the only prop firm guide you'll ever need (deep dive)

Right, what's good guys? Welcome to the module on what is essentially going to be the ultimate guide on prop firms. Not only are we going to get into why you should be going into prop firms, even if you may not be looking to trade other people's capital, I'm going to give you the math behind prop firms. I'm going to give you the exact strategy on how to pass a prop firm in a couple of weeks compared to a couple of months that most people take. And when you have questions like, oh, but what if I fail the challenge? Or like, I don't want my money to be you know, kind of like tied to other people. That's also gonna be answered. And like, yeah, I'm gonna get into the best prop firms. I'm gonna get into what to look at when it comes to the prop firms, get into the differences between, you know, one-step, two-step challenges and all sorts of stuff. So yeah, this is essentially going to be kind of like the be-all end-all when it comes to prop firms. And yeah, let's get into it. Starting things off, I didn't actually put it inside the module, but just in case you needed to know what prop firms are, they're basically firms out there that kind of provide you with capital to trade with. And if you're able to make a profit on that capital, then you get to keep a percentage of that profit. Usually it's between 80% to 100% of the profits. And this does not mean that whatever capital they give you is like live, live money. It just means that, you know, you have this amount, like let's say $100,000 in a demo account and you trade that and you basically only keep the profits that you make. Now with prop firms, the kind of like conventional way to acquire an account is to take a challenge. This challenge is essentially just a Like, to put it in very, very simple terms, it's a little bit of an exam where you have a set amount of like a drawdown limit where you cannot lose a certain percentage. Usually that's anywhere between 3 to 10%. You also have a profit target that you need to hit, which is anywhere between 5 to maybe 15%. So as long as you can hit the profit target without hitting the stop loss target, then yeah, you're good and you will pass the challenge. And then you can start getting into the live trading phase, at which point whatever money that you make on top Of the account that you already have, that's yours to keep. Now, this is different. Now, one of the things that you need to understand about prop firms is that this is a business, right? Later on, I'm going to get into like why it does not matter whatsoever if in the event that you fail an account. In fact, you kind of want to adopt the mindset of wanting to pass fast or fail fast. But for now, let's get into why you would you know want to get into prop firms. So just to kick things off, this is like prop firms is something that allows you to trade with much more meaningful size than you otherwise could. with your own, you know, self-capital. Essentially, like the majority of people who get into trading, they understand that trading is able to give them the lifestyle that they're looking for, or just the freedom, or just to, you know, give them some options in their life. But the problem is that not everyone starts trading with $100,000 in their bank account. And that can be a problem because if you are, let's say, starting with $10,000, maybe $50K, now $50K, you can still make a pretty decent living, but still, Like anywhere under $50,000, that's when you get into a little bit more dangerous territory because in order, just to give you an idea, as a trader, if you're able to make 10% a month, month over month, you can consider it pretty good, right? There are a lot of people out there with a lot of money that would be more than happy to park their money with you as a trader if you happen to be able to average 10% a month for, you know, many, many years in a row. So 10% is amazing. The problem with having less than, you know, let's say $50,000, of capital is that you may be amazing at trading, you may be world-class at trading, but the sole determining factor between you making basically $5,000 a month or $50,000 a month is not your trading skill, it's not your ability, it's purely the amount of capital that you have access to. And prop firms are amazing for this because for a small fee, you get to take a challenge and eventually end up with the equivalent of $50,000 to potentially $500,000 of capital to trade with. Now I want you to picture this for a moment. If you happen to have $500,000 in funding, which is a lot, which is a lot more achievable than you think, Then in the event that you know you have a rough month, right? You make two percent on the month. That's ten k. And if you happen to have a solid month of ten percent, that's fifty k. And nothing's going to change when you have five hundred thousand dollars, right? In terms of the process, but the output is going to be about a hundred times bigger, if that makes sense. And secondly, prop firms kind of remove the downside risk from your own capital because in the even in the event that you know let's say you have a hundred thousand dollars to start with, you don't necessarily want to throw that all into a personal account. Why? Because you like every Like for example, if you happen to lose $10,000 from trading, you've lost $10,000. That is very different with a prop firm because with a prop firm, a $100,000 account usually costs anywhere between, you know, $100 on the low end. That's really, really low end. But you know, on average you'd be expected to pay anywhere between, you know, $200 to $300, maybe $500 for a $100,000 account. So in the event that you hit your drawdown limit, right? In the previous example, you have a $100K account, you lose 10%, you lose $10,000. That is your hard-earned money gone out the window. Poof. When you lose 10% on a prop firm account, you don't lose $10,000. You lose whatever you ended up paying for the prop firm, which is a couple hundred bucks. Now, once you think of it that way, it becomes a lot more kind of like easy to stomach. You know, like the risk on paper is not actually that big, which I'm gonna get into later with when it comes to prop firm math. But just lastly, prop firms are just an absolute no-brainer. Like if you are here in Blueprint or Bootcamp, or basically if as long as you're learning this AOC framework, it is something that works and it is something that gives you an edge. What is an edge? It just simply means, like, it's just trader speak for you make more money than you lose in trading over the long term or for a large enough sample size. In the event that you are a trader that knows what you're doing, and if you have edge, which again, you're in the right place because chances are you are going to have an edge. The only determining factor between, again, you barely able to scrape by trading and potentially losing motivation because, you know, you're not making enough, between to making an absolute killing on trading, being able to, you know, travel full-time, you know, do all of these fancy shit. Whatever is the amount of capital that you have access to. And in this case, because the downside risk is capped at, you know, a few hundred dollars while the upside potential is 10 times to 100 times of the amount that you're putting in. If you think about it this way, prop firms are almost like a, I don't want to, I don't want to really use this term, but it's kind of like a, you know, hidden gem 100x meme coin because it's kind of true, right? If you end up paying $200 for a $100K account and over the course of 6 months you get $20,000 worth of payouts, that is 800x return. And the beautiful thing is this is very much achievable. It's a lot more likely to happen than you catching some sort of hidden gem meme coin that goes 100x. And the best part is like this kind of amplifies what you're already doing, right? You're already spending the time and effort into trading. You're already spending, you know, you're already grinding. Might as well get a much larger kind of output from trading. And prop firms are a great way to do that. So essentially like it doesn't matter if you are already good at trading, if you've been doing trading for a while, or if you're just starting out in trading, prop firms are just a great way to, like, it's just a no-brainer, right? It's a very low-risk way to just diversify or just acquire more capital. Over the years, I've had people ask me a lot like, hey, you know, if you've already been trading for so long and you have so much money inside your bank account, you know, why are you still using prop firms? Well, because it's a no-brainer. Like, for very little downside risk, you get, you know, a lot of potential upside. But yeah, you know, regardless of who you are, as long as you're trading, you should definitely get into prop firms. It's just an absolute no-brainer, especially once I share with you later on how you can kind of like essentially use one account and trade like the equivalent of like 20 accounts, right? This is how the top guys do it. They're not trading, like they may have like 20 to 40 or 50, you know, prop firm accounts, but they're not trading every single one kind of like individually. There's an automation, there's a tool that allows you to sync everything together. And when you take a trade on one account, the rest copy. That is how you basically start trading with the equivalent of $1 million of capital within a couple of short months after starting your journey in trading. Profits make that possible. Like, yeah, just before we get into the, you know, the true nitty-gritty stuff, let's just talk real quick about, you know, the numbers and why profits make sense. And this is already kind of like, I've already prefaced this earlier by talking about like, you know, let's say hypothetically speaking, your goal is to get to $10,000 a month. Then, well, there are usually 2 ways that you can do this. One is, you know, you have self-capital where you are going to need just amazing months just to hit this target, right? Especially if you're starting with anything under than $100,000 worth of capital, which most of you watching this are probably not. And in this case, when you're running with your own self-capital scaling, right? Now, the only way that you're gonna achieve more capital is either you put more money yourself into the trading account, which, you know, it also depends on you having an insanely, you know, high income so that you can always have disposable income to throw into this, which again, most people do not. And secondly, you have to rely on compounding, which, you know, involves you getting 10% a month for many months in a row so that your initial, let's say $10,000 can reach $100,000. Now it can, it's possible. At the same time, you're probably gonna have many, many months where even though you have on paper achieved an Amazing return in a trading sense, in a strictly trading sense, but you're not getting that big of a reward from it. And so what's likely gonna happen, and I've seen this happen many times, is that you're gonna lose motivation. It's not gonna be worthwhile, or you're just simply forced to do something else because you still, at the end of the day, you need to pay the bills. So profit is making this possible. Instead of needing months, months, like months or years of compounding, you can achieve it in a couple of months, especially if you are here and you basically have the blueprint in order to achieve that. Now, Compare this to a prop firm where a $100K account literally costs between anywhere, you know, from $100 to $300. You do not need anywhere close to 10% gain a month. But let's say, let's say on paper you only have one $100,000 account, 10% gain, like 10% gain per month puts you to the $10K mark. Now, in the event that you have more, which chances are you're gonna have more because there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't have more. And in fact, I will give you the kind of like blueprint in order to scale your prop firm kind of like capital later as well. Then chances are you're probably gonna end up with a couple of hundred dollars, sorry, a couple of hundred thousand dollars Or potentially half a million or potentially even a million. In that case, you need anywhere between 2% to 5% gain a month in order to receive— in order to sustain $10,000 a month. Beautiful thing about that, 2% gain is literally one trade risking 1%, you get 2R back, that's your target done for the month in a single trade. So if you've ever seen, you know, prop firm traders, they get like really complacent or they played really, really safe. It's not that they, you know, they suck at trading or they don't want to trade or they're not interested in trading. It's more of like they've already reached a point where the goal Becomes less about kind of like scaling to the moon, but more about just capital preservation because they already have the accounts, they already have the capital. All they need every single month is to get a couple of good trades in and boom, right? They're making anywhere between $40,000 to $50,000 a month. Now, they're not smarter than you. They just understand the math. And now you understand the math as well. And then lastly, again, just talking about self-capital and prop firms. Self-capital, of course, if you lose your money, you're losing your money. On prop firms, guess what? Your downside risk is capped. Whatever the amount is that you spent on the challenge. In fact, fun fact, most challenges even give you a refund on whatever you paid for the challenge once you pass it. So your downside risk is basically nil, minimal, nada. And I know at this point you might be thinking, oh, there has to be some sort of catch here, right? Because, you know, if prop firms keep doing this, like, it's basically just free money for everyone. Like, wouldn't they go bankrupt? Are they running a charity? Are they money laundering? Well, no, I'm gonna get into that later. And, but just lastly, when it comes to prop firms, I'll