I made $1.5M prop firm trading and learned this

Over the last couple of years, I've withdrawn more than $1.5 million from prop firms. The thing that surprises people when I tell them is that they think I'm good at predicting the market, but honestly, I'm not. I'm actually wrong constantly. And what got me here was six lessons. Most of them don't have anything to do with the charts at all.

wrong constantly. And what got me here was six lessons. Most of them don't have anything to do with the charts at all.

It's the boring stuff that nobody talks about. One of them took me the longest to learn, and it lost me the most amount of money. So, I'll get to that one in the middle, but let's start with the first one. The day that I stopped trying to be right.

first one. The day that I stopped trying to be right. Early on, you treat every single trade like I want to be right. I need to be right this trade. I want to be a market genius. I want to make

Early on, you treat every single trade like, I want to be right. I need to be right this trade. I want to be a market genius. I want to make infinite money trading on prop firms. Well, it's a good approach to have if you're doing it on a live account because your whole goal there should be to optimize for your profit in the long run and reduce your risk of ruin. But if you're on a prop firm, you want to basically multiply your chance of survival because if you never reach the max drawdown, then your account consistently grows based on your edge over time. So your goal on the prop firm should be to, instead of maximize your profit, reduce your chance of hitting the max loss. Consequently, that will reduce your profit. But if you stop hitting the max loss, then your account will eventually get exponential growth.

you're on a prop firm, you want to basically multiply your chance of survival because if you never reach the max draw down, then your account consistently grow based on your edge over time. So your goal on the prop firm

The market doesn't pay you for being right on prop firms. It pays you when your edge works over time. And for your edge to work over time, you can't hit a max drawdown. If there's a few trades in a row that are bad and it wipes you out, well then you never have the opportunity to experience that exponential growth that other traders would get that never hit their max loss.

The market doesn't pay you for being right on prop firms. It pays you when your edge works over time. And for your edge to work over time, you can't hit a max draw down. If there's a few trades

To be honest, survival doesn't really mean winning. It just means not losing. A bunch of my accounts as well haven't won. They hit max drawdown every once in a while. That's totally normal. I do have the bankroll now to replace them.

To be honest, survival doesn't really mean winning. It just means not losing. A bunch of my accounts as well haven't won. They hit max draw down every once in a while. That's totally normal. I do have the bankroll now to replace them.

But early on when I was starting, I would take a much lower risk approach because I needed my accounts to survive so that my edge on prop firms could survive for the infinite future. Here's an example of when I was wrong a bunch, but I was able to survive and make a ton of money because of my good risk management. In this example, I believe the fair price was here before the market open, and I was going to try shorting all of this and this all the way down here. On average, I'm expecting it to go down. So, I'm expecting to make money in the long run, but my entries were not the best. So, if you look at this with my 50 point stop loss, I took multiple entries. So, here's the first one. I lost 50 points. Here was my second one. I lost another 50 points even instantly. Finally, my third entry, I did not lose. And then it came all the way down here to give me 250 points or so in profit. And [music] this is why it's so important to survive on prop firms because I knew I had the direction right. The price action just swept me out twice before going to my take-profit. I lost 50, lost 50, then won 250. And when you add that up, that should be 150 points times three contracts, which is $9,000. All because I had good size [music] and risk management. Now, me telling you your account has to survive is just one thing. So, I'll get into something that is going to tell you if your account is actually going to survive or not.

but I was able to survive and make a ton of money because of my good risk management. In this example, I believe the fair price was here before the market open, and I was going to try shorting all of this and this all the

