Funding Traders does not tolerate any sort of gambling strategies that try to gamify the evaluation model. The essence of the evaluation model is to find traders with a profitable strategy and disciplined risk management.
Some traders meet the profit targets, loss limits, and other objectives. But the real question is how did they do it? Was it through trading or gambling?
Over the years, the industry has been flooded with users that use high risk strategies to aim for one payout - where the same strategy causes them to fail their funded account the very next day.
This is not the community of traders we want to build at Funding Traders.
Instead, we want to build a trader pool that is disciplined and focused on refining their winning strategy.
What are gambling strategies?
❌ Overleveraged Trades
❌ Overleveraged Trades
While we have friendly leverage settings for various symbol groups, this does not mean that a trader should allocate over 30% of their margin in one trade idea. Yes, there are times where a setup looks promising, but it doesn’t mean that you should allocate a large sum of your margin and give up your flexibility.
What happens when you allocate 50% of your margin on one trade idea? This gives you no room to react to the market and even allocate more to another trade idea that can be a winner. Protecting capital and being able to be flexible is a key factor to risk management.
Overleveraging also exposes you to violate the daily loss limit and max loss limit much faster than if spread between different trade ideas.
❌ Overexposure
❌ Overexposure
Just because you open a trade on multiple symbols does not mean you’re not overexposed. As a trader, you must take into account the correlation of the symbols. For example, if you have three positions on different instruments risking 1% on each, you might be actually risking 3% total on a one-directional bet since they’re correlated.
Another example of overexposure is when a trader uses over 50% of margin on highly correlated trading ideas. In this case, free margin drops significantly faster whenever the market goes the other way.
❌ One-sided Trading
❌ One-sided Trading
This has become very popular in the world of prop firms. Where “traders” speedrun the evaluation process by placing one-sided bets just to pass the evaluation quickly.
For example, traders would stack up buy positions (in one trade or in multiple trades) on a singular instrument or highly correlated instrument and wait for it to either hit the profit target, loss limits, or a sizable loss.
We asked traders why they do this, and they tell us, “It’s only in the evaluation phase, I will take the funded stage more seriously”. This is equivalent to not taking your medical board exam seriously and telling people that you’ll be a serious doctor.
Real traders take the evaluation like a test to showcase their strategy and risk management skills. They don’t rush the funded stage because they will get there anyways by following their trading plan.
❌ Account Rolling/Stacking
❌ Account Rolling/Stacking
This is another subset of users that think they can get away with spam purchasing evaluations and risking big on all of them until they eventually get a sizable payout.
This practice is not tolerated at FundingTraders. There are many times we see traders practice this and post large payout certificates on social media fooling the public that they are the best traders in the world. Meanwhile, they’re just gambling and taking advantage of the evaluation model.
We are not in the business to help traders fake their trading skills for public glory. Instead, we're the training ground for real traders to learn real skills.
Trading is a career built with strong discipline and continuous learning. We are here to help you get there and cut the time to become a professional trader. Our risk management team is designed to make you a better trader everyday - to learn a skill that you can take with you everywhere and extract value from the markets.