share with you the scaling strategy later, but just understand that with prop firms, it's so easy to scale, right? Between you getting your first prop firm account at like $50,000, I've seen guys, in fact, we recently just had a guy who in his first month, he acquired about $100,000 worth of capital. And 2 months later, he's now sitting at close to $500,000. In fact, I believe yesterday or the day before, he just shared that he got funded for another $200,000. So I think that squarely puts him at half a million dollars worth of funding. And so at this point, like even if he only makes 2% a month, you do the math. So anyways, now that we have talked about the rough, you know, kind of like introductory numbers when it comes to prop firms, let's actually get into what I like to call prop math because this is usually a big, big, big thing that holds people back from just A, passing prop firm challenges and B, this is something that holds a lot of people back from A, passing prop firm challenges and B, actually making money from You know, their accounts once they pass the challenge and they're through to the live trading stage. So essentially the way that I can boil it down is this. When you pay for a prop firm, right? Let's say you're gonna pay, you know, $500 for a $100K account. And let's say in this case, hypothetically speaking, you have a drawdown limit of 10%, which is actually quite industry standard. So on paper, when you take a trade and let's say you risk 1% on that trade, if you make 2R, you're gonna see $2,000, right? That's fair enough. When you have a live account, you do in fact have $2,000. But when people see a red number in the 4-figure, like kind of like 4-figure range, right? Because you're risking 1% on a $100K account, you're gonna lose $1,000 in the event that you lose. Now, not everyone is immediately going to be kind of like used to or kind of like numb to just losing 4 figures in a day because that's a decent chunk of money for anyone. So what you need to understand though is that just because that number looks big, you're not actually losing $1,000. In fact, you're losing much less because if you break down the math, if you have a 10% drawdown and you paid $500 for it, every percentage that you risk is not $1,000, it's $50. And once you're able to break it down like that, like it becomes so much easier for you to, you know, risk the proper amount because like— But let's just go into, you know, another section real quick because this is a very natural segue into this. One of the things that I've definitely realized over, you know, my experience of coaching hundreds or potentially even thousands of students at this point, that the biggest reason that people are unable to pass prop firms usually boils down to the fact that they, like, it's not that they don't understand the system, it's not that they're good Then it's not that they're not even good at technical analysis because the truth is, like, I'm going to use bootcamp as an example. Phase 1 is the theory part. Phase 2 is like, in order to pass phase 2, I have to like personally watch your backtests and kind of like give you the green light, right? At that point, and my criteria for giving you the green light of passing, you know, the practice phase and getting into the live phase is that I have to think that like, you know, based on you recording yourself backtesting, like you're at a level now where the system is so intuitive that you could make my YouTube videos for me if you ever wanted to. And that's kind of the level you need to be. So So if, you know, the actual, you know, theoretical part, so if the actual theory is not the problem and if they've already done the practice to the point where, you know, everything is intuitive, then clearly the reason why people are still not able to pass prop firm challenges or to just be, you know, just make good money from trading has to be something else. And that something usually boils down to psychology. And that psychology, I know it's a very general word. If I can boil it down even more, it's kind of like a fear of losing money because it's super scary when you see on that screen, oh, minus $1,000, minus $2,000. Like that's a lot of money for a lot of people. But at the same time, if you break down the math, it's not that much, right? It's $50 to $100 per trade. If you risk, like, you know, if you have a decently sized, you know, big account, and if you take on 1 to 2% risk, that's gonna be probably $100, which most of you watching this are going to risk anyways on a single trade of your own money. But this time, you know, for $100, you could potentially pick up a $10K account. If you have a 10% drawdown, your risk per trade is gonna be $10, right? Think about it that way. It's like, whoa, that's not a lot of money. And it's not. And the beauty of that is that This, A, allows you to risk the proper amount when it comes to prop firms because it is absolutely stupid for you to be, you know, risking, you know, 0.25% risk in a prop firm challenge thinking that you're smart because, you know, you're managing risk. But in reality, like if you do that, you're just gonna spend an incredibly long amount of time and effort, you know, grinding a prop firm challenge without like, you're gonna be spending a lot of time and effort trading but not getting any payout from it. So I'm gonna share later what kind of like a strategy is to, you know, when it comes to prop firms, but essentially boils down to pass fast, fail fast. Anyways, just going back to what I was talking about. When you remove that attachment to those big numbers, well, A, it becomes a lot easier for you to risk the proper amount, which means that, you know, if previously, if you were risking like 1/10 of that usual size, it might have taken you like 50 winning trades in order to pass a prop firm challenge. Well, now you can do it in 5. So you can actually accomplish this in 2 weeks instead of 2 months, which in the past, the people that struggled with this, they tended to take 2 to 3 months to pass the challenge. Simple fix, boom, they're now passing it, you know, at most within a month. In the event that market conditions are not that good. So simple fix, but that's, you know, that's number one. Number 2, a lot of the times when you see a big number on the line, when that number matters to you, and when that number is— of course that number matters to you— when that number is too big for you to handle, there's going to be something else that is playing out in your mind and in your heart when you're taking that trade. And that something is not going to be based on logic. It's not going to be based on reason. It's not going to even be based on the system, right? It's purely psychological, which is, oh my God, this is such a big amount of money, right? You're going to put more weight to that trade. You're going to be a little bit more afraid. You're going to be tempted to move your stop loss a little bit earlier, even though, you know, on paper that your stop loss is supposed to be like this. Because, oh, when you put it like that, ah man, I'm going to lose $1,000. Let me just, yeah, there's a little swing low down below here. Like, let me just move it to $500, like a $500 stop. Or you might be tempted to take profit early. And one thing to understand, like the thing to understand about this is that none of this is based on reason. None of this is based on a system or logic. It's purely psychological. And you don't want to be trading from a psychological standpoint because Feel is not a profitable strategy. So once you understand profit math in this way, like, and this kind of fixes everything. And the beautiful part is that like while it fixes these problems, it's going to start getting you on track to getting used to bigger numbers, which is in the past, at least for me personally, before I started, you know, prop firms, when I was scaling my own money, it was really tough for me to make the jump from, you know, because for a very long time, $100 to $200 was like, you know, it's a decent sum of money to risk because in the event that I win, guess what? I've just paid for basically an entire week's meals. That was back when I was still staying in Malaysia. Malaysia and, you know, life was still pretty cheap back then. But anyways, at that time, and the reason why I'm sharing this with you, like you'll get it soon, but back then, you know, $100 was a decent sum of money. Now the problem with getting used to, or rather getting attached to any sum of money is that comes a point in time when your account grows and now you're supposed to be risking $200 on a single trade instead of $100. You're going to struggle to do that because you're attached to that You know, number. You're attached to that money and it makes sense. You know, we work hard for our money, but the market doesn't care that you work hard for your money. Money's money. Capital's capital. Risk is risk. So all of this is kind of like self-imposed emotions, which again, does not help with trading whatsoever. So one of the biggest problems that I had and one of the, you know, longest, you know, kind of like phases that I got stuck at was basically going from $100 of risk to comfortably being able to risk $250. And then it was even harder for me to go from like, you know, $200, $250 risk to $500. And the biggest step I had to go was going from $500 worth of risk to the 4-figure range. And that's because it's a huge psychological jump to go from 3 figures to 4 figures. And one of the beautiful things about, you know, starting your trading journey with prop firms is that no matter what, like even if you get a $10K account, like yeah, sure, you're still gonna be looking at like, you know, $100 worth of risk. But in the event that you pick up a $100K account, well, you're gonna be starting to get used to, like you're gonna get used to these like bigger numbers, but in reality you're only risking like 2 figures on every single trade. And by the time that you want to start trading your own capital, ideally you should already be quite proficient in trading. You should have already gotten multiple payouts from prop firms just to prove to yourself that, you know, hey, if I look back at my trading, well, I've already gotten this many payouts, you know, I've gotten this much funding, I have this many months of data that I can kind of fall back on, I am now considered a profitable trader. And if at that point you want to start trading your own capital, like, go for it, and you're not going to have any struggles whatsoever. Because you already understand, you know, probability theory, you understand systems theory, you understand that all of this plays out. And as long as you stick to the system, you're going to be profitable long-term and you're not going to struggle with risking the proper amount on every single trade. And that's just something that I didn't quite add into the whiteboard, but it's something worth mentioning. So just understand that you don't really have much downside when it comes to prop firms, but treat it the right way. Now let's move into kind of like the core philosophy, right? If there is one strategy when it comes to passing prop firms, quick and reliably without, you know, doing stupid shit and being reckless, this is it. Essentially, it boils down to you want to pass fast or you want to fail fast. But let me explain. And I kind of put this in the kind of like Q&A, FAQ kind of section of the board because this is also another problem, or rather a question that a lot of people tend to have in regards to prop firms, which is, oh, but what if I fail the challenge? We'll answer both of the questions at the same time. So let's kick things off with, you know, the perception that most people have towards prop firms. Most people tend to think that, most people at the very least, right, they put a lot of weight into a prop firm challenge, right? Oh, it's an exam. Oh, I'm being tested as a trader. Oh, these prop firms, they're gonna see that I'm not following my rules and I'm a shit trader and they're not gonna give me money anymore. And like, no, the reality is prop firms are a business model, right? It's a business model where they make an incredible amount of money from understanding statistics basically. And just to break that down, We already know from, you know, just rough estimations that about 90% of the population of traders are consistently unprofitable, right? They consistently lose money. And it also means that 90 to 95% of people that end up buying a prop firm challenge, they tend to fail it. And when you have, you know, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people paying, you know, a few hundred dollars for a prop firm account just to fail it like 9 times out of 10, and then they're going to come and retry it again. That's a lot of money that you stand to make from, you know, people buying challenges. So the challenges are absolutely like, they're just, it's just a transaction. It's a business transaction and nobody's measuring like your trader profile or whatever. In the event that you fail the challenge, just get a new one. That's it. Like they're not gonna hold anything against you. You don't need to, like, for example, if you buy a $100,000 account that the drawdown limit is $10,000, if you blow that account, like you don't need to pay them back $10,000, right? It's a demo account. Essentially, like you're playing with fake money. They're just seeing If, you know, do you have the capability of, you know, taking trades consistently, not overtrading, not over-risking, and just in general being a fucking degen? If you're able to prove that you're not, you know, doing that while being able to hit the profit target without blowing up the stop loss target, guess what? You're a funded trader. You've passed. So, and this also applies to when you, once you've passed your challenge, you know, once you get into the live phase, it's not like if you end up blowing the account, you need to pay them back. Again, it's a demo account, or at the very least, 99% of prop firms use demo accounts even during the live phase. There's a very, very rare few prop firms that will actually give you live money to play with. While you're in the live phase. But then they, like, the way that they kind of adapt to that is that the exam, you know, kind of like in order to pass the challenge and before they give you live money to trade with, they tend to be a little more stringent with, you know, their criteria. And they just need to ensure that they do their due diligence on you as a trader so that whatever live money they're giving you, like you're not just going to recklessly blow it up. But even if you lose it, you don't need to pay them back nothing. Again, your risk and profits is literally capped to the amount of money that you pay for the prop firm. And of course the time and effort that you spend into the prop firm. That much we can't really say much, but just the fact that this is an incredible trade-off if you know what you're doing, which is very low potential risk, very high potential upside. So right now you just gotta get good at what you're doing and the prop firms are going to be the— I know it kind of sounds almost like, you know, a magic pill or like a magic bullet, but the truth is it is, right? 