short run.
In trading, everything doesn't always go right. Sometimes our
emotions get the best of us and perhaps we get a little overzealous
with a particular position and we perhaps drop
below the trailing drawdown or break any of the other rules
that we said must be adhered to with the funded trading account.
What happens? Well, we lose our funded trading account and we don't want
this to happen. It's strongly encouraged that we pay attention at all
times and adhere to the rules. They're relatively simple, there's
not many of them, and overall, they're meant to help you, not hurt you.
But if you lose your account, does that mean you're done trading forever?
No, it does not. The way you acquired the account in the first place,
by passing the Gauntlet Mini, can be done to acquire
a new funded trading account.
The purpose behind this is because it will show us that whatever
reason that caused you to lose the account
is not a determining factor in your overall trading
process. If you can go through the Gauntlet Mini experience
again and continue to hold steadfast the rules and pass again,
the proprietary trading firm would be more than happy to
connect you with more trading capital.
If you do blow up your account, the reality is, it will
be closed, but it is not the end of the world and you can
find a path back to redemption. In order to stay safe and
make sure that we don't blow up our account or have our funded
account taken away from us,
these are the exact things that we want to follow and pay
attention to. We don't want to reach or dip below our daily loss limit.
This is pretty simple. It's a predefined limit
based on your account size, and we don't want to fall below
this limit. Next, we don't want to exceed the maximum position size.
Once again, this is going to be a predefined amount based
on our account value. Also, we want to make sure that we are trading in the
approved hours which means, if we trade outside, this is kind
of worded strange, if we trade outside the approved hours
that can have our account taken away from us.
We want to make sure that we are trading inside
the approved hours, so just trade during the hours
of open exchange trading. That is essentially what that
means. Then we don't want to reach our dip below
our trailing drawdown. We've already talked about this.
It's going to be an amount that is going to be specific to
your account size that you decide to open.
We don't want to fall below that number and once we get deep
into the profits, we won't even realize that this is a thing
to begin with. The exceeding progression ladder limits
is a way to have our account closed as well.
That means, we are exceeding the maximum position size
for our account, so these two go hand-in-hand.
Then, the unscheduled absences of five consecutive trading
days will result in our account being terminated.
And yes, I did say five consecutive trading days so we can
think of these as business days to a degree.
It means if you have gone away for five consecutive trading days
and you have not notified the proprietary trading firm,
they can view this as reason to close your account as they
view it as an inactive trader. And that is it, folks. If we
pay attention to the rules that we talked about
in this video, and we hold steadfast on whatever strategy
that we use to pass the Gauntlet Mini,
then we're on a good track and a high chance of finding success
as we continue with our trading career.
Remember, the rules that we have are not just here to help
the proprietary trading firm that's funding you
they're are here to help you. They're risk management rules.
They're there to make sure that we're not overexposing
our self or the trading firms' money. If we can't find profit without
being unnecessarily risky, then chances are, we probably want
to re-evaluate being a trader to begin with. But until next
time folks, thank you for joining me as always.
It's always a pleasure to do these videos,
so please make sure you click like and subscribe down below
so I can keep coming out with content for you all out there,
but I will see you soon. Happy trading everybody.
Happy hunting and good luck on your Gauntlet Mini.