Haha, I'll tell you my anecdotal experiences about TopStep and I'll preface it with some background information just as a frame for reference.
I've been a trader for the last ~10 years and only a professionally consistent and successful one for the last ~5. In my early career, I will fully admit that I was lucky and overzealous; I was in the right market at the right time, an early adopter of an instrument before a long-term favorable trend. It made me arrogant and led me to several large losses inevitably. This forced me to adapt.
In this industry, it truly does take years of experience [think Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory from his book Outliers] and thousands of hours of screen time to honestly learn patience, discipline, risk management, etc. Over time, I began trading the same position size and never compounding and I've been earning about $250,000 a year trading Oil futures since January 2014 [I trade 10 CL contracts at a time, taking only the highest probability entries, so I only trade about once every week or two on average]. You could say that I'm more of a positional swing trader at heart. If there's anything I've learned in my years of practice, it's that not every environment needs to be traded. Not every day/week/month, etc., needs to be traded. I've found that reducing the amount you trade counter intuitively leads to more profits and that day trading for a few ticks/day isn't feasible for longevity.
About 1.5 years ago or so I discovered TopStep and thought, hey, I could increase my buying power with essentially no risk so that I could continue trading my own personal accounts while simultaneously operating a TopStep managed account. Why not? Anyways, and keep in mind this is coming from someone with a proven track record of making $250,000+ a year utilizing CL contracts, it took me 3 combines and 2 FTP to just get funded.
Being forced to day trade with their parameters and drawdowns isn't realistic in the slightest. In addition, you're restricted from trading reports and miss out on a lot of momentum as a result (a large component of my trading strategy is capturing the report volatility because I can predict with an 80%+ accuracy every EIA report; truthfully, most API/EIA reports just resume the prior trend and don't result in a counter-trend reversal).
When it comes to their drawdown and daily loss limits in particular, this is where you find your hamster wheel. You get fired for "one" bad day. It doesn't matter if 99 out of 100 days you were profitable, if you hit that daily loss limit just once, you're out. It doesn't matter if you made $1,000,000 for them, one bad day you're out. In the Oil market using CL, for example, you can easily lose several thousands of dollars in a day. This doesn't make you a bad trader as you can also easily make several thousands of dollars in a day and what really matters is your statistical market advantage (profit factor). After about a month of being funded, I hit the drawdown [because withdrawals count as losses], and basically got fired, despite the fact that my account was still green if you adjusted for my withdrawals. Back to the combine I go. Another annoying thing I didn't like is that I was receiving daily phone calls from their performance coach that I was forced to answer because my contract stated that if I didn't stay in contact, they reserved the right to liquidate my positions against my will and fire me. When I had good days, it was 'good job, but don't lose it, I've seen people lose it all the very next day' and when I had bad days, it was 'what are you doing, don't lose money, do you have stops in place?'. It was a very condescending attitude and you could tell by the tone of the guy's voice that he was an arrogant prick who felt he had authority because his status at TopStep brought him some pseudo-power. I also found it annoying that they would display my user-name when I made money, withdrew money, etc., and that they would continuously market mediocrity in blog posts, etc. It's like, I truly don't care if someone just made $1.7k in a month trading CL when I just made $10k using the same position size in my personal accounts. In this way, their marketing and advertising is very deceptive because even their best traders are still earning basically pennies with their potential.
That right there should tell you everything you need to know about TopStep [the fact that even consistently profitable traders still get fired even with advantaged statistics and that even consistently profitable traders and grown adults are 'babied']. They're not interested in professional traders, mentoring potential candidates, or developing their best talent, they're interested in continued evaluation fees because the combine/FTP is basically like a gamble. Anyways, that is where I ended my relationship with TopStep and didn't look back; they're basically handcuffs that prevent learning how to become a 'real' trader and their parameters don't teach you anything except to be 'afraid' and 'fearful' of losses or having 'one day day' which leads to an extreme slippery slope of negative performance as it instills in you anxiety and panic instead of objectivity. As an aside, I earned $5k with them that month and in my own personal accounts that didn't restrict me, with the same position size, I earned $15k. Every day the performance coach called me over a loss, I couldn't help but laugh as I told him that I was forced to stop out with TopStep because of their parameters but that my personal accounts were going to be profitable -- and the next day, by simply just holding onto the position, they were.
P.S. This was before they recently updated their rules to make it more difficult. With the revised rules on their website, I would honestly be surprised if more than 2% of attempts passed their Combine/FTP programs. This is why OneUp is such a threat to them, why they've attempted suing them, etc., and that is because OneUp's parameters are far more realistic and favorable for 'real' traders to perform on and as a result, will naturally attract more market share.
