Articles
The part nobody explains
before you pay the fee.
Drawdown mechanics, position sizing and the rules that actually close prop accounts. Written because we learned all of it the expensive way, and none of it is proprietary. You can apply every word of this to somebody else's strategies, or to your own.
Nobody knows where the next bar goes
Intraday price is very close to unpredictable, and no amount of screen time fixes that. What is left once you accept it is a short list: pick the conditions, follow the rules, manage the trade. That list is the whole job.
Read → 7 min DrawdownYour winner tightens your loser’s leash
On most prop accounts the drawdown limit follows your unrealized profit up and never comes back down. Here is what that costs, in dollars, on a trade that ends flat.
Read → 6 min RiskDiversification does not do what you think inside one account
Splitting risk across uncorrelated strategies is real and large. Adding strategies to an account is a different thing entirely, and it makes the drawdown worse.
Read → 8 min Account sizingHow much of your allowance should one trade risk?
Take an unusually good strategy and size it at 30% of the account's allowance. Its expected life is about sixty trades. The same strategy at 5% survives essentially forever. Nothing changed but the sizing.
Read → 5 min RiskOne equity engine and one gold engine. Per firm. Maximum.
Independent strategies will eventually take opposite sides of the same market. At one firm that is hedging, and the penalty is usually closure and forfeiture — even though you did nothing wrong.
Read → 6 min ETDThe trade was up $458. It closed at $46.
Everyone optimizes the entry. The money is usually lost after the trade is already winning. Why we judge our own engines on what they keep, not what they make.
Read → 7 min Account sizingTen accounts can still be one bet
Two things we could not find written down anywhere, after going looking for how serious traders actually construct a multi-firm book. Plus four problems we have not solved.
Read → 7 min Account sizingA full-size contract is ten micros. The results are not.
ES is exactly ten MES. That does not make an ES backtest equal to the MES backtest times ten, and the size of the gap depends on what triggers your strategy.
Read → 5 minThese articles teach you to audit a strategy vendor — including this one. The numbers behind everything we sell are in the backtest explorer, trade by trade, and the forward test shows how they have tracked since.