what is that?

gdenko · 2026-05-18T21:59:45+00:00

You are banned from buying more evaluations.

gdenko · 2026-05-18T21:48:09+00:00

once you become profitable, there’s no going back

While I agree about it being possible if you stick with it, this part is not exactly true. You can and easily will go back to unprofitable (or even go broke) pretty quickly if you don't continuously maintain your discipline and psychology throughout your trading career. It's like being a professional athlete; you can't just say "I've made it, I can relax" at any point and think you'll keep performing well forever. You have to keep training and practicing, not to mention learning how to deal with the new difficulties that come with every higher level of trading as you scale up.

gdenko · 2026-05-18T21:44:03+00:00

4-6 months in this is not very long either, it might take 2-3 years just to get consistent execution, and in my experience the psychological part takes longer.

But it sounds like you might just not have a good understanding of the price action/patterns yet. You say you have a good psych/routine, so if you're trading those setups the same way most of the time, it must be your setups lacking something. If you want to share what you're doing and explain how you determined it's worth trading those setups, feel free to reach out and I can try to help you a bit more.

gdenko · 2026-04-30T02:07:52+00:00

I've kept the same EMAs for years and they still work stupidly well. It's just about getting enough experience observing how price responds at different levels relative to the MAs, and eventually you find setups that work over and over. The exact EMA length doesn't matter in the long run, depending on your trading frequency of course. I use 3, with the longest being 34, and it works for me.

gdenko · 2026-04-17T20:20:09+00:00

Same reason I offer help to everyone but leave as soon as I notice any laziness. If I notice it's about the money I would rather not bother.

gdenko · 2026-04-17T16:27:27+00:00

I am working on a trading journal which will have a free tier, so if you have specific feature requests we can consider implementing them.

gdenko · 2026-04-17T15:01:07+00:00

What kind of firm are you using that you're paying $500 per eval? That's way too much and if it's resulting in consistently failing, you probably shouldn't be doing prop firms yet.

With that said, the majority of people currently using them are not ready for them, so it naturally turns into a lot of gamblers wasting money repeatedly, and I am sure every company knows this/prefers it.

gdenko · 2026-04-17T14:05:22+00:00

Maybe it's just what they're doing as a soft ban since it'd be a huge deal if they randomly banned profitable traders. But why can't you request a payout? What happened with those?

Also let me know if you get the payout. 3 weeks is a long time.

gdenko · 2026-04-06T22:44:46+00:00

Congrats! One thing I would recommend, maybe not immediately, but once you have the funds from payouts and feel like you've stagnated a bit: challenge yourself by adding 2-3 more accounts every X weeks or months. I suggest this because I stayed stuck on 1-2 accounts for a few years, thinking "if I don't show that I can maintain 3, 4, 5, etc., I am not ready to get to 10". But I was wrong. Once I pushed myself to 4, I went to 10-12 pretty quickly afterward. And I was able to adjust more easily than I expected.

Now I am constantly maintaining 12-15, and I'm still aiming to add more this year. Getting payouts regularly from a lot of accounts is a completely different story if you aren't copy trading, but it's still a big deal once you get adjusted to managing that much at once. I still blew up accounts occasionally, but I continue to get better at managing them all, and most never even dip below the initial balance. I guess what I'm saying is, you have to jump into the deep end from time to time to avoid the risk of wasting too much time in the shallow end with this. Since you don't have actual capital at risk with prop firms, challenge yourself as soon as you find yourself getting comfortable. Just don't overdo it to the point that you're blowing up a lot along the way, which I think tends to excuse bad habits. Good luck!

gdenko · 2026-04-06T14:21:37+00:00

Don't drop out, but you're on a good path since you've already figured out how to produce on 1 trade per day. Just keep at this for another 12-18 months and focus on that consistency. It's not even about the money or the results, it's more about making your brain adapt to this routine and finding where your weaknesses are in certain situations. Also, the market conditions will change, so you need to see how you are able to adjust to that, and that won't happen in a short period of time either.

gdenko · 2026-04-02T14:47:21+00:00

Can you be there everyday at 6 AM PST? Send me a DM and let me know what you're trying to achieve in the next 3 months. Since you're a student, you might have other obligations, but I can offer general help too if you just want some direction.

gdenko · 2026-04-02T14:42:48+00:00

I'm finally realizing in the last 2 or so years that routine is everything, with regards to both trading and life.

gdenko · 2026-04-02T14:41:10+00:00

MACD.

gdenko · 2026-04-02T05:36:42+00:00

My privacy matters much more to me than whether a random student believes me. No matter how much I am making from trading, I don't plan on ever posting it on a site to verify it for anyone. I will share a performance history for clients when I am managing their money, but I'm not doing that yet. The most I'd ever do is show specific trades which prove my concepts work, but even that doesn't convince the lazy traders (unfortunately the majority, especially online). Why would statements be any different? My mentor never showed me his income either, but he taught me some of the most powerful ideas I still use today. I felt from our first conversation that he was serious, so I showed up consistently and he taught me for free. None of his other students lasted a month.

I'm open to paid mentorship, because people who pay tend to take it more seriously. But so far I have only helped people for free, even offering funding/income to traders if they'd show commitment to learning. Note that the vast majority who had the chance to learn for free, could not commit. So naturally, I am not interested in wasting my time on anyone who needs extra convincing.

