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Most traders open the chart and guess direction. Up or down, coin flip. The Fractal Model takes the guess out. You read direction before the session opens, and it starts with one question.

Start with the draw 01

Where does price want to go? That target is the draw on liquidity, the DOL. It's the magnet and the reason a trade exists. Mark it top down, monthly to weekly to daily to 4 hour. No draw, no trade.

This is not optional and it is not a formality. Everything downstream is a question about how price gets to the draw. If you skip it you end up with a beautiful entry pointed at nothing, which is how people take a perfect setup and hold it through a full reversal wondering when to exit. Lesson 03 covers how to rank competing draws when four of them are on the chart at once.

Read bias from the closes 02

Run the Daily. Did price close above or below the previous day high or low. Ask the same on the Weekly and the Monthly. That stack of closes sets your lean before you drop down a timeframe.

Closes, not touches. A wick through the previous day high that closes back below it is a sweep, and a sweep is the opposite signal to a close. The candle body is the market telling you what it accepted. The wick is what it rejected.

When the three timeframes agree, you have a strong lean and you can size normally. When they disagree, the higher one wins and you treat the lower one as noise until it flips. Monthly bullish with a bearish Daily is a pullback in an uptrend, not a reversal, and trading it as a reversal is how people short into strength for a week.

The fractal pairs 03

The model is fractal. A higher timeframe candle forms the swing, and you confirm it on the timeframe below. The pairs:

Monthly pairs with Daily. Weekly with 4 hour. 4 hour with 15 minute. 1 hour with 5 minute.

The 4 hour to 15 minute pair is the one most traders live on. It gives you a swing that forms across most of a session and a confirmation timeframe fast enough to enter on without staring at a 1 minute chart all morning.

The best setups stack two or three pairs at once. A Weekly swing forming while the 4 hour also gives you a C2, confirmed on the 15 minute, is a different trade to a lone 1 hour signal, and it deserves different size.

Why the pairing works 04

A higher timeframe candle is not a unit. It's a completed story on the timeframe below it. One 4 hour candle is sixteen 15 minute candles, and those sixteen candles contain the sweep, the reversal and the delivery that produced the shape you see up top.

That is why you confirm one timeframe down and not three. Drop too far and you are looking at noise inside noise, reacting to structure that has nothing to do with the swing you are trading. Stay on the pair.

The C2 and the tap 05

The swing candle is the C2. It sweeps the prior candle, the C1, and closes back beyond it. Bullish closes back above the C1 low. Bearish closes back below the C1 high. The close is what makes it a C2. The sweep, or the tap into a draw, is what makes it a setup. You need both.

Read that twice, because the order matters. A candle that takes out the prior low and closes below it is continuation. A candle that takes out the prior low and closes back above it is a C2. Same wick, opposite meaning, and the difference is one close.

What fakes a C2 06

Three things look like a C2 and are not.

The close that never happened. Judging a C2 mid-candle. Two hours into a 4 hour candle it looks perfect and by the close it is something else entirely. The candle is not a C2 until it closes.

The sweep that swept nothing. If the C1 extreme was already taken out earlier, there is no liquidity left to grab and the sweep is cosmetic. Check the level is actually unmitigated first.

The C2 in the middle of nowhere. A textbook C2 that forms with no draw above or below it is a pattern, not a setup. There has to be somewhere for price to go.

CISD confirms it 07

CISD is the confirmation that the turn is real. It comes on the lower timeframe of the pair. A 4 hour to 15 minute model means you watch the 15 minute for the shift. Sweep without confirmation is a guess. Let the lower timeframe confirm.

What you are waiting for is price closing through the last opposing candle series in the direction of your bias. It is the lower timeframe agreeing with what the higher timeframe candle just told you. Until it prints, you have a story and no evidence.

This is also the step that keeps you out of the worst trades. Most failed C2s never produce a clean shift on the pair timeframe. They just drift back the other way. Waiting for CISD costs you a few points of entry and saves you the trades that were never real.

The sequence, in order 08

Every trade in this model runs the same five steps, and skipping one is where losses come from.