10 years ago, if you were getting into trading, you would have no choice but to either rely on your own capital or pray that you are able to apply to some sort of trading firm or trading floor, and there'll be someone to coach you, there'll be someone to give you capital. But nowadays, like, the game is wide open. Prop firms have never been more accessible. In fact, even compared to just 3 years ago, the landscape of prop firms was completely different, right? Just to give you an example, most prop firms now don't give you any sort of time limit to, you know, pass a challenge. In the past, you had to hit a 10% profit target within 30 days, which is not always, you know, that achievable unless you're properly risking the proper amount. On every single trade, and you had to have a pretty decent month, right? Again, 10% gain is nothing to scoff at. It may not feel like much if you're coming from crypto, but again, just to give you an idea. But when you're coming from a TradFi perspective, this is huge. If you're able to maintain 10% a month with a decent amount of capital for a long enough period of time, you're going to be making an absolute killing from trading. So anyways, now let's get into kind of like the core philosophy of, you know, basically passing prop firms, which is like, again, I've already, you know, kind of prefaced this multiple times throughout this video, but essentially it boils down to pass fast, fail fast. Now that you understand not only the business model of prop firms, but you also understand prop firm math, you also understand your downside risk cap. In this sense, like, again, the biggest reason that I've seen across hundreds of examples of people who are perfectly proficient when it comes to trading and they understand the system, they understand technical analysis, but they still do not reach the point of just consistency or just profitability, it's purely on the fact that A, they're not risking the proper amount of money that they should be, or B, there is, you know, some other kind of like psychological thing that is affecting them. Now, usually that tends to also boil down to a fear of losing money, which again, it is completely valid in the event that you're trading your own capital and, you know, you've worked hard for that money and you have to risk a meaningful amount in order to make a meaningful amount back. But when it comes to prop firms, it completely changes that equation because, you know, if you think about the fact that you're only risking like $25 a trade, like if you're afraid, Of risking $25 a trade, then like maybe it's time to rethink your life. But like in general, like, all right, no, that's in general. If you— yeah, you gotta rethink your life. But if you're like, the truthful answer, if you're afraid of risking $25 a trade, if you put $25 on the line and you feel some sort of way and you feel the need to kind of like mess around with the trade because, you know, you're afraid of risking that money, then you really gotta change your perspective with risk or potentially money. In which case, I'll probably point you towards You know what? I don't even know what to point you towards other than the fact that, you know, maybe start with $10 risk per trade or $5. If that helps, pick up a $5K account, pick up a $10K account, and it's gonna make it so much easier. But otherwise, just to get back to that core theory of like pass fast, fail fast. Essentially, when it comes to prop firms, just remember this one thing. The longer that you spend grinding away on a challenge is the longer, it's like the more time and effort that you're gonna put into trading, but you're not gonna be getting any payouts from it. So save the smart risk management for after you've passed a prop firm challenge. Once you get into a live account, And, you know, now you just gotta, you know, make, like, make a couple of percentage, maybe 5% a month without blowing up the account so that you can do this for many, many months and just extract a lot of profits from that initial investment of a couple hundred dollars that you put in. Like, do the risk management at that point, right? If at that point you decide you wanna go for 0.25% risk per trade and 0.5% and you never wanna touch 1%, absolutely, by all means, go for it. But not during the challenge phase, because during the challenge phase, think about the money that you're putting in. Right. And whatever that amount is, like, this is why you also see people that are able to pass prop firm challenges within the same day taking like 1 to 2 trades. No, that is not gambling. It's just they've done the math. If they, like, if they're used to risking, you know, $500 to $1,000 a trade, even on their own personal money, and the prop firm account costs $500, and as long as they have the rule that allows you to pass in 1 day without any, you know, consistency rule, then yeah, you know, I might as well buy like 5 of these accounts and treat them as 5 separate trades so that I can pass it in a single day and whatever, you know, trades that I win in the future, it's just going to be kind of like house money. So now obviously you don't want to just start off by doing that, like, but just understand again, like basically like if I could give you a very practical rule to apply when it comes to prop firms, you never want to be risking less than 1% on the challenge phase, right? Ideally, if you have a kind of like an A+ setup where everything's kind of aligning and you have like every criteria checking out plus some bonus confluences, then go for 2% or the maximum amount of risk that your prop firm is able to allow you to risk on a single trade, which depending on the prop firm, like it's going to completely differ in the sense that some may be 1%, some may be 2%, some may be 3%. Now the only way that you're gonna be able to find this out is if you go read the rules, which I highly encourage you to do. But we'll save this for later because that, like I'm just gonna share some notes when it comes to, you know, what you should look for when it comes to prop firms later on. But just understand like 1% is basically your half risk trade and 2% is basically going to be your full risk trade. Now, when you do this, keep in mind, I am kind of referring to this from the perspective of a 10% drawdown account. So in the event that you, let's say, have 5% drawdown, then you kind of want to just halve that number. So 0.5% risk for half risk and 1% for like your full risk. Now I'm going to get into like what's the differences between like the drawdown limits later, but essentially when you're dealing with a one-phase challenge, you're going to have, you know, Usually 3 to 5% drawdown limit. When you're dealing with a 2-phase account, you're going to have anywhere between 10 to 12% of a drawdown limit, which is a lot more forgiving. But at the same time, with a bigger drawdown limit, it means that, you know, the more target you actually need to hit, which means, you know, if you use the same like kind of risk parameters for both of these accounts, then yeah, you're still going to take a couple of months to pass the challenge, which is not what you want. At the very least, which is not what I want for you. Ultimately, you're here to make money trading, but like if you can get it done in a month rather than 3, then Wouldn't you rather get it done in a month? So obviously when you take this approach, you are going to fail more accounts, which again is perfectly fine. It's just a business model after all. And if you really break down the numbers, all you're losing is a couple hundred bucks, right? Again, when you think about it that way, not that big of a deal. When you fail an account, it's not that the prop firms are going to ban you from ever taking another challenge. In fact, they would love for you to try another challenge so that they can take, or rather they can have the potential to take more of your money. There is no shame in failing prop firm challenges. In fact, Even better. It just shows that, you know, you're risking the proper amount on every single trade. Like everyone's going to have some, a couple of losing streaks, but as long as you have proper risk management and if you trust the system and you just so happen to kind of like run into a losing streak and you blow the account, fine. Like it's not that big of a deal. It's like, yeah, just start fresh. Basically in the event that, you know, you potentially, you know, down 8% on a prop firm and you have 2% drawdown limit yet and you have a 2% drawdown limit left, it's better to just kind of like, in a way it's even better to just kind of like start a fresh account, right? Obviously try to recover that account, but don't put like your entire mind, human and soul and being or whatever into kind of like recovering that account. Oh, I'm gonna take 0.25% risk here until I kind of get back to 7%. Then I'm gonna up it to 0.5% risk or whatever. No. Like if you're down 8%, like that's 8% you have to make just to get back to breakeven. May as well save that time, spend another $100, get a new account or something, or like risk the last 2% on like a final kind of like A+ trade. If you win it, great, you made 4 to 6% back and then boom, now you're back at breakeven. Or heck, for $100 you can kind of like start fresh and you have a new account, right? Again, Just don't. At the end of the day, all I'm trying to say is that when it like just remove that attachment from brothel accounts, they are nothing. It's no big deal, right? Especially in the challenge phase. Once you get into the live phase, great. Like it's real money now. You actually, you know, whatever money that you made there, you can actually get a payout. Great. Treat it seriously. But the challenge, yeah, just pass last, fail fast. If that's the one thing that I can leave you with, it is going to be that. Anyways, I think we are now getting close to the end of the kind of like overall strategy stuff. Later on, I'm going to give you more of the technical stuff. I'm also going to kind of go through a couple of prop firms just live alongside you guys, just to explain some different terminologies so that you are not, you know, absolutely confused when you go into a prop firm website, which I understand. Not only are the amount of prop firms out there absolutely confusing, and honestly, there's way too many, but even the amount of terminologies and just jargon is just like, yeah. It takes a while to get used to. So just to answer one last kind of like FAQ that I've gotten asked many, many times is that, oh, hey, what if I don't want my money to, you know, be in the control of somebody else? You don't have to. When it comes to prop firms, yeah, there are like, what you'll kind of understand later is that there's a difference between short-term accounts and there's difference between long-term accounts. And when it comes to prop firms, right, again, your downside risk is very much capped. All it takes is one payout and you've kind of like made back multiple times the investment that you put into the account in the first place. Everything else on top of that is just You don't need to risk your entire livelihood on the fact that the prop firm is gonna continue to exist, that they will continue to pay you out, or on some other factor that is outside of your control. Whatever money that you take from like from your payouts, feel free to cycle it into a personal account. Feel free to cycle it into more trustworthy prop firms that have been around for like the last 20 years. No, sorry, not 20 years. At the very least the last 10 years, which is quite a long time in the prop firm industry. And then get some long-term accounts there so that, you know, you basically, you will never run into any issue. Or heck, put it into investments, right? Crypto, real estate, whatever it is. it is, like, don't, like, prop firms can be as long-term or as short-term as you want. In fact, there are different strategies. In fact, you could have long-term accounts while you, you know, kind of gamble on short-term accounts. It's perfectly valid. Again, at the end of the day, prop firms are just a way for you to get capital and whatever you do with that capital, which, you know, ideally you should be making money from that capital so that you can, again, put it into yourself. And so you don't have to, like, yeah, in the event that the prop firm decides to ban you for whatever bullshit reason. If they decide to deny you a payout for any reason, like it's no big deal. You've already acquired some money. You have diversified your kind of like holdings across multiple different prop firms. Even if this one, you know, goes away, like boom, you have like 3 other accounts. Yeah, this is honestly not a super big concern. And if there's honestly one thing that I would like you to consider