Poker has rendered me with a 5 year “real” job gap in my resume that has rendered me essentially unemployable. Moving out of the country to play online poker is not an option for me and to be honest, I’m ready to move on from poker. This blog will be about my quest to make it in the trading world, and it starts with me entering TopStepTrader’s Trading Combine.
The trading combine is a 10 day simulated trading challenge where my objective is to make $3,500 while also meeting other requirements (2k max drawdown/certain ratio of winners to losers,etc). If I succeed, TopStepTrader will give me a funded trading account where I receive a split of the profit. I traded futures for 2 years before I started playing poker full time, so I have prior experience as well as a trading system I’m confident works. The system doesn’t generate many trades, but it captures larges moves when it does.
Day 1 of the combine
My max limit of contracts I can have on at once is 5. I decided to start with 1 contract and try to build a cushion since it would be very easy to reach my 1k drawdown limit trading bigger size. Crude(CL) futures started selling off early and found a good entry point from a risk/reward standpoint. I was going for a big move and didn't exit when it was 30 ticks in my favor. At this point I should have moved my stop to breakeven and let it ride, but irrationally exited the trade after it backed off. Either I have to exit after the initial surge, or go for a bigger move and expect it to retrace some.
Soon after I exited, CL futures went higher and put in a reliable buy signal so I got long again. I didn’t take much heat on this trade and exited for a 25 tick winner.
The plan was to short SP futures if it rallied off the open, but it slowly went straight down with not much movement. I missed some trades in hindsight as there was a low risk opportunity to go long near 18080.25, a prior low made on 7/31.
I’ll mostly be trading Crude/Gold/SP futures. Since I don’t have much margin for error, I’m going to be very selective with my trades, but need to be willing to up my size for the best setups.
Overall up $315 for the day, but I felt like I left a lot of money on the table. It’s a similar feeling to MTT's where anything besides first place feels like a failure.
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“We can’t run from who we are. Our destiny chooses us.” – Mike McDermott.