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TopstepTrader Review – Should You Become a Funded Trader?

By Dave

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TopStep Trader Review

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TopstepTrader Review

  • Platform
  • Quality
  • Cost
  • Support
3.8

Summary

TopstepTrader is a trading firm that seeks to recruit traders by evaluating their performance in real-time, simulated accounts. Discover how this trading platform could be an option for your day to day activity.Β 

About TopstepTrader

TopstepTrader is a proprietary trading firm that recruits traders by evaluating traders’ performance in real-time simulated accounts. The firm generates revenue both from their funded traders (20% of profits) and by charging monthly fees for access to their practice platform.

The firm was started by Michael Patek, who had trading aspirations rooting back to his teenagers, but due to his rural Nebraska upbringing, he had no trading connections until he moved to Chicago with $90,000 to trade. Patek ended up losing all of his capital, and then earned his chops on a simulated trading account. This experience inspired him to start TopstepTrader.

The process of becoming a funded trader starts with subscribing to their monthly platform, which comes with a minimum fee of $150 and goes up to $375. Traders who meet their performance criteria will be able to trade using Topstep’s capital.

In this article, we’re going to review the pros and cons of TopstepTrader’s path to funding and their simulation platform.

Become a Funded Trader
TRY TOPSTEP TRADER FOR FREE
TopstepTrader Review: Key Facts
📈 Features Trading Education, Trading Simulators, Funded Trading Program
💰 Pricing Varies by Plan
Discounts Free 14-Day Trial
Best For New Traders Seeking Education and Capital
🔁 Alternative To OneUp Trader, Apiary Fund

TopstepTrader Pricing

TopstepTrader has four different plans, all of which have the same features with different account parameters like profit target and trailing maximum drawdown.

Platform

TopstepTrader uses the Tradovate platform. Tradovate is a futures brokerage that employs a subscription-based commission model.

topstep pricing

Charts

The charts have multiple ways to display data, featuring candlesticks, bars, line, bid/ask volume, heiken ashi, renko, and point & figure. The charts also give you a choice to display bars in time periods, ticks, volume, range, and momentum range.

While the charts are certainly above average, they can be a bit clunky at times, mostly due to their lack of auto-scaling, seen in the likes of TradingView.

topstep chart

The rest of the platform’s features are quite standard, with your average news feed and position analysis screen.

Market Replay

topstep replay

TopstepTrader has a market replay feature integrated into the Tradovate platform. It lacks when compared to other market replayers like TradingSim and thinkOnDemand.

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Topstep allows you to choose your start date & time, speed, and initial balance. TradingSim and thinkOnDemand both have the previous features plus much more, like TradingSim’s fast-forward to any time feature, or thinkOnDemand’s vast array of asset classes available for simulated trading.

Products Offered

Traders on the simulation can trade any CME Group product, while funded traders also have access to EUREX products.

Additional Fees

Combine Reset: If you blow up an account during your β€œCombine” (simulation) phase, TopstepTrader will charge you $100 to reset the account.

Data Fees: (pulled directly from TopstepTrader site)

  • CME products $105.00 (Effective 04/01/2018)
  • CBOT products $105.00 (Effective 04/01/2018)
  • NYMEX products $105.00 (Effective 04/01/2018)
  • COMEX products $105.00 (Effective 04/01/2018)
  • EUREX products $69.00 USD

Commissions: In addition to exchange and regulatory fees, TopstepTrader claims to give β€œfree” commissions; however, they charge $0.18 per contract as a β€œtransaction fee,” which isn’t charged by other firms like NinjaTrader, eSignal, MarketDelta, and others.

topstep commissions

Getting Funded at TopstepTrader

This is the most important part of this platform, as people don’t join for the trading simulator but for the chance to trade TopstepTrader’s capital (similar to Maverick Trading).

Before we talk about the likelihood of getting funded and the worthiness of the program itself, let’s go over what TopstepTrader will require from you before they give you a chance at trading a funded account.

topstep funded

There are two steps to getting a funded account. As you can see above, the first is to prove you can be a profitable trader, which involves meeting certain milestones that involve managing your losses and hitting a profit target. From there, you need to prove that, while being profitable, you can trade without taking a lot of risks, which involves scaling in and out of your large positions, not holding positions into economic releases, and staying within a weekly loss limit.

The most significant criticism of the funded account program is that the actual account size numbers are a bit abstracted. While TopstepTrader tells you they are funding you with $100,000 or $150,000, you can only lose the β€œtrailing max drawdown.” For example, in their $50,000 funded account, their trailing max drawdown is $2,000, meaning the max drawdown you can have at any point intraday is $2,000 of your account’s equity. Here is a chart from TopstepTrader to illustrate the point:

topstep drawdown

Another criticism often made of TopstepTrader is the small number of traders they have funded historically. The firm has been open since 2012, and they have funded 1,537, illustrating the stringent standards they have for getting funded. Once getting funded, many traders end up getting knocked off shortly after and getting put back on the trading simulation. Many would say that this is just a representation of how unlikely traders are to succeed and says more about the difficulty of trading then TopstepTrader.