is that how about you think about this problem once you actually make money or, you know, get profitable? So many people come to me, so many people have come to me over the years, you know, asking this question and that question and that question. That's like kind of like step 5 or step 10 when they haven't even begun, you know, step 1. Some problems, you know, deal with it once you actually, you know, make money. It's kind of like taxes, you know, you wouldn't worry about taxes if you're not making money, right? So like, is taxes going to be something that you consider before you start a business? Because, oh man, I'm going to make so much money, taxes are going to be crazy. Like, no, it's a stupid question. So just focus on making money first and thinking about all of this later. Honest opinion. But otherwise, like, yeah, now let's get into the 2 types of prop firms. So essentially, like, Most prop firm accounts and most prop firm challenges are gonna be split into 2 broad categories. The first one's gonna be a short-term account and the second's gonna be a long-term account. Now, the only differences between the short and the long-term one is that the short-term one, your goal and priority with that account is to basically get the payout, ideally as safe, as reliably, but as fast as possible. Once you get that payout, everything else is kind of like house money and it does not matter at that point if you blow the account up. Now, the reason why I'm saying it from this perspective is because usually when it comes to short-term accounts, they tend to be one-phase challenges, which their drawdown limit It tends to range between 3% to 6%. Now, if you've been trading for any amount of period, like for any period of time, you understand how easy it is to lose 3%, right? All you need is potentially a losing streak of like 3 to 5, and boom, you've lost the account. So instead of looking at it as like a long-term, like I'm going to have this for many, many years, treat it as what it is, a short-term account, right? Again, another misconception that people have when it comes to the differences between one-phase and two-phase challenges, like One phase, you know, get in quick, kind of like do a pump and dump, right? Once you get your money, once you sell the top, boom, cycle it into more one-phase accounts or cycle it into somewhere else. But the goal with a short-term challenge is to make money fast. And that is, this is like, as we'll get into later with the prop firm strategy, we'll always recommend beginners to start with a one-phase account, at least for their first couple of accounts, or at least until they get their first payout. Only after that, you know, start thinking about long-term accounts because it's an absolute waste of time for you to be buying a 2-phase challenge, which now we're gonna get into, where you have a drawdown limit of like 10%, which is great. Oh, I can lose 10 trades in a row before I blow up the account. Problem is your target, right? The profit target in order to pass the challenge is usually going to be double to a little bit more than double compared to a 1-phase account where it's gonna range anywhere between, you know, 12% to maybe 15% on the high end. And that essentially also means that unless you're risking the proper amount, you, it's gonna take double the amount of time for you to pass the challenge. Compared to one phase. It's gonna be double the amount of time for you to get your first payout compared to the one phase. And like your initial kind of trajectory as a trader is highly determined by that first couple of payouts because the moment you start feeling like, okay, I'm not risking my own money anymore, but I'm just risking house money, that's when trading kind of opens up. Again, just to go back to what we were talking about before, where the majority of trading problems can kind of be boiled down to one thing, which is a fear of loss, right? Most people are afraid to lose money. Most people don't wanna lose anything. In fact, like it doesn't feel good if you happen to lose. something in your life, right? Money tends to be a pretty big component of that. If you're able to kind of like remove that attachment from money and just be like, okay, whatever money here is kind of like what I've made from trading and I can lose this entire payout buying new prop firm challenges, I can lose all of these prop firm challenges and I'll still be fine because technically like this is house money. Once you can get to that phase, that's when trading really takes off because again, you no longer have that attachment to money. Now, if you're able to get to that point without needing a payout to the point where you already have a good relationship with money, you're already, you know, kind of in a good spot in life. Perfect. You want to be a little bit more aggressive when it comes to the strategy that you use with prop firms, right? For one-phase challenges, you could realistically pick up like $25K, $50K accounts for like $100, $150. And if you have a 3% drawdown limit, heck, go 1% risk on all of them. Like pick up a few at the same time once they run promotions, which is another thing. Like, yeah, you know, since I'm on the, since I'm on this note, like let's just talk about it. When it comes to prop firms, like a lot of these tend to run promotions all the fucking time. Like if you take a look at Apex, they have 85% off basically, you know, 300 days out of 365 days of the year. When it comes to just the majority of these prop firms, they always have some sort of a promotion going on. So if you see that they are currently in a state where there is no promotion going on, just wait like 2 weeks because every month there tends to be something and it's usually worthwhile. It's 20%, 30%, 50% off. Like it just makes whatever that number is on paper, like $200 could become $100 of your own investment. That just makes things a lot easier. Now, just to get back to the prop firm challenges, talking about like one-phase account, you already understand the one-phase account. Now let's move into the two-phase account. Now, the reason why this is called a two-phase account is that, okay, usually with two-phase accounts, you have a static drawdown. Now I just realized there's also something that I forgot to talk about with the one-phase challenge. There are 2 different types. In fact, you know, we'll talk about this later. In fact, I am going to share this later once we go onto a prop firm website and I'll kind of break down every single terminology out there that you need to understand. Now, the reason why a long-term account is usually a two-phase account Is because only on 2-phase accounts do they give you more than a 10% static drawdown limit, which means that, you know, 10% is a healthy amount where you could lose 10 trades in a row. And granted, not every single loss is going to be 1% risk. Like some could be 0.5, some could be 0.25, especially once you reach the live account phase. Then like, yeah, you basically have the leeway of like 20 to 30 losses in a row before you blow that account up, which basically makes it near impossible for you to blow up a, you know, a 2-phase or kind of like a long-term account. Again, the reason why you wouldn't want to do this at the start is because like, again, different kind of goals here. Long-term. accounts, you would usually look to have it for many, many months. And so when it comes to long-term accounts, you also want to ideally be investing into these long-term accounts with reputable prop firms. The best, some of the best in the game are the ones that have been around the longest, right? FTMO and Vydas are 2 of basically like the crème de la crème, if you can put it that way. But either way, with a long-term account, like you don't want to start off with this, but just understand like they, there's nothing wrong with either kind of approach, but depending on where you're at in your trading journey, you want to prioritize short-term first and then cycle it into long-term later, especially once you've gotten a couple of payouts. With the long-term account, one of the different kind of like things compared to the short-term account is that you are looking to maintain, especially once you pass the challenge, you're looking to maintain the account. Again, you're looking to have this for many, many months and potentially years. Different to a short-term account where you are literally borderline gambling, where you're trying to get payouts, you know, consistently, quickly, but still done in a way where you're following the system, so safely. With a long-term account, you know, you want to be a little bit more safer with this, right? Don't go more than 0.5 5% risk per trade unless you see an amazing, like, A++, you know, not only is everything in the system aligning, but you also have some bonus confluences on top of that. Yeah, feel free to go 1%, 2% if you want. It's completely up to you and get a big fat payout for that month. But the goal with the long-term account is you wanna play it safe, right? Because at the end of the day, it like, if you tell someone that, oh yeah, you're a trader, it only makes 3% a month, they're gonna be like, ah, you know, that, yeah, you're not that great. And you tell them, oh, but I have a million dollars in capital. Oh. See, that's what you do with a long-term account, right? The actual on-paper kind of like vanity metric of like, you know, gain percentage, not high, but once you have enough capital, that's when things change completely for you as a trader. Now let's get into the prop strategy, which I think I've kind of already prefaced this, but like, yeah, you always want to start with the one-phase challenge, almost always. Now the one that I would recommend for most of you watching this is going to be Apex Trader Funding. I In fact, we'll go onto their website later just so I can explain a couple of things for you. Yeah, Apex. Why? Because they usually run 85% off kind of promotions, which also means that their accounts go from you know $150 for a 50k account to 30 bucks for a 50k account. Five zero. Apex exclusively does one phase challenges, which means this is the perfect kind of like starting point to getting your first payout. Now the bonus part of Apex is that they're also one of the most transparent prop firms out there in the sense that they have they have some of the highest approval ratings when it comes to payouts, and they do it really quick. Basically, like. Chances are you're not gonna run into them denying you a payout or banning you for some stupid bullshit reason because A, they're quite reputable, B, they're incredibly cheap, they have one-phase challenges, and they have a good reputation. So that's the one that I would recommend for most of you watching this. Like, I wouldn't overthink this, which later on, once I get into the prop firm kind of like website, I'm gonna— one of the things that I will tell you is not to overthink it. In fact, one of the rules down here is to not overthink it because it's really easy. But like, yeah, let's get to that once we get to that phase. So once you have your one-phase challenge, you know, connect it to MT5, connect it to TradingView, connect it to whatever trading method that you would prefer to have. And then again, look to pass fast or fail fast, right? A challenge is just a challenge. It's just whatever money that you would've risked anyways on a single trade that you would take with your own money, but now you're spreading it out and diversifying that risk across different prop firms. Pass fast, fail fast. Don't be attached to the challenges. The challenges are absolutely nothing. Once you get into the live, feel free to get attached to it because now you have, you know, real stakes at hand. And then lastly, when it comes to like when you pass a challenge, One of the rules that you always want to have when it comes to, you know, just prop firms is that you always want to buy another challenge the moment you pass any challenge, right? And when I say at least another challenge, what I usually do is I buy a couple of challenges once I pass any challenge. And the reason why you want to do that, it comes down to kind of like diversifying your risk, but also kind of like scaling. And I'm going to explain that. So when it comes to diversifying your risk, there happens to be someday where some prop firm decides to ban you or deny you a payout for whatever reason. Like boom, right? If you only have one account, if you've never kind of like started working on other accounts, guess what? You now have to start from zero and chances are for the next month you're probably going to make nothing from trading because now you have to, you know, start over from scratch. Now when you always make it a point to buy new challenges and to work on these new challenges, the moment you pass one means that A, you're always diversifying your risk in the event that this prop firm goes away, boom, right? You have this other one that's already kind of like 2% away from passing and all you need to do is Kabang bang, and you know, you have some, you know, you have a way to acquire income for that month. Now secondly, you're always scaling. When it comes to profits, it shouldn't be like, oh, when I think I want to scale, then I buy like 20 accounts at the same time, right? Why not go slow and steady? Just build out from 1 to 2 accounts, 2 to 4, 4 to, you know, 5, and then 5 to, you know, 7 and whatever. Like over time, like naturally as you continue to do your thing, like you're already gonna do this anyways. You're already gonna be using the system. You're already gonna be trading. Over time, You naturally scale if you do this, which one of the one of the ways that we're going to manage all of these accounts because you know at some point you're going to reach the point where you have you know ten accounts you're not going to be trading ten accounts individually each and every single time on ten different phones or whatever you're going to have one centralized kind of hub which is called