Most common mistakes to avoid when presenting a Funded Trading Program
There are many traders around the world who are constantly presenting funded trading programs. They see the opportunity to manage a larger capital than they could on their own and venture to try to pass it with the illusion of being able to live off this profession. In Latin America, we have seen how the offer of these programs has grown and the variety of options they offer in terms of prices, assets to trade, rules, time to pass, and mode.
The truth is that the percentage of people who pass them and are funded is not very high. One intrinsic reason is that there are not many consistently winning and successful traders, regardless of whether they are presenting a funded trading program or not. To this reason, other factors must be added, such as the complicated rules that must be met and the mentality or strategy with which traders face them.
The idea of this blog is to review some of the most common mistakes that traders make when presenting a funded trading program and that, in one way or another, create the necessary awareness and be a way to start them with a clearer mindset.
Once you have chosen the ideal program you want to do, there are some additional topics that must be taken into account to achieve its success. Below I will try to enumerate some of the most common mistakes a trader makes:
1 Not knowing or following the program rules.
Many times traders start a program just because it was the cheapest, but they do not know all the rules well, or they read them quickly but do not have them in mind all the time. Another case with this issue is that by not doing the math on the rules regarding Drawdown or the maximum daily loss, they take trades that affect the program.
2 Taking the program with a different strategy than the one they have learned and had results with.
Some traders present a funded trading program with a different strategy in a hurry to pass it quickly. They look for higher value trades, expand the stop assuming greater risk, look for entries every day even if they are not their parameters, just to add days or points. This implies that all the statistics they have from their previous trading are lost, and they cannot achieve consistency that allows them to achieve their goal.
3 Trading more than necessary with revenge trades.
In a funded trading program, the trader is more prone to the sense of urgency. As they have a goal, when they have losing days, they feel they have moved away. This makes them face the market the next day with a greater need to win, and their trading becomes more emotional.
Many of the individual mistakes are already included in the Trading Plan, but it is worth emphasizing because, without a doubt, it is perhaps one of the mistakes that traders make the most when presenting a funded trading program. Feeling that they are being evaluated injects some adrenaline into their trading, and they make decisions outside their own rules. They take trades they have never taken, trade at times they had not considered, even at night, and so on.
5 Not adapting to the market.
Sometimes traders, when they achieve one or two months of profitability, already feel confident enough to take a funded trading program, but that does not indicate that the program will be successful. The market changes constantly, and if a trader is not capable of adapting, it is possible that they will be surprised just at the moment they are presenting it. Adapting to the market is a fundamental quality for any trader if they want to achieve consistency and profitability in the long term.
6 They don't manage the risk.
Tests set limits that traders are not always accustomed to. These limits may even require you to modify your risk management in order to meet them, so it’s important to have very clear statistics on your maximum drawdown in the past, your biggest losing trade, and the different losing streaks you’ve experienced in order to manage your risk in such a way that you don’t get disqualified from the test for lack of this information.
7 Approaching the test with the wrong mindset.
Wanting to pass the test from day one, thinking that a negative trade is catastrophic because it takes you away from your goal, thinking only about revenge trading to recover from a losing day. These are all attitudes or thoughts that won’t get you anywhere as a trader. Everyone has their own process for passing a test, and the most important thing is to approach it with a learner’s mindset, with a clear focus on executing trades calmly and in line with what you’ve done before or what’s in your trading plan, with the idea of doing things as best as possible and above all, in a fair manner. This is how consistency is achieved. This is how tests are passed.
As we can see, there are many mistakes that are made when presenting a funding test, and it probably happens to the majority. The important thing is to try to learn and not repeat the pattern every time you take one. Having a clear strategy, knowing and understanding the rules you must follow, taking each trade as an isolated event based on statistics, and approaching it with the mindset of a consistent trader are some of the keys that will allow you to succeed in your objective.
With Swiset as a tool, you can get to know yourself as a trader in depth based on data. You will know what your most profitable parameter or setup is, which days and times you should avoid or prioritize, what your success rate in the market is, which moods affect you most when trading, and much other data that will surely be very useful.
And if that weren’t enough, you can make these mistakes in Funding Test Simulations, as they were precisely developed for this purpose, so that when you face a real Funding Test, you have the confidence that you have already been able to overcome it before.
Sebastián Orozco
Head of partnerships