Survive on its own is literally just a buzzword. It doesn't mean anything unless you're able to do it. And it's not really your strategy that [music] enables you to survive. It's something else. You need to stop watching the money and start watching the process. Maybe you're in a trade, you're up a few hundred, you're down a few hundred, your hands hovering over the exit button, thinking, should I exit this trade early? You know, it's not right to exit early, but maybe you'll do it anyways. When you watch the dollars on a chart going up and down very quickly, the dollars are what's going to make your decision, not the math. When you watch the process instead of the dollars, then you're watching the math. You're watching the setup. Did I take it right? Is the math in my favor? How is the expected value going to treat my funded account? How is this going to impact my pass rate? So you're watching the overall process. You're not watching the dollar amount of an individual trade because that's going to force you to exit early, make bad decisions, maybe not go for optimal profit targets, definitely not have an optimal stop-loss size, especially on prop firms. This is the first crack in the myth of prediction. Good traders are not watching the money at all. All they have to do is execute their process time and time again and let the math play out in their favor in the long run. Here's something I used to do that was actually really bad on prop firms. So, I enter off this huge displacement for about 100 points back towards a fair price, which is the pre-open price as usual. And when it gets down here, it's about halfway to my take profit. But when I see this wick coming up right here, I'm just going to find a reason to exit. I just told myself, you know, there's some consolidation over here at about that price of this wick, and it's starting to retrace on me. So, I'm just going to exit right now. Well, that's not good.

multiple entries. So, here's the first one. I lost 50 points. Here was my second one. I lost another 50 points even instantly. Finally, my third entry, I did not lose. And then it came all the way down here to give me 250 points or

Now, what I actually do is I don't convince myself that I need to exit if it starts going against me. I convince myself that in the long run, I have good risk management and I have a slight edge with my bias towards fair price. So, I'm just going to let the trade play out.

won 250. And when you add that up, that should be 150 points times three contracts, which is $9,000. All because I had good size [music] and risk management. Now, me telling you your account has to survive is just one

And you see, literally one minute after, I won instead of exiting early and missing out on probably $3,000. Now, on that same day, here's some examples of good trades that would have lost money, which is totally normal. This candle was a good strong displacement and breakup structure. So, I bought at the very top and I pretty much lost instantly, but it was still a standard continuation trade that follows my strategy and I have to understand in the long run, these trades are going to work out. So, I just need to keep placing them with good risk.

Survive on its own is literally just a buzz word. It doesn't mean anything unless you're able to do it. And it's not really your strategy that [music] enables you to survive. It's something else. You need to stop watching the

Then, once you're able to stop watching the dollars and start focusing on the process, then that leads to the third lesson, the one that took me the longest to learn and the most amount of money to learn. Expectancy is more important than win rate. And you need to size to your prop firm evaluation math. Some people will choose a high win rate strategy because they think maybe it works well with their personality. They don't like to lose. So, I'm going to do a low risk-to-reward and I'm going to have a very high win rate. Well, on prop firms, if you could choose between a low win rate or a high win rate, high risk-to-reward, low risk-to-reward, one of those must be optimal because given the prop firm rule set, you have to have one optimal risk-to-reward going forward. So, someone doing the wrong one is automatically not optimal. And you might be thinking, well, it works with my strategy. It works with my psychology. Maybe it does. I'll give you that. But in terms of the math, what you're giving up by not doing the optimum one is way more than you'd expect in terms of expected value. Way more. So, what doesn't really matter is how often you're winning, how often you're losing. It matters your average win per trade. Basically, your expectancy over the long run when trading on prop firms. A setup that wins more than half the time can make you a bunch of money. A setup that wins less than half the time can also make you a bunch of money. So, stop focusing on the risk-to-reward. Stop focusing on I need to trade a one to two. All of that is completely made up because it's going to be tied inversely proportionately to your win rate. Your win rate to risk reward is inverse. So, you need to find which one works on the prop firm and then try that.

early, but maybe you'll do it anyways. When you watch the dollars on a chart going up and down very quickly, the dollars are what's going to make your decision, not the math. When you watch the process instead of the dollars, then

you're watching the math. You're watching the setup. Did I take it right? Is the math in my favor? How is the expected value going to treat my funded account? How is this going to impact my pass rate? So you're watching the

overall process. You're not watching the dollar amount of an individual trade because that's going to force you to exit early, make bad decisions, maybe not go for an optimal profit targets, definitely not have an optimal stop-loss size, especially on prop firms. This is

the first crack in the myth of prediction. Good traders are not watching the money at all. All they have to do is execute their process time and time again and let the math play out in their favor in the long run. Here's

something I used to do that was actually really bad on prop firms. So, I enter off this huge displacement for about 100 points back towards a fair price, which is the pre-open price as usual. And when it gets down here, it's about halfway to

my takerit. But when I see this wick coming up right here, I'm just going to find a reason to exit. I just told myself, you know, there's some consolidation over here at about that price of this wick, and it's starting to

retrace on me. So, I'm just going to exit right now. Well, that's not good.