TradeSyncer that's the one that I recommend when it comes to these like trade copiers or like account copiers and you're just going to take a trade on like the main account right the main account and it's going to copy trade right it's going to place a similar Like kind of risk percentage, same asset, same position, everything across all of your accounts. And that's how you, like, that's how these prop firm traders basically trade, you know, $2 to $5 million worth of capital spread across like, you know, 20 different accounts. They do it using an app like this. But yeah, eventually you're gonna get a payout. Once you're done with your one-phase challenges and you get a couple of payouts, that's when you kind of start working towards two-step challenges. So just understand like, but yeah, that's in general the prop firm strategy. It's not really that complicated, to be honest. It's really simple even. So now let's get into some of the things that we need to consider with firms. So this is also one of the other huge talking points when it comes to prop firms, which is, oh, but I'm not getting into this prop firm because it has a negative review. Like, no shit. They're gonna have negative reviews on every single prop firm out there, even the best ones. FTMO, Fiverr, whatever. Always gonna see negative reviews. Why is that? Because like, just think about it for a moment, right? If you have an absolutely horrendous experience at a restaurant versus an absolutely fantastic experience at a restaurant, which one are you more inclined to talk about? Chances are you're gonna, you know, go online and, you know, trash this restaurant like, oh my God, the waiters are so rude, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because you had a negative experience. And it at the very least makes you feel better if you kind of vent about it. And if you kind of like, it feels like you have been wronged. And so you try to get back at the restaurant. Same thing with a proflite, right? If they happen to be denied a payout or whatever, for whatever reason, whatever, like they're gonna go online and they're gonna go, yo, I put in so much work, but you denied my Pay or blah blah blah. Like it's always going to happen, and it's not always the fault of a prop firm. In fact, there is no prop firm out there that will not have any negative reviews. Like for whatever reason, there is going to be someone talking about it, and the voices of the negative people are always going to be louder than the ones that are really positive, right? It's the reason why you know news tends to be so negative most of the time because nobody cares about positive stuff. Everyone only cares when it's negative. Negativity sells basically, you know. So even with prop firms, negative reviews are always going to be more prominent than the positive reviews, and it's just kind of like the way. You know, human psychology works. So yes, you are always gonna see negative reviews. Now what matters is the overall reviews. And secondly, you know, how long they've been in the space tends to also be like a pretty good kind of like benchmark for quality when it comes to a prop firm. But in general, like reputation and like the overall reviews, as long as there are enough people using it and if there are enough people kind of like speaking about it, and most importantly, if you go to a website like propfirmmatch.com and you see that, you know, it has pretty decent reviews, chances are you're gonna be fine, right? Some of the longest players in the space, like you could definitely name them off the top of your head. Chances are you're gonna be fine with those. Are they a little bit more expensive? Yes. But would you be happy to pay for a little bit of security? I would assume yes, if you're someone that is concerned about things like this. But just understand, like on every prop firm, you know, the offerings are gonna be slightly different. Trading rules are gonna be slightly different. But one thing for sure is that you're always gonna see negative reviews and that is perfectly fine. Even some of the worst, like, you know, worst kind of like PR prop firms out there, they're still around and they're still paying people out. Obviously, you know, given the choice, you wouldn't go those as your first option. Oh, but one other thing before we move into the second point within this kind of like segment is that like one of above all else, what you want to kind of like specifically look for outside of overall reviews and just like general like trust and reputation within the space is transparency. Essentially, like ideally they should not be banning you for bullshit reasons. That's honestly the most annoying part about prop firms. It's only happened to me a couple of times throughout my many years of trading and across trying out different prop firms. So it's very much the exception and not the rule. And those are only because like those prop firms were scammy as shit, which kind of like the second point, this, you know, segment is going to kind of like talk about that. But just understand that nowadays in 2026, as of the time I'm filming this, I believe 99% of the prop firm industry is like, it's so competitive nowadays because of how many players there are in the space that very little prop firms can actually afford to maintain a bad reputation anymore. So most of the time what they'll do is they'll use kind of like the fine print within the rules to kind of like hold it against you. But again, that is way rare. Fair these days compared to back in like 2022, for example. And even when it comes to the rules, it's as simple as giving it a quick read when, you know, before you sign up to the prop firm, just to make sure that it fits whatever trading strategy that you are trying to use. But for the most part, if you're trading the AOC model, whether it's the scalping model, the intraday model, I wouldn't quite say the same for the swing trading model, but if as long as you're doing intraday or scalping, then you're going to be perfectly fine with the majority of prop firms out there. It's not going to be any concern. You will never breach any sort of rules as long as you follow the rules of the Now, if you're trading swing trading, then you want to look specifically for prop firms that support swing trading. Basically prop firms that allow you to hold trades overnight, because not every single prop firm does this. If you happen to sign up to something like Apex, for example, you can't hold trades overnight. And if you do, then you're going to get flagged and you're going to be like, hey, you broke a rule. And so that would be a reason why they might reject the payout. But usually if you make the, you know, if you make, if you break a rule once, it's usually fine. If you break a rule twice, It's still fine, but 3 times is when kind of like, you know, you might lose the account. But it again is a simple fix. All you need to do, read the rules a little bit, take 5 minutes, understand some English, and generally we're going to be pretty okay, right? Nowadays, the prop firm industry, just again, because of how competitive it has become, like people are now forced, like, and it's a good thing by the way, where these prop firms are now forced to be a lot more transparent in their, you know, writing and in their rules so that, you know, they're not getting called out by the entirety of Twitter and, you know, then they're just basically going to lose their entire business because nobody's ever going to want to use that prop firm anymore because everyone knows that it's a scam. Next up, speaking about scams, let's move into the second point of this segment is that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Like if they're offering you like a $200K account for like $20 and, you know, like just incredible rules that just like, wow, they promise the world. If it sounds too good to be true, chances are it is. So it doesn't mean that you should avoid it entirely. But in the event that you do decide to go with a prop firm, maybe go for the one-phase challenge, maybe start off with a little bit smaller an account so that you're not spending too much money on it. And lastly, like, just try to pass it. Who knows, you might even get a payout. And because if the rules are that great, if the rules are kind of like, whoa, you know, for relatively little you can get a lot, and if you get one payout, then, you know, that kind of makes money worth it. So it's a lot like market conditions where, you know, you can't really control the prop firm value, you can really just tell the prop firm, you know, what not to do. But at the very least, you can adapt to it by, you know, A, buying a smaller account, B, going for a quick payout, and then, you know, pumping jump and see. You might even realize, oh yeah, you know, maybe what they're promising is true after all, and you might have just discovered a hidden gem. But you'll never know until you try. But in general, like, if you're someone that worries about things like that, just stick to the reputable prop firms. There are more than 10 that I can count, and they're all going to be pretty decent. Obviously some are better than others, but in general, again, because of how competitive this space has become, it's kind of like forced the floor of prop firms to be really high in the sense that, you know, there are not that many bad players in the space anymore. There are not that many bad apples in the space anymore. So like generally speaking, you're going to be good no matter what. Like things to consider with prop firms, definitely read the rules. It's worth it. I know it's going to take 5 minutes out of your day to just kind of like make sure that whatever the rules the prop firm has is kind of like fitting with the AOC strategy, which again, most of the time it will, but still read the rules. It's super worth it. So things that you want to look for is overnight trading in the event that you are doing swing trading. You also want to look at their risk rules. For example, certain prop firms will allow you to risk up to 3% of your account on any single trade. Some will only allow 2% and some are actually a I don't think there are any prop firms out there that still keep to 1%, but back in the day there was. Anyways, nowadays it's either between 2% to 3%, and it's just good to get an idea so that, you know, if you have a $50K account, you understand, all right, if I only have 2%, I don't want to be risking more than $1,000 in this trade. Even if I'm on the 2-phase account where, you know, Shwen says that, you know, on A+ setups you want to take 2% risk on that trade, well then make sure your max is actually 2%, right? Because if you end up going 3% where the rules say 2%, then yeah, you know, then you might run into some issues. And then it's not the problem with the prop firms, it's just that you did not take the time to do some due diligence. Moving on, it's like kind of like their rules when it comes to copy trading. Now, obviously, you're not allowed to copy somebody else's trades, but if you're copying like your own trades using TradeSyncer, where you have multiple accounts with the prop firm, which by the way, most prop firms allow you to have multiple accounts with the same prop firm, and of course, they expect you to use some sort of software in order to copy trades amongst, you know, all of these accounts, that's perfectly fine. For 99% of the prop firms out there, obviously, you can't copy other people. Some of them allow you to use like trading bots, some do not. Some of you allows you to do, you know, kind Like take multiple trades in a day. Some of them allows you to do like high-frequency trading, some do not. Like again, at the end of the day, every prop firm is different. All of their offerings are slightly different. They are catered towards different types of audiences. For example, Apex, they're all one-phase challenges. Like nobody in their right mind is gonna look at Apex and think like, okay, this is the perfect long-term account. I'm gonna have each and every single account for years and years and years. Because truth is right now, every account that they have have a maximum kind of like payout limit of like 6 times, right? You can take 6 payouts from that single account and then you have to start a new one, which is perfectly fine as well. Because of how cheap It is and the super low barrier of entry. But either way, like just take a you know just have a read. Like when it comes to payout rules, to give you an example with Apex, like you have a let's say you get a fifty thousand dollar account, you pass it. It's not like you know if you hit five hundred dollars of profit, you can just withdraw that. No, you have to first hit twenty six hundred dollars in profit. Sorry, you need to hit twenty one hundred dollars in profit. Anything above that, you can withdraw. So just small rules like this that you know in this case kind of only applies to Apex. I can't think of other. Other, you know, prop firms that would have you needing to hit like some sort of like that high of a minimum. But in general, it's still good to know. And it's not going to take more than 5 minutes of your time just to read through this before you decide you want to sign up and you decide you want to pay for the account, you know. And just one last thing to keep in mind is that when we get into the actual websites of the prop firms later, you are going to see that there are an incredible amount of, you know, technical jargons. When you start to check out, they're going to give you options to where, oh, would you like to have your profit split go from 80% to 90%? Or would you like to have one day Would you like to have this? Would you like to have that? Would you like to have halal trading? Which is a thing, by the way, like to make it legal for Muslims to trade. And essentially the TLDR of this is that you will probably be tempted to look this up. You'll be tempted to ask me questions on like, oh, should I get this? Should I get that? The truth is you don't, especially when you're