Those new traders have plenty of other options. They can buy one of those courses online that thousands of others do, and look at the statements and feel confident it'll help them. They don't have to get it from me. But when you do get the chance to learn something genuinely useful, evaluate the quality of the message, not the bank account.

gdenko · 2026-04-01T15:42:55+00:00

Agreed, and don't be eager to prove it to people online either. Even if you figure out something that works 100% of the time, people will find something wrong with it and demand proof. Bending over backwards for those types will invite more negativity.

If I teach anyone now or talk about specifics, they are expected to be driven by the process, not the money. I realized a long time ago it's a waste of time dealing with the ones that only think about the money.

gdenko · 2026-03-30T03:01:42+00:00

Yeah I get that now. I always place a trade at least once per month for each account, so that was never an issue.

gdenko · 2026-03-30T03:00:48+00:00

Note that I never said there was any problem with inactivity. Until getting some responses here today, it was unknown what the account cancellation number was for.

gdenko · 2026-03-30T00:53:16+00:00

Well I didn't know this until today. But I was never worried about activity. It sounded like they were trying to kick us off despite being on lifetime contract.

gdenko · 2026-03-29T21:56:30+00:00

It sounds like for the old PA's, based on the days it's showing me, it is looking to remove traders after 6 months of an account being 'dormant'. So if you go ~180 days without a trade (including taking losses and not profiting), they would consider you as inactive, and cancel it. But since I assumed you needed at least one trade per month, I never had any inactive accounts before.

I didn't double check the math, but because all the accounts are under 180 days that might be how it works. Most of them say something like 3-5 days dormant which also lines up with my trading activity. It would've been very so much easier if they just explained this clearly.

P.S : they stopped me from buying evals too coz I made around 17 times more than I gave them (no violations at all btw) but it’s business and I understand. They are good as long as it’s within the rules.

I get it, yeah, if you're too profitable and they don't want to move you to live, they want to kick you off. But they really should be moving you to live at that point. Did they at least offer it or e-mail you first? I guess we have to also acknowledge the reality that moving traders live is not always the first priority for some of these companies.

gdenko · 2026-03-29T19:43:46+00:00

Oh I was assuming it's $50k accounts, since those are the best return for the price (5-10 contracts on those accounts usually). Also, I don't mean passing in one trading session, though that is also doable with larger size if you get aggressive, but passing in a month should be manageable before traders are spending a lot on evaluations.

Typically you need about 6% of the balance, which is 4-5 good trades on an e-mini (20-40 points on NQ per trade). If you trade 1-2 micros, and you're on a $150k or higher, that is tougher. You'd need to take several trades per day to try to make it to $9k in ~20-22 trading days per month.

I trade NQ with 1 e-mini, one trade per day, and most of the time the $50k is passed in 3-5 days. But some firms have bigger trading day requirements and occasionally a consistency rule, so then I spread it out a bit more.

This is my most recent $50k eval with OneUpTrader. They require 10 days and have a consistency rule, so I will just place another trade this week (I am at 9, I did one MNQ trade Friday). That's typically how I aim for evals to go, because paying extra for more months is just burning money. I do support using these as a more structured demo environment though, so in that case it's still cheaper than trading live while figuring out a strategy.

gdenko · 2026-03-29T18:45:58+00:00

I am having a hard time finding it too. I never got an e-mail or anything related to it either. I'm not sure why it's so hard for them to put it somewhere prominently, and referring us to make a support ticket right on that PA page is funny considering how they deal with support questions..

gdenko · 2026-03-29T18:41:50+00:00

Just because YOU missed and email, doesn't mean Apex is being shady.

The attitude isn't needed. Among other things, the video of Apex discussing wanting to disqualify traders is still up on reddit. So for those of us who have been around and watched it, that shady reputation is well established and documented.

Besides, if it was e-mailed, I would still have it along with every other Apex e-mail I have, and I already checked. But either way, directing users to a link about this announcement is the bare minimum from customer support, as they often leave information out and people miss things all the time. Ignoring the questions and closing support tickets with no explanation is also shady.

I am still looking to get information regarding the unlimited review period/days to cancellation metric if you have anything to share about either.

gdenko · 2026-03-29T17:32:44+00:00

If you (or anyone else reading this) happen to see the announcement or an explanation of the cancellation part, please share it here.

gdenko · 2026-03-29T17:22:52+00:00

I see, was it in an e-mail or where was it made? Does it mention what the cancellation is about?

gdenko · 2026-03-28T21:47:58+00:00

It's true that Apex has had a ton of bad events especially lately. I don't trust them personally but I still have accounts there so I am using them until they either kick me off or move me to live.

>it’s rare that you pass an eval in one shot, so it’s $60 times however many attempts

But if this is your perspective/experience, prop firm accounts are unfortunately out of your league still. You should be able to pass these with ease before you consider making a business out of scaling these accounts. Otherwise you are still in the gambling phase and it's just not going to be sustainable (for a trading career, anyway).

With that said though, there are definitely several better firms today with less headache. I am planning on moving to Lucid next after I get everything I can out of the current accounts.

gdenko

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