Now, what I actually do is I don't convince myself that I need to exit if it starts going against me. I convinced myself that in the long run, I have good risk management and I have a slight edge

with my bias towards fair price. So, I'm just going to let the trade play out.

And you see, literally 1 minute after I won instead of exiting early and missing out on probably $3,000. Now, on that same day, here's some examples of good trades that would have lost money, which is totally normal. This candle was a

good strong displacement and breakup structure. So, I bought at the very top and I pretty much lost instantly, but it was still a standard continuation trade that follows my strategy and I have to understand in the long run, these trades

are going to work out. So, I just need to keep placing them with good risk.

Then, once you're able to stop watching the dollars and start focusing on the process, then that leads to the third lesson, the one that took me the longest to learn and the most amount of money to learn. Expectancy is more important than

win rate. And you need to size to your prop firm evaluation math. Some people will choose a high win rate strategy because they think maybe it works well with their personality. They don't like to lose. So, I'm going to do a low

riskto-reward and I'm going to have a very high win rate. Well, on prop firms, if you could choose between a low win rate or a high win rate, high risk to reward, low riskto-reward, one of those must be optimal because given the prop

firm rule set, you have to have one optimal risk-to-reward going forward. So, someone doing the wrong one is automatically not optimal. And you might be thinking, well, it works with my strategy. It works with my psychology.

Maybe it does. I'll give you that. But in terms of the math, what you're giving up by not doing the optimum one is way more than you'd expect in terms of expected value. Way more. So, what doesn't really matter is how often

you're winning, how often you're losing. It matters your average win per trade. Basically, your expectancy over the long run when trading on prop firms. A setup that wins more than half the time can make you a bunch of money. A setup that

wins less than half the time can also make you a bunch of money. So, stop focusing on the risk-to-reward. Stop focusing on I need to trade a one, a one to two. All of that is completely made up because it's going to be tied

inversely proportionately to your win rate. Your win rate to risk reward is inverse. So, you need to find which one works on the prop firm and then try that. Just my personal advice, I would say try and trade a 1 to 1.5 at least

with my strategy if you try mine. The reason for that is the prop firm valuation has $2,000 of max loss, $3,000 of profit target. So that in itself is a 1 to 1.5. Now, if you're going to separate that up into multiple trades,

then as your equity curve goes up and down, you can have a solid amount of losses before you hit your max loss and also not cap your upside. This is the part that cost me the most when I first

started out on prop firms. Position sizing should not be appealing. And by position sizing, I mean contracts and how large your takeprofit and your stop loss is. There must exist a statistically optimal size for your take-profit, for your contracts, and for

your stop loss in terms of [music] dollars. Anyone that wants to put their stop loss below a previous low, their take-profit at a previous high already, that's not optimal because it's a proper environment. And for proper environments, using a static X% [music]

of risk for your account is much more optimal than doing a non-static discretionary based on what the market's showing you. In no way should you ever have a discretionary stop loss. Every single one should be static. You tie it

to the evaluation math based on your strategy and your win rate. Whichever risk-to-reward is going to give you the highest chance of passing your evaluation. That is how you decide x% of stop-loss, x% as take profit. And then

it should be the same for every single trade you take on an eval ever. Pretty much the number of times you can be wrong in a row gives you a good amount of trades before you hit your max draw

down. And that should help you size on your positions. As soon as I sized to that number, that's when the accounts stopped blowing up. I got my first payouts and then exponential growth happened after that. I lost way more

accounts to bad sizing than bad trades. So, if I kept doing the same exact trades just improve the sizing, my prediction or my win rate would stay the same, which is fine, but my survival would become exponentially better. Now,

unfortunately, in a perfect world, you do follow the perfect math, but again, we're all human and people do deviate from optimal strategy at times. To pass a trading evaluation, you need to hit plus 3,000 before hitting minus2,000.

