Preface Waking up at your usual hour of 4 am EST, you jump from your bed to check the futures market. Down twelve handles. The news overnight is overblown, in your humble opinion, and the market is reacting too harshly. Things should stabilize by 10:30 am EST. Your equities positions are manageable. Most aren’t correlated to the market, and you sold calls against your SPY position. No reason to panic and nothing to do unless you see weakness (down another 4 or 5). Your plan is clear. Add to any positions in individual names down more than two standard deviations and stay calm. If the market continues selling into the close and ends at the lows, you will short some e-minis as a hedge. All your decisions have already been made, and you are confident in your thesis. How much capital do you have at risk? Zero. All of your trading is simulated. Your dream is to become a Portfolio Manager and manage client funds or become a Day trader and manage your own wealth through a family office. Before that happens, you have to prove yourself. To any potential investors. To your family and friends. To your significant other who thinks you’ve gone mad. Most importantly, to yourself. The purpose of this eBook is to discuss signing up for a simulated trading account (using a service like Score Priority Try2BeFunded in an attempt to obtain funding for your trading and test your strategies. Things to Note About Simulated Trading Take The Simulated Trading As Seriously As Possible. Try and forget that it is a simulated account, and nothing happens if you lose. You can blow up your funded account as easily as you blow up a simulated account. So, when you open a simulated account, forget that it is a “play money” account. Treat it as a funded account and your real funds. Your trades should be calculated, and risk/rewards carefully planned. Every trade is being watched and analyzed by your company’s risk department to decide who is the best candidate for live capital. Focus and confidence are key for any trader but are most important for neophytes. You will make plenty of mistakes along the way. Make those mistakes without the consequences of real capital loss. When you do trade live, you should be trading a SPC Try2BeFunded account account so that any losses won’t affect your lifestyle. If you trade recklessly with your simulated account, you will do the same with your funded account too. If you take positions with your simulated account while there is no clear trading setup, you will do the same with your funded account. If you develop the habit of over-trading with your simulated account, you will do the same with your funded account too. Bottom Line: Whatever habits, routines, or patterns you adopt while trading the demo account will follow you when trading live funds. Form good habits from the beginning. They will pay nice dividends later. Make Sure To Keep On Trading In Simulation Then Trade Your Firm Funded Account Before Adding Your Personal Funds. The terms you will receive as a retail customer will always be better than a firm funded account: 100% payout on your profits The ability to increase your size and buying power based your on your account balance Setting your own risk limits and liquidations It doesn’t make sense to abandon your simulated/earned funded account and trade with your personal funds before you are able to profit consistently. If you were that talented with that much real market experience, you never would have signed up for the sim account in the first place. The market isn’t any different in a retail account, but your losses are certainly real. Real enough to end your trading career before you get started. The Takeaway: You were smart enough to test your strategies in a simulated environment and talented enough to pass the various stages to receive funding. Be wise enough to know that a few profitable months doesn’t make a successful trader. You need to see the entire market cycle and survive a few downturns before you are ready to take off the virtual “training wheels”. Take the gift you were given. Your Simulated Account And Your Funded Account Should Have The Same Buying Power. Services like Score Priority Prop (scorepriority.com) do this for you, but not all do. If your funded account is set to be $100,000 after passing the hurdles, don’t use a $10,000,000 demo account. This helps you respect your simulated account exactly as you would your funded account. Although you pay monthly for a program to trade the simulator in the hopes of receiving a funded account, resist the urge to treat the simulator as free money. You are spending your time on it. You are building your experience and discipline with it. The value of the time you are spending on “learning the ropes” has monetary value. The old adage of “Time is Money” couldn’t be more relevant. Conclusion Until recently, the only way to test your mettle in the market was to risk your hard-earned, borrowed, or inherited money and hope it worked. Almost every great trader has a story where they had a few successful (lucky) months at the beginning of their career before blowing up their trading account by averaging down on the wrong losing trade. With technological advances, new traders are able to trade in a live environment without risking their own capital and earn funding from firms that are risk-seeking and searching for the next Ray Dalio or Steve Cohen. The markets are largely zero-sum, with the most successful traders and firms reaping the vast reward. Don’t enter the game until you are ready, and when you feel you are, trade with someone else’s cash. A Public Service Announcement from your Friends at Score Priority Sincerely, The Team at Score Priority Toll-Free + 1-855-274-4934 Domestic + 1-646-558-3232 Info@scorepriority.com Copyright © ScorePriority.com Score Priority Inc., Member FINRA & SIPC, NFA