Who is TopstepTrader Best For?

Based on TopstepTrader’s numbers, only having funded 1,537 traders in total, with an average weekly profit of $549, and the vast majority of traders not being active at any one time, it seems that TopstepTrader makes most of their money off selling subscriptions to their trading simulation and the dream of getting a funded trading account.

However, one cannot dispute that TopstepTrader would be an excellent way to test if you’re actually a profitable trader. If you cannot get funded, perhaps you’re not as good a trader as you thought?

πŸ† Top Rated Services πŸ†

Our team has reviewed over 300 services. These are our favorites:
πŸ“ˆ  Best Day Trading Service
Investors Underground
🎯  Best Stock Scanner
Trade Ideas
πŸ“‰ Best Stock Charts
TradingView
πŸ’°  Best Stock Picking Service
Motley Fool
πŸ“±  Best Mobile Broker
Webull
πŸ“Š   Best for Stock Research
Seeking Alpha

Ultimately, TopstepTrader is upfront about their business. They charge traders for access to the simulation because the vast majority will never get funded; however, they will stick to their word and fund you if you manage to meet their funding guidelines.

There’s a competitor to TopstepTrader that has similar terms called Oneup Trader; however, one should approach with caution due to the debacle that the supposed owner had over at futures trading forum futures.io.

Become a Funded Trader
TRY TOPSTEP TRADER FOR FREE

Pros

  • Chance for traders with little capital to trade full-time
  • Forces you to have high standards for your trading

Cons

  • Nickel and dimes members with fees and high membership costs
  • Unlikely to get funded
Day Trade Review

Dave

Dave has been a part-time day trader and swing trader since 2011 when he first became obsessed with the markets. He focuses primarily on technical setups and will hold positions anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. Over his trading career, Dave has tried numerous day trading products, brokers, services, and courses. He continues to test and review new day trading services to this day.

4 thoughts on “TopstepTrader Review – Should You Become a Funded Trader?”

  1. I would highly recommend TopstepTrader. The proprietary Firm is legit and they do give their capital to trade with.

    I would not choose OneUp because there are some disadvantages: with OneUp you have a Trailing Max Drawdown which is being calculated Intraday instead of End of Day Calculation! This is a HUGE disatvantage because: let’s say you have a 2k Max Drawdown within the OneUp Programme. You earn 2k in one day and the same day you lose the 2k Profit… In this Case you have reached your Max Drawdown and you are out…
    This is not the case with TopstepTrader!

    Second disatvantage of One Up: Higher commissions !!

    TopstepTrader is more expensive than One Up, but its conditions are way more transparent and fair.

    Reply
  2. I would highly recommend TopstepTrader. The proprietary Firm is legit and they do give their capital to trade with.

    I would not choose OneUp because there are some disadvantages: with OneUp you have a Trailing Max Drawdown which is being calculated Intraday instead of End of Day Calculation! This is a HUGE disatvantage because: let’s say you have a 2k Max Drawdown within the OneUp Programme. You earn 2k in one day and the same day you lose the 2k Profit… In this Case you have reached your Max Drawdown and you are out…
    This is not the case with TopstepTrader!

    Second disatvantage of One Up: Higher commissions !!

    TopstepTrader is more expensive than One Up, but its conditions are way more transparent and fair.

    Reply
  3. I currently have a bad experience with TopStep Trader. Over a week ago I tried to sign up for a trading combine.

    When I was asked am I a professional or a non-professional I filled out the form wrong. I filled in professional.

    I immediately contacted TopStep to get them to fix this. There reply was that my account had been blocked and I would have to set up another under a different email but not to worry I had not been charged on my credit card.

    My credit card was charged and now I am trying to get my money back with little success.

    I have given them a copy of my statement clearly showing a payment to TopStep.

    Now they are saying they can’t find my payment which is incredulous.

    more than 15 emails later I am no further forward getting my money back for a service I never received.

    I will update if I get this resolved.

    Reply
    • Whatever you do, don’t take their Pro Account, it s a scam. They promote it on their website but all it is, is another obstacle to getting funded. You cannot withdraw from it until you hit the target, which contradicts their website promotion where they they say “withdraw at any time”. So basically you are doing the combine all over again, a win win opportunity for Topstep not to have to pay out any profits except to a minimal number of traders who get to the profit level. Also they profit from the CME fees themselves. I was funded twice within a month but they insisted on me paying the CME exchange fee twice for the same month, or my 2nd account would not be activated. A bad experience Topstep

      Reply

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