This in and of itself is a 1 to 1.5 risk-to-reward. So, if you section your trades out by 1 to 1.5, then it's going to be much easier for you to hit the plus $3,000 profit target before hitting

the trailing draw down. This is a simulation giving me a $500 stop loss and assuming a $4,000 draw down. It takes eight in a row to blow the account. [music] And when you simulate this 6,000 times, then 100 trades,

you're pretty much 50/50 to blow an account. If you're doing $500 risk over a 100 trades, then it is pretty much statistically guaranteed that you're going to blow at least one account with a $500 risk per trade. So, if you have

an edge, you want to risk small per trade. So, that way, every time you lose, you are getting close to the max draw down, but it is not going to lose so many in a row where you can have

statistically that likely of a losing streak. This also was simulated on a 40% win rate. If you made it this far in the video, I hope you're now convinced that the charts and your strategy are definitely not the most important part

when trading on prop firms. And in my mentorship, risk management is the main part of what I go over. I go over statistically optimal risk in terms of take-profit, stop-loss, pretty much everything for your funded account based on what prop firm you're trading on,

what balance your account is, if it's an eval funded balance, draw down, pretty much everything involved. There must exist a statistically optimal risk, take profit, and that is what I do for you in the mentorship. It's an application, so

it is small on purpose, but there is a link in the description if you are interested. If not, here's the fourth lesson. Doing nothing is technically still taking a position. You're taking a position in which you don't want to

trade the market. Now, it's not like an actual position. It's more of a mental and emotional position of I'm not going to trade right now. If your setup's not there, then just don't [music] take it.

Don't force anything. Forcing things is bad because it's going to decrease your win rate and it's going to decrease your survival. Definitely no need to force things, especially when there's 252 trading days in a year. There is so much

opportunity to trade. You always have the next day. You always have the next setup. Hopefully, your strategy works in the long run. So, you don't get FOMO out of missing a trade and then you try and make it up by taking something you

shouldn't have. The trades that you don't take protect the money you made. The same way the good trades made that money. So, some of my edge also comes from refusing to take bad trades. I know a lot of people do take bad trades and

it's a little bit more complicated than just telling yourself, I'm not going to take a bad trade [music] today. You have to have your trading plan set up before you even touch the charts and you need to make sure your trading plan is proper

specific. So, you know, if I take this bad trade, here's how it's going to impact my expected value. And I can just see that's statistically horrible because of how much money I'm going to lose by pressing this button. There's no

way I'm going to press the button, no matter how angry I feel at the charts.

Now, this is probably one of the rules that I do break. I do like to force trades just because I have so many accounts. I'm trying to get through all of them every day. And I feel like I

need speed. I need to make as much money as possible per month before prop firms eventually die. So, I do get a little bit too aggressive with my trades.

There's nothing specific you can do about it. It's mostly just yourself. You have to battle with the person sitting in the chair trading on the charts. It's no battle with the charts, no battle with the prompts, just a battle within

yourself. Now, here's what some people might consider a pretty strong trade. Taking a short off this displacement as it's continuing down since the opening candle was red. However, the fair price is the pre-open price right here. And if

you short here, that means you're trading away from it. Likewise, maybe there's a chance to buy here, but you're buying away from fair price, which is something you shouldn't do. Also, if the price is right here, possibly even too

close to fair price to take a trade as long as it's following your risk management since again, it should be static. So, there's lots of times where trades appear that might seem enticing to take, but then again, if you're not

trading towards fair price, then your bias is wrong and that's going to cost you money. Now, here's a day where I basically took no trades. I did take the continuation, but I waited patiently for basically a full hour for it to break

structure. And this entire move up, there was no structure being broken, so I just stayed away. And that brings me to the fifth lesson. Your psychology is the strategy. Now, I know I made another video where I said I don't believe

psychology is real. Kind of. As long as you're following a step-by-step trading plan, then psychology isn't real as long as you do it step by step. Now, I guess there's a little bit of psychology in following that. But once you line it up,

you see just how profitable you could be as long as you followed it. And any psychology leading you away from that is kind of just you being dumb. No offense.

