APEX Investing had a quick New Year’s sale that I took advantage of. But this time, instead of buying five or ten trials, I decided to buy one at at time. So, instead of rising 5 x $17 by grouping accounts, I decided I’d by one account and YOLO it. That is, risk the max size on every trade with the goal of passing it quickly. If I failed, so what? I was only risking $17. If I passed, then I could purchase a performance account (PA) for only $85 – which is $20 cheaper than normal. I ended up passing two and losing two – not too bad.
But the same approach in a PA account will not work. For starters, APEX has rules for both draw down and max percentage profits in a single day. So, even if blowing an $85 account by risking too much is palatable, the rules kind of prohibit it.
I now have three $50k PA accounts. I am determined to grow them slowly and use them to add accounts with each payout. It is really simple if you are patient. Yes, there will be losses. But, with a reasonable trade size and trade plan, it can happen.
I had one account before the sale. I lost $800 on the first day. I was up $500 on the second day, but ended up losing $700. If you do the math, I only had $1000 left in drawdown.
Then APEX had it’s sale and I worked on adding two accounts. Of course I wanted more, but I need to be careful of the cost of paying for the PA’s when I passed. So I decided to limit myself to just two for now. I can always add account with a payout. In fact, there’s no need to wait for a sale. After all, what is a total cost of $175 without a sale compared to $105 with a sale when compared to fairly easy payouts of $500 every eight days once a profit threshold has been met? I mean, why wait for a sale if you’re good and patient?
Anyway, on day 3 of the first PA, I decided I needed to scale down my trade size and build it back slowly. I am impatient by nature, but because I had the two additional accounts, I decided it didn’t matter if it took me two weeks or two months to get a payout. I just didn’t want to blow it.
I came up with the formula of trading one micro NQ for every $500 of trailing margin. So, my first trades were only two micros. My goal was to take it easy and grow the account to $49k where I could up my size to three micros. I was pleasantly surprised to find accepting losses was much easier! My average target was only $40 and my average loss was only $60. I set liquidity levels and trend lines and started my day. In just three hours, I had reached my target of $49k!
What is surprising is how easy and comfortable it was to use this approach. When a trade presented itself, I just went with it – knowing the worst that could happen was a small loss. I was also surprised to see how quickly the profits added up. I suspect it wasn’t a “normal” day for trading in that things just seemed to go they was the should – most of the time. That is, price action usually did exactly what I expected.
Once I got this first account to my target for the day, I decided to focus on my two new accounts. To be transparent, this would be for day two for these accounts. I had a good first day for both and they were at approximately $900 in profit starting day two.
But this is where things are about to change.
Because I had started this day with the plan to trade one micro for every $500 in trailing margin, I started with trading only 5 micros instead of my one or two mini’s as I have done with previous PAs. At this point, I do not copy trade, so I started with the goal of getting each account to $100 profit for the day. This happened fairly quickly so my next goal was to focus on one account and simply take trades for the rest of the session as they presented to me. It wasn’t great, but I ended up a total of $300 for that account. Unfortunately, my success rate wasn’t as good as earlier – I had 16 wins and 9 losses. But I was still up at the end.
Another clarification is I tend to DCA a bit when I’m comfortable with a setup. So the numbers aren’t pure. I also had one trade lose $180. I guess I must have move the stop on that trade. I need to be more disciplined in this regard.
That is the point of this post. Discipline wins in the end. All one needs to do believe and it can work.