first starting out. In fact, until today, like I've had more than 10 prop firm accounts and I've never once bought any sort of add-ons to it unless like occasionally, like for example, if Knowing that I am investing into this account for the long term, it's a $200,000 account. And, you know, maybe I would, like for this specific account, I would like to pay up, you know, profit split to be not 80%, I would like it to be 95%, right? I pay for that. But that's something you think about once you've reached like beyond step 5, right? It's a problem that once you started making money, you think about taxes. You don't think about taxes before you've made money, that kind of thing. So like TLDR for the majority of you, for your first like 5 accounts, don't even think about the add-ons. Like feel free to research it in your own time if you want, if you're curious, if you're interested, But in general, you're not going to need it. Lastly, yeah, we'll get into TradeSync. So now there are usually like 2 kind of like main, you know, these Traders Connect and the other one's called Traders Connect. The reason why I recommend TradeSync is that, you know, in terms of it's a lot more budget friendly compared to Traders Connect because Traders Connect, you kind of pay $10 a month for every account or like every connection you have to the main account. But with TradeSync, it's $50 flat, I believe, or around $40 per month, but you get 20 connections for that money. So essentially, if you have 20, like, as long as you're not trading with more than 20 accounts, in almost every kind of scenario, basically if you're trading with less than 2 to 4 accounts, then yeah, maybe Traders Connect might be a bit more worth it. But chances are, if you're watching this video, chances are if you're in Blueprint, if you're in Bootcamp, you aren't going to reach the point when you have more than 5 accounts, just because like you are gonna get good at trading and there will be absolutely no reason for you not to get more accounts. So in this case, like you might as well get used to Tradexing. So it's Like in terms of the software, I don't think that's too much that's different between TradeSyncer and Traders Connect. Feel free to look into it, but TradeSyncer is the one that I use and like it's the one I can recommend. I haven't had any issues with it so far. And you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to designating which main accounts, you know, what assets to trade on each account. Like for example, you can literally categorize accounts based on like, okay, only these 2 accounts will, if I take any trade on, you know, let's say gold, then only these 2 accounts will kind of like come into play. If I take on NASDAQ, then, you know, both these accounts will not. Stuff along those lines, right? I'm not going to get too deep into TradeStation in this video. Just feel free to go on YouTube. Like there are a bunch of tutorials. It's not something that's incredibly difficult to figure out. But yeah, connecting accounts just gives you the ability to, you know, basically trade 10 accounts without absolutely losing your mind because you have to now have, you know, 10 different phones or like 10 different apps, whatever. You have 10 different logins and you have to execute trades 10 different times. Like it's a no-brainer, right? And again, because of one of the rules of scaling when it comes to prop firms is that every challenge that you pass, you want to start a second challenge immediately in a sense where You know, even if you end up, okay, let's say you pass the challenge and now you're on the live phase and you reduce your risk by half, right? Instead of taking 1% risk per trade, now you're getting, you know, 0.5% risk per trade. Doesn't matter. You can still use that as your main account as long as, you know, whatever trades that you've taken in the live account, as long as your other account is kind of like building towards passing, right? That's what matters because you just want to protect yourself against the potential of, you know, one day you might potentially lose the account for whatever reason. It can happen. Then you have to start from scratch. But if you've just been, you know, working on other accounts Well, you're making money. Guess what, right? Not only will scaling be a lot easier, but it kind of happens on autopilot as you just do your thing. But secondly, in the event that anything does happen, you're not starting from scratch. You already have a couple of other accounts ready, and that is a good place to be when it comes to trading and just having that sense of security. So yeah, that is most of— sorry. Yeah, that is most of the module here when it comes to prop firms. This is surprisingly going on for more than an hour at this point, but now let's just get into a couple of prop firm websites so that I can show you some of the terminology. Strategies that are involved when you are about to sign up for a prop firm. Let's take a look first at Apex. So let's go into Explore Products. All right, so let's take a look here. When it comes to Apex in general, right, you have 2 different types. One is an intraday trail, where basically the trading stop loss is calculated based on the end— based on intraday. Basically, if you hit the stop loss at any point in time, like, it will be calculated instantly. And you have end of day, Which means that, you know, even if you're down below the stop loss limit before the day ends, if you can somehow get back above the limit, then your account won't be blown. Now personally, I don't really think that this matters a lot. I would just go for intraday most of the time because if you have like, again, pass fast, fail fast. With Apex, their offerings are all one-phase challenges. It's not like you need to keep this account for the long term anyway. So if you lose it, you lose it. Like you get another account. In fact, taking a look at the prices for the account, like check it out. For $25, $25, you can pick up a $50K account. Like how ridiculous is that? I can pick up $25. accounts right now and for like $500. Can you believe that? So again, like, yes, you have a 3% drawdown limit, which I'm gonna get into now. As an example, let's say we're looking at the $50K account and we're gonna use Tradovate as our execution platform. Well, your minimum days to pass is essentially like, if I happen to take one trade today and I hit the $3,000 profit target, it means that I pass the challenge. Like I get to have my account immediately, right? Because the minimum amount of trading days is one. In the event that you have 5, you can pass, you can hit the profit target on the first day, but you still have to just take some couple of trades, like small ones throughout the rest of the 4 days on 4 separate occasions so that you can hit the minimum kind of days required to pass. That's all that means. Most of the time you're probably not gonna be passing it in a day. And most of the time the kind of like limit that Prop Firm set for you, or like the rule that Prop Firm set for you in regards to the amount of minimum days, like the minimum amount of trading days that you need, it's usually quite friendly, right? It's anywhere between 3 to 5 and potentially Which makes sense, right? You're not gonna hit 10% profit target in a single day. Even if it takes 5 days, it's a fair amount, right? Let's just keep it at that. Now, max contracts means that, you know, you're able to open 6 contracts of NASDAQ Mini, or you're able to open up 60 micro contracts. Profit target is, you know, $3K based on a $50K account. You can do the math. This is 6%. The maximum drawdown that you have is that you cannot lose more than 4% of the account. And again, this is an intraday trail, which means that it's gonna be cheaper compared to the end of day trail, because like it's easier for you to lose the account, but at the same time, it's like with Apex, it doesn't really quite matter. In fact, Apex is the only one that I know that does a separation between intraday trail or end of day trail. But either way, like let's take a look at just more stuff. Your daily loss limit. Now every prop firm will have some sort of a daily loss limit, which basically means that you cannot lose more than a certain amount in the same day, right? Once you hit that number, do not continue to trade because if you continue to do it, you are going to violate a rule within the prop firm. This is just to prevent traders from just blowing up their account in single day. Most prop firms have this and like just, it's usually pretty transparent. You'll see it on the front page of the prop firm. Scaling, this basically means that, you know, with some prop firms, there is no scaling built in where if you get a $50K account, you're just going to be trading with a $50K account for the rest of time. It's not going to grow into anything more. There are some prop firms that have scaling. For example, every payout that you take that is worth at least 5%, for example, your account will grow by 5% in terms of capital. Next month, you know, after you take the payout this month, next month you're going to trade with, you know, instead of $50K, you're going to be trading with $53K as an example. And then that kind of keeps compounding. Now, this depends on the prop firm. Is this a reason for you to choose this prop firm over the next? Absolutely not. Scaling doesn't matter because like for a couple hundred dollars, you could scale right then and there. You don't need this. Is it good to have? Yes. But should that be a top consideration? Absolutely not. And then reset fee, this is basically like, this usually applies to essentially, like, you could pay a fee to kind of like reset the account instead of having to pick up a new account. Let's say you're down by 8% right now and you're 2% away from failing. Like, instead of buying a new account for maybe like $200, maybe the reset fee is $80 and you might find it worth it to just kind of reset the account back to zero and then you can start from there again. With Apex, the reason why there is no reset fee is because this is only like each account is only active for 30 days, right? Again, when I say that Apex is a one-phase challenge and your goal should be to pass fast, fail fast, this is what I mean, right? You have 30 days to basically make 6% or to blow the account up, because otherwise you're going to lose it after 30 days anyways, right? So that's why there is no reset fee when it comes to Apex, but majority of other prop firms, you should have some sort of a reset fee. Now, depending on— every prop firm is going to have different kind of like execution platforms available to you. For example, Tradovate is directly available on TradingView, which means that you can trade, place trades, and close trades directly on TradingView. Now, can you use Tradovate on the browser? Yes. Can you use Trade of Eight on mobile? Yes. Can you use Trade of Eight on Mac? Yes. Can you use Trade of Eight on like yeah, you know all of this is Trade of Eight and obviously if I go into Rhythmic, which is another execution platform, this becomes a little bit different, right? So Rhythmic would not be available on TradingView, for example, but Trade of Eight is. So that's about it when it comes to this, and essentially like Apex is absolutely ridiculous. Ninety percent off. Incredible. But yeah, you know that's that's Apex. Let's look at you know another prop. Popular one, which is Crypto Fund Trader. This is a really popular one. It's one that I've used before. This is the one Sid uses. He's funded for like half a million dollars with them. And a lot of people within the AOC community are using this because this is one of the only more legit kind of like crypto prop firms outside of Breakout Prop. And yeah, Crypto Fund Trader, I think this is probably the 2 main ones. So here now you start seeing that there is a difference between one-phase and two-phase Now let's start off with the one-phase one because, you know, it's a natural segue from what we've already been discussing in regards to Apex. So if you take a look at the one-phase, like, let's take a look at— and by the way, like, you can kind of like go through one of the other things that I did not mention when it came to Apex is that you don't necessarily want to go for just the biggest account that you can get. Because like, just to give you an example, if we take a look at a $150K account here, your max drawdown is only $4K, right? With the $50K, Well, that doesn't quite add up, right? The account size is 3 times of the $50K, but your drawdown limit is only double. So it depends on what kind of goal that you're going for. Essentially, like with the $150K account, the profit target is still 6%, but the drawdown limit is like 2.5%, which can be a little bit rough compared to the $50K, which also the reason why like you see a lot of people who use Apex, even though they have a lot of experience in trading and they have, you know, a lot of capital at their disposal, they'll still go for the $50K account and they'll just get 20% accounts, which Apex, by the way, gives you a maximum of 20 accounts. That's why I say 20. So instead of like going for 20 $150K accounts where it's really easy to potentially blow this, like they go for 50 because your drawdown limit is 4%, right? Which is acceptable. Is it the best? No. But for one-phase challenges, it's acceptable. It's industry standard. So that's just something to keep in mind. So in regards to all of these accounts, their pricing is not going to also reflect the amount of value that there is as well. So for example, with Apex, like this is too cheap to even talk about. But let's go into, you know, Crypto Fund Trader. Now, most other prop firms outside of Apex, I think, will just have a set number. So depending on the account that you go for, like nothing's really going to change. And obviously the bigger the account that you go for, the better value for money that you're gonna get. But there's also a caveat, right? You kind of do this calculation by yourself. For