wrigly ✧

I started this account with 3k around January 27th, focused on only trading roughly 1 to 2 micros. Sometimes I got a little too confident and went with 5 MNQ, but I decided to size back down. My win rate is around 44%. During all of this, my mentality for trading has shifted immensely, in a good way. Trading minis and somehow, I say somehow as if I do not know the answer, always blowing prop accounts does quite a bit of damage to your mental if you are actually trying to trade and not yolo 5 cons to “game the system”. The truth is trading a mini or more on a prop account is not sustainable at all (for me right now), unless of course you are just swinging for the fences, which I hardly do. Especially if you have a win rate like me. I wanted to take a step back, fund a live account, and trade extremely light so I could gather actual data and reflect on a question: who am I as a trader? What is my style? January 27 to now is not a large sample size by any means, but it has proven to myself that sizing down, accepting losses, and letting winners run shows that blowing prop accounts left and right was not necessarily a strategy issue, but more so a sizing issue, risk issue, and psychology issue. While trading a live account, I am content with making small profits on the day because it is not fake money. I am not spending money on props, and I am slowly growing my equity curve. I am not worried about prop wars, rule changes, etc. Sure, trading prop accounts can feel like real money, but for whatever reason my mental is not the same between prop accounts and a live account. There is a sense of needing to rush a prop account. Or if I lose on a day, the next day’s profits are capped to remain within consistency rules or something. My mentality has shifted from rushing prop accounts to meet a payout eligibility timeline to just slowly and surely building an equity curve. Not failing an eval, or even passing an eval then failing a funded account, only to restart all over again. Prop firms are great. But for me, I have gotten more pleasure building this account from 3k to 8k than I ever did taking 20k+ payouts from Topstep with a month. Maybe someday I will go back to trading a prop account and do it slowly. But as of right now, I think my goal is not spending a dime on a prop firm account and sticking with live funds.