It's guaranteed to make you money in the long run as long as you don't do certain things like tilting, trying to win stuff back, FOMO, overtrading. So, if there's a difference between you having zero dollars to your name and you having

$100,000 to your name, literally the only difference between those two is your trading psychology, which is pretty much deviating from your trading plan.

So, just think about the net result of zero versus $100,000 to your name. and then convince yourself next time that you want to place a trade that you know is out of fear, FOMO, greed, whatever, that okay, I'm choosing to be worth $0

today instead of $100,000 in the future. You're actively making that choice every time you deviate from your trading plan, which should already be set up step by step for trading on proper so you know literally exactly how much money you're

expecting to make with every single trade in the long run. Also will help convince you how statistically bad it is to place tilting trades. Now, I guess I'm not immune to this. Nobody really is fully, but there are definitely some

things that you can do to make it less bad if you ever go on Tilt. For example, if you're going to Tilt, at least just gamble some evaluations. They're probably worth onetenth of your funded account. So, if you automatically want

to save 10 times as much money, go gamble some evals. Worst case, you'll break even, right? Here's an example of a day where I was kind of FOMO and I missed out on a win. Fair price was here

from the pre-open. It dropped quickly and there's literally one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight wicks and unfortunately I bought during three of them. So I lost my account that I was supposed to be trading and then I missed

the inevitable perfect setup with the break of structure. That's why you should save your accounts for the best setups. Now this brings me to the last lesson. It is pretty boring, but it is what made everything else work together.

A trading journal is what can make you profitable in the long run. Now, I never thought I would hear myself saying those words because I didn't really agree with journaling your trades. Now that I've taught so many people trading, I

realized journaling was not for me, but it is 100% for other people. And in terms of journaling, there's a few things you can do. The most important one is to track your win rate with your risk-to-reward, which should be static.

You should not change your risk-to-reward ever. It should be static. Track how much you spend on evals. Track how much you're getting in payouts. Track your chance of getting a payout on funded accounts. And track the size of a payout on your funded

accounts. So once you start tracking the key metrics that is really a good type of journaling so you know okay I am supposed to be profitable based on the back test that I ran in a properform environment. Also if you ever have

psychological mistakes you go on tilt fomo greed whatever definitely write it down just so you don't repeat it in the future. It should help a little bit. As soon as you're able to prove to yourself with your journal and you're back

testing that you know your strategy is going to be profitable in the long run on prop firms with a predetermined risk management that you never stray from.

then all you have to do is just keep implementing it, keep scaling it, and then you'll eventually achieve exponential growth. So, as you probably noticed, none of the things that I've talked about in this video are about predicting the market. [music] That's

pretty much just a strategy thing, and it's not the most important part when you're trading on prop firms. The $1.5 million I made from prop firms is not proof that I know where the market's going. It's proof that I can survive the

prop firm environment. The traders that don't make it on prop firms are not worse traders than me. They lose to themselves, to the fear, and to bad math. Because prop firms are supposed to be formed where live traders would 100%

fail. So now that you know how I got here, I hope I have convinced you that it is way better to reduce your chance of blowing accounts than it is to fix your strategy or fix your win rate. If

you want me to look at your trades instead of you having to learn it the hard way, then the link is in the description. I keep it small and I actually look at your trades and I compare them to mine. And if you're not

there yet, then start with the boring one. Journal. Make sure that you know your exact win rate, your exact risk-to-reward, your exact expectancy, payout chance, payout size, and then you'll know before you even spend a scent on prop firms. You'll know if your

approach is profitable. Then all you have to do is follow it. Do that for a month, and I promise you'll teach yourself pretty much half of what I just told you. I'll see you in the next one.