example, the one-phase $10K account compared to the one-phase $25K account, like there's not that big of a difference between the actual value, right? If you multiply $10K or like $120K by 2.5 times, you're gonna You're gonna get around $260, $270. But if the $25K account, the $25K account is also about $260. If you multiply $120 by 2.5 times, you're gonna get $300. But the $25K account, if you were to just, you know, it's $260. So it's a $30 to $40 difference, right? It's not huge when you're dealing with the smaller numbers. $25K to $50K, that's when, you know, it becomes meaningful because instead of $530, you're looking at $450 and that's before the Discount, right? Again, most of these prop firms will do discounts, and in this case you have a 23% off. So you kind of do the math from 50 to 100; that's 900. You're saving 100 bucks, right? And then from this to that, like you can do the math. I'm not going to talk too much about this, but just to go back to what we were talking about before: maximum daily loss. So the difference between you know the apex kind of like one phase challenge versus a a more legit one phase challenge, if we can put it that way. Is that, you know, we have 6% maximum loss and we have a 10% profit target, right? So it's gonna take a little bit more time to pass, but at the same time, it's gonna be less likely that you're gonna blow the account up. But again, when it comes to One Phase Challenges, you're not looking to hold the account for like months and months on end anyways. So pick the one that makes sense. But one of the things that we should talk about though is a trailing loss versus— if you take a look here, in fact, this is not even going to be the clearest one. So let me go to FundingPips to show you what I mean when I talk about trading loss versus a static drawdown. So if you take a look here, all right, let's take a look at the— let's take a look at FundingPips, right? Let's take a look at the 2-step account. In this case, you have a maximum loss, but the moment you click this question mark, it says that it's 10% of the initial account size, which means that if you have a $100K account, the account cannot go below $90,000 at any moment, right? That is the point where you will blow the account. Now, what's different compared— this is known as a static drawdown, right? Which is what you want to look for when it comes to long-term accounts. But with Crypto Fund Trader, for example, with their One Phase account, it says trailing loss, which means that let's say on paper, right, let's use a $100,000 account as an example. Let's say that you have now hit $106,000 on the account, right? You're 6% up. That means that at this point, your stop loss, right, point at which your account is blown, is no longer $94,000 as it was at the It is now $100K, right? 6% from where you currently are, 6% away from the highest point that you've reached within the account. That is what the definition of a trailing stop loss is. When it comes to one-phase challenges, that is perfectly fine, right? Apex works the same way because it's a one-phase challenge. But for a two-phase challenge, you wanna go for a static drawdown. So for example, here it says maximum overall loss. That means that this is a static drawdown. It means that if you get a $100K account, as long as you don't go below $90K, you're gonna be good. So even if you're at $105,000, At that point, the point that you would blow the account is if you go from $105 to $90. So that is still perfectly acceptable. Now that we're getting into 2-phase challenge, you know what, let's talk real quick about just the 1-phase challenge. Let's take a look here. All right, so with a 1-phase challenge, as you can see again, minimum days traded, you need at least 5. And then maximum days traded, indefinite means that you do not have a time limit. It's a one-time fee and the account is not going to expire as long as you do not blow the account up. Lastly, leverage. This is automatically baked in. For example, especially if you use a platform like MetaTrader 5, then leverage tends to be baked in directly. You don't have to like select your leverage as you do when it comes to, you know, a crypto centralized exchange. And so over here, this is just to pass the account, right? Once you get into the live stage, you'll get an 80% profit split, which means that, okay, let's say I make $10,000 on, uh, for this month and I want to withdraw my profits. So instead of getting $10K, I'm going to get $8,000 because that's the profit split. Now when you start, you know, adding this to cart, which I'm going to try now, they will give you the option of, let's take a look here, Right. See, they'll give you the option of adding payouts. Sorry, they'll give you options to add, you know, kind of like extras. Now, you don't need this. Again, 90/10, great for a two-phase account that where you're planning to get serious on. Absolutely amazing. Weekly payouts, chances are you're not going to need this. You're not going to need a payout every single week. It's perfectly fine to wait, you know, a couple weeks, three weeks, one month, which is another thing that you should definitely read about when it comes to the prop firm rules, which is like what is the payout frequency? Some allow. You get monthly payouts, some do daily payouts, some do weekly payouts. They're all gonna be a little bit different. Now, 0 days minimum traded, like, you know, it doesn't take a genius to understand that this is not necessarily needed, right? Chances are you're gonna do things the proper way anyways, and you're not gonna be looking to pass the account in a single day, right? That's why I say when you get to the checkout page, there will be add-on options for you, and chances are you're not gonna need them until, you know, quite later down the stage. Now let's take a look at 2-phase challenges. In the 2-phase challenge, essentially, instead of passing, like for example, when you pass phase 1, it doesn't mean that you are now It means that now you've gone into phase 2 and you kind of repeat, like you've gotta repeat everything again. So in phase 1, like again, your maximum static drawdown is 5%, sorry, 10%. You cannot lose more than 5% in a single day, which means that theoretically speaking, you could risk 5% of the account in a single trade and you'll still be fine, right? Obviously don't keep it at 5%, maybe do 4.5%, right? In case, you know, slippage or whatever, then, you know, if you risk 5%, you might go over. But still, ideally you're not doing this, of course. Still, your profit target in this case is 8%, which means once you hit the profit target, you don't hit your stop loss limit. All right, now you move into phase 2 where you have to trade another 5 days and you have to hit 5%. But when you get into phase 2, your account's gonna get reset. Essentially, you're gonna be at $108,000 and it's gonna get reset and then boom, it's back to $100K. Now you gotta hit $105K without blowing out the stop loss and then boom, now you're at the live stage. Now the beautiful thing about a 2-phase challenge is that yes, it takes longer to pass, but at the same time, because you have a starting drawdown limit, means that you're very unlikely to blow this account up, which is why I would only recommend getting into 2 phase challenges, not at the start where you have, you know, you have to be like, you know, budget conscious. It's like, oh, I only have $100 to spare. Let me get a $10K 2-phase challenge. It's an absolute waste of your time. Even once you pass it, it's like, oh, you've got $10K. Maybe you make a few hundred bucks from this. Why not put that money into 1-phase challenges, pass it, get a payout, and then like, let's say you get a $1,000 payout, maybe you buy 2 $50K, you know, 2-phase challenges. And once you pass those, oh man, you know, $50K is the point where it starts to feel a bit meaningful because, you know, if you get 5% on the month, you get $2.5K. And that for most people, Is an okay, like it's not, it's good money, right? It's not amazing money, but it's enough to pay the bills at the very least or pay rent or a portion of rent depending on what kind of house you're living in. But so you get the idea. And then lastly, we get into the instant funding. This is honestly still a very new thing in regards to, you know, the prop firm kind of industry. So I personally have not tried this out yet. And then lastly, you're gonna see the instant funding, which, you know, in FundingPips, if we come here, it's kind of known as Essentially, you don't need to pass a challenge. In this case, you pay the money and you're basically straight into the live stage. The thing is, A, it's going to cost a lot more money. B, you will have much tighter kind of like maximum loss limits. And 3, potentially your profit share is going to be a lot less as well compared to a proper 1-phase or 2-phase challenge. Which, is that the end of the world? No, it depends on the goal, right? Different types of accounts will be suitable for different people with— will be suitable for different people who are looking to accomplish different goals. But when it comes to the zero step challenge, I would honestly recommend going for the one step just to start because like with the zero— as far as the zero step challenge— oh wow. Whoa. FundingPips is absolutely amazing actually. Look at the zero step challenge. It's a 5% drawdown limit, which if it's one step, it's only 6%. It's only $20 less expense. It's only $20 less. Your drawdown limit is basically 1% away. And take a look at FundingPips. And by the way, FundingPips is one of the more reputable prop firms out there that I would definitely recommend. So this is alongside FTMO, alongside Fiverr. In fact, let's go take a look at FTMO. And in fact, let's go also take a look at Fiverr. These are all kind of like really good ones. And then last one is FundedNext. So basically FundedNext, Apex, and FundingPips are kind of like 3 of the more kind of like transparent prop firms out there in the sense that they are just, they don't really have that bad, like they have really good reputations and especially like they have really good payout transparency. So you're almost never, like you're almost never gonna get fucked over by them. In fact, every single prop firm that you see on my screen right now, You're basically going to have very little challenges of— sorry, you're going to have very little chances where you're going to get screwed over by them for some bullshit reason. But still, let's go talk about them real quick. Now, when it comes to FundedNext, let's take a look here. At this point, you should already kind of like understand what is going on. There is one step, there is two-step, right? And you can just kind of compare and contrast between the both. The profit target of FundedNext is the same as CFT in regards to the two-step challenge where it's 8% and in terms Maximum drawdown limit is 10% as well. And like most of this is the same. So the only difference I think is that, you know, with Fundonex, which is by the way very legit, they have a 15% performance reward. Basically, if you manage to pass the challenge and once you get a couple of payouts, they're gonna give you like a little bit bonus on top of that. I know the wording is really misleading. It kind of makes you feel that, oh, if you pass a challenge, you're gonna get $300 back. But in reality, that's not how it works. They only give you this as a bonus once you get 2 payouts. About. So definitely just click on this and always, always click on this because like the wording that they have on their website can be a bit vague sometimes and they make it like that on purpose because like most people won't care to read. And also like if they can kind of like manage to scam your money and, you know, fantastic. As long as you become a customer and they make money, that's kind of what they're looking for. And obviously even a reputable one will do this. Not a big concern. But yeah. Oh, another thing that you should definitely look about is Another thing that you should definitely look into when it comes to different prop firms. Most of these you'll find within their rules. For example, I will come into Fundanex rules or FTMO rules, and you definitely want to take a look at news trading just because of how big of a part news trading is within the AOC system, where we're looking to primarily take most of our trades when it when we're within the news window, which is an hour before news to the hour after news. Now some prop firms out there, not every, will. For example, if you take a look here, if you happen to take a trade 5 minutes before and after high impact news, only 40% of the profit is counted for, you know, these trades. FundedNext is already amazing because some of these where 5 minutes before, 5 minutes after, they will completely disregard any trade that you end up taking, which is pretty rare nowadays, to be honest. But still, like with FundedNext, this is perfectly fair. And of course, click here to learn more, like learn, like just go into the specifics, right? You don't want to be caught by surprise and then, you know, you end up blaming the prop firm. As reputable as they may be, just take some time to respect their rules and to just at least find out. For example, You know, you might think, oh, what if I have a trade taken an hour before news, but then like once news happens, 1 minute after news, my profit target hits? So let's take a look. Well, this applies to both market open or market closing, or if you end up having a take profit or a stop loss that gets hit during that period, it's only going to count for 40%. In this case, you might think, okay, FundedNext might not be the best option for me based on, you know, this list of available profit levels because I will most likely be trading a lot of news. So in this case, All right, let's move on as an example. But anyways, just taking a look at the Stellar One Step, pretty much the same Stellar Lite. And then you have your instant funding, which might not actually be a terrible idea considering that you're essentially paying $100. You're paying, you're going to be paying a little bit of a premium, right? Compared to the Two Step Challenge. Let's see here. For a $5K account, you're going to pay $150. For $150, like you could get realistically a $15K account, right? So you're basically paying 3 times the amount to basically skip the entire funding process, which is it worth it as a beginner? I don't think so. But if you're experienced enough in this game to where you already know what you're doing, are 100% clear that you have an edge and you know you're profitable, then yeah, this might be worth it because like at that point, more money equals, like more capital equals more money made. But anyways, at this point you should also understand the difference between, for example, in this, in their one-step challenge, I think this is a static drawdown, but again, just read this. Yeah. Okay. So in this case, because it's a maximum draw loss limit and not a trailing loss limit, this is a static drawdown, which for a one-step challenge, again, it's a bit misleading because you're not looking for your one-step challenge to give you Like obviously you will look for multiple payouts with a one-step challenge, but still you are generally going to be a little bit more aggressive on the one-step challenge. So is this the end of the world? No. Is this something that will make you consider, you know, this firm over that firm as a main reason? No, because it's a one-step challenge. Now on the two-step challenge, absolutely, right? You basically don't get any two-step challenges that are trailing drawdowns. For one step, like, does not quite matter. So now you know how to read that. Now let's go into Fiverr, right? Now when it comes to Fiverr, you have Basically, they have a 3-step one, which is actually the thing that kind of got them famous because the 3-step challenge is something that you can get into for very low cost. For example, here for $95, you can pick up a $100K valuation basically. Now I know, I know Apex, you can get it for much cheaper, but this is actually a proper account in the sense that, oh no, they've changed it. All right. Over the years they've changed it. It used to be like a 10% maximum drawdown limit, but still like 3-step challenges, ideally you're going to want to avoid the 3-step challenges because based on what I've explained to you in the past from before, the more time that you're spending, you know, grinding away at prop firm challenges is the more time that you're going to be spending trading without getting any sort of payout from it. So when it comes to prop firm challenges, ideally you don't want to go more than 2-step as a long-term account. And in this case, this would be, all right, maximum loss 10%, pretty standard so far. Now, if you take a look here, once you're actually funded, for Fiverr, they're one of the ones that are known to allow you to scale over time. So for example, every 10% that you make On every 10% that you make on the live funded account, you're going to be eligible for scaling where you know the value of your account is going to increase. Now, and then one step, this is probably going to be some sort of a well stop out level. This is Fiverr's is known to be one of the most reputable prop firms out there in the space, and even their language is a little bit ambiguous. So definitely read into you know what exactly this is. At this point, you should understand what this is. So next up, let's go into FTMO, and this is probably going to be the last. Last one. So FTMO, like hopefully at this point you're very familiar with the language of prop firms. So FTMO right now, what we're looking at is the 2-step challenge. And in this case, you have a maximum daily loss of 10%, minimum trading days of 4 days. Rewards in FTMO's case, they give you 90%, which is a lot better than a CFT because just to give you an idea, if you happen to have a $100K account and you make $10K, 10%, the difference of 10% is literally, you know, $10,000. Sorry, difference of 10% is literally $1,000, which isn't meaningful for most of you, I would assume. Yes, but just getting back into it, maximum daily loss, okay, fair enough. And in terms of the refund, ah, this is also another thing that you can look out for, which is a lot of the competitive prop firms or like the proper prop firms out there, they will often offer you some sort of a refund for passing the challenge. In FTMO's case, whatever money that you spend on the account, for example, let's say I spend €1,000 on the €200K account. Once I pass the challenge, right, if I don't blow the account up, if I pass the challenge, I get back the €1,000 that I put into the account. So essentially your downside risk becomes nothing because that's just how prop firms work, right? Magical. Just moving on to the One Step Challenge, taking a look. And in this case, like, yeah, for the most part, it's exactly the same. Now, one of the other things that you will kind of see is with prop firms, some prop firms, case in point, like we've only now seen it on FTMO, is known as a consistency rule, or in FTMO, they call it a best day rule. Essentially, your most profitable day, which means must not account for for more than your 50% of your positive days profit. Essentially what this means is that let's say my average win is $500. Now, if I happen to get a trade that is like a $5,000 winner, like that trade is probably not going to be eligible for some sort of payout because in that case, like I might've just got lucky on that trade. Especially when it comes to, you know, passing a challenge, I can't just, you know, win 3 $250 trades and then win one $3K one and then I'll pass it, right? Not every prop firm does this, but FTMO is probably one of the most reputable ones out there and they do things properly. So in this way, they're just encouraging like, you know, good disciplined trading. Now, a lot of prop firms do not have this rule, so don't be afraid. Like, only in the case of FTMO, that is the case. But yeah, in terms of the One Step Challenge, you know, you have a 10% profit target, your maximum loss is 10%. Now, this is actually really competitive. Outside of the price that you pay for the account, which is relatively high for, you know, for most competitive prop firms out there, the actual rules of this One Step challenge is actually quite favorable to you as a trader. So if you're looking for a long-term one-step challenge, FTMO might be the way to go. And it also just so happens that they give you a lot of options in terms of trading pairs, which by the way, I completely forgot to mention this inside the— which by the way, I completely forgot to mention this inside the actual module. But the one very important thing that you should definitely look out for is the trading assets that you are allowed to trade when you sign up for that prop firm. For For example, with FTMO, go into, you know, for example, it's quite easy to find where with FTMO they will show you exactly what tickers that you can trade. For example, here you have most of the major euro, you have most of the major crypto pairs, you have most of the major forex pairs, you have most of the major indices where you have NASDAQ, you have the S&P 500, crypto, you even have crypto, right? And then lastly, you have commodities, right? So basically FTMO is something that covers all grounds where you have oil, you have gold, you have the futures, you have the indices, you Forex. That is not the case for something like Apex, for example, where Apex is a futures firm. So Apex, you're not able to trade Forex, like at least not the conventional kind of way of Forex. So when it comes to, you know, let's— I just did a quick Google search, by the way, Apex Trader Funding tradable assets. What this tells me is that it specializes in futures prop trading. Now what that means is that yes, you're still going to be able to trade currency futures, but for example, when I go onto TradingView Right now, usually you would look at forex as you know euro USD. Well, not in the case of well, not in the case of Apex because in Apex you would only be allowed to trade this other chart called Euro futures, right? Euro FX futures. Take a look here. You're looking at various FX. Now, if you take a look here, they have a wide variety of futures products across CME, CBOT, New York Next, and Connex, right? CME, right? Futures from CME. Now. Is this a relatively similar chart compared to euro? Yes, but as you can see here, the euro futures are currently trading at 1.151 while euro USD is trading at 1.147. So this is technically like when you're trading euro futures, you're technically trading futures, you're not trading forex. Okay, so just understand that small little difference. So if you're looking to specifically trade forex, you wanna make sure that whatever, you know, whatever prop firm that you go on, right? Let's take a look at FundingPips. For example, now that we take a look at FundingPips, you'll see that, all right, they allow forex, they allow gold, and by the way, In terms of Apex Trader Funding, the like chart on gold is also different, right? Because you have XAU/USD, which is what we traditionally known as gold, and you have GC, which is gold futures, right? Similar, you're gonna have a roughly similar chart, but still there are slight differences between the both. So depending on what you're going for, that is also a very key consideration when it comes to whatever platform that you're going for. Now FTMO, Fiverr, even CFT, Crypto Fund Trader, like as long as you're going for the MetaTrader 5 option, which by the way, if you end up choosing Bybit, it means that you are fully limited to just crypto. So I would highly recommend, unless you are getting this specifically for crypto, I would recommend the MetaTrader 5 because at the very least, this still gives you the option of trading forex pairs and also like indices or futures or just anything in between. So let's take a look at Crypto Fund Trader trading assets. And yeah, let's take a look here. You have cryptocurrencies, you have forex, right? When they say forex and not futures, like there's a difference between forex and currency futures. If it's forex, you can trade EUR/USD, GBP/USD, like your traditional forex pairs. You have commodities, which basically refers to oil and all of that stuff. And you have indices, which refers to NASDAQ, S&P 500, the Nikkei 100, the GER40 or whatever. And stocks, right? You even have stocks, which means you can trade stuff like Tesla and whatever. Now, with leverage, it is again automatically calculated if you're using a platform like MetaTrader 5. And yeah, that's it. That is about it. Not gonna lie, this video has took a lot longer than I expected, but just there just ended up being a lot more to cover in regards to prop firms. But hopefully this kind of debunks every question that you could potentially have in regards to prop firms: how to pass it, how to fail it, how to get profits, get payouts, blah blah blah blah, how to navigate this very complex, very you know jargony kind of world of prop firms. Which by the way, now that I've done this explanation, hopefully you start to see how easy. But still, I'm gonna go take a break now. But still, I hope you enjoyed this video. Feel free to just shoot me a chat on WhatsApp, on anywhere, if you have any questions regarding this. And I guess the final question that you might have at this point is what prop firm would I recommend? Again, Apex would be the first option if you're just starting out. You can never go wrong with any of the 5 that I've just shown you there though. Just compare and contrast as to what assets you're trading, news, the profit splits, and even the budget, because they're all gonna have different prices. Which also tends to reflect the quality of the prop firm. And do not be afraid to experiment with a little bit more, you know, new up-and-coming kind of like prop firms out there, because chances are you're gonna get a lot more competitive rates. Like just some ones that I can think of is, you know, stuff like Tradify, you have upcommers.com. Of course, I'm recording this as of the time, you know, in 2026. These are some of the options that you have. You also have stuff like GoFundTheTrader, like just slightly aggressive ones, slightly up-and-coming ones. But either way, whatever that you get a good deal on, as long as it's transparent, as long as it has a good reputation for, you know, not scamming people. And as long as, yeah, like it never hurts, especially once you have Tradingsa, you're not really losing much time because you're gonna be trading anyways. You're just gonna buy an account from there and link it to Tradingsa. If you pass it, great. And see how, you know, they approve your passing or not. And if you get a payout, great. See if they approve it or not and see how long it takes for the payout to get into your account. And ultimately you might just end up, you know, discovering a little bit of a hidden gem. Which is always great when it comes to prop firms because at some point you're going to kind of come to realize that with all of these prop firms, they have a maximum funding rate of, you know, anywhere between $200,000 to maybe $500,000. In the event that one day you become a world-class trader and you would like to get to $10 million in funding, you're not going to be able to achieve it with just the list that I've given you. Chances are you're going to need to experiment with different other prop firms. And yeah, that's one thing that— and yeah, again, just remember, prop firms are just a tool. Like when used right, it can achieve some miraculous effects on your trading journey. And when used wrong, you're just going to be continually banging your head against the wall and, you know, not really seeing any sort of progress from it. So treat it as it is, it's just a tool, it's just a business transaction. And ultimately go make some money with prop firms because now you have the tools and all the knowledge. Cheers.