One. Mark the draw, top down. Two. Read bias from Daily, Weekly and Monthly closes. Three. Pick your pair and wait for the C2 to close. Four. Drop to the lower timeframe of the pair and wait for CISD. Five. Enter, with the stop behind the C2 extreme and the target at the draw.

Notice how much of that is waiting. Four of the five steps happen before you touch the mouse. That is the model working, not the model being slow.

Risk and target 09

The read is wrong if price trades back through the extreme the C2 swept. That wick is the invalidation, because if the sweep is reclaimed the story it told was false. Stop goes beyond it, not at it.

The target is the draw you marked in step one. That is the whole reason the trade exists. When structure gives you something on the way, an FVG, a swing, an order block, that is a place to move to breakeven and let the rest run toward the draw.

If the distance from your stop to the draw does not give you at least three to one, the trade does not exist at that size. Either the entry is late or the draw is too close. Both are reasons to pass, and passing costs nothing.

What kills the read 10

The C2 gets reclaimed. Price trades back through the swept wick and closes there. The swing failed, and holding on hoping is how a small loss becomes the day.

The draw gets taken by something else first. If price runs your target before your setup triggers, the trade you were waiting for no longer has a destination. Re-mark and start again.

The higher timeframe flips. A Daily close through the opposite side changes the lean, and a 15 minute confirmation cannot outvote a Daily close. Higher timeframe always wins.

Three mistakes 11

Trading the pair you did not mark. Reading bias on the Daily and then entering off a 5 minute signal is not the model. If you build the read on the 4 hour, you confirm on the 15 minute. Stay on the pair you chose.

Entering on the sweep. The sweep is the setup, not the trigger. Entering as price runs the level, before the close and before CISD, is the single most common way this model loses money.

Forcing it outside a kill zone. The pairs work all day. The probability does not. Sweeps that happen during a kill zone are being engineered. Sweeps at 1 PM are usually just drift.

Where the edge is 12

None of these pieces are secret on their own. The edge is the pairing. Stack the Fractal Model with an IFVG entry and you catch the move early with tight risk. Almost nobody runs both together as one read.

That combination is what the playbook walks through, candle by candle, on a real NQ swing. Lesson 02 covers the IFVG on its own. Read them together and you have the entry model that goes inside this read.

Most traders see a fair value gap fail and call the setup dead. Traded right, that failure is the signal. Price taps a gap, respects it, then closes back through it. Same zone, opposite job. That flip is the IFVG, and it's a full model on its own.

Start with the draw 01

Same foundation as everything we run. Where does price want to go? Mark the draw on liquidity top down, monthly to weekly to daily. Read bias from the closes, above or below the previous high or low on the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly. No DOL, no trade. This model needs a clear target or it doesn't exist.

The draw does double duty here. It is your target, and it is the reason to believe the sweep you are about to see is engineered rather than random. Price sweeping a low on its way to a marked high above is a story. Price sweeping a low with nothing above it is just price.

A sweep with force 02

The setup opens with a liquidity sweep, and the sweep has to come with strong displacement. A slow drift into a level is not it. You want price to run a high or a low and move away with intent. Weak sweeps get faded. Strong ones leave a footprint.

Displacement is visible without measuring anything. Large bodies, small wicks, several candles in one direction, and gaps left behind in the move. That last part matters, because the gaps displacement leaves are the raw material for the inversion you are about to trade.

If you have to squint to decide whether a move counts as displacement, it doesn't. The whole point is that it is obvious.

Delivery from a gap 03

When it's there, delivery is one of the strongest confluences on the board. Price delivers into a fair value gap that already sits on the chart, a BISI below for a long or a SIBI above for a short, and respects it.

BISI is buyside imbalance, sellside inefficiency, the gap left by a move up. SIBI is the mirror, left by a move down. You want price coming down into a BISI when you are looking for a long, and up into a SIBI when you are looking for a short.

Respect means a wick tap only, no candle closing inside it, judged on that gap's own timeframe. A 15 minute gap means no 15 minute body closes in it. Only the wick. That timeframe rule is the part people get wrong, because a 1 minute body closing inside a 15 minute gap tells you nothing. Judge the gap on the chart it formed on.

You won't always have it, and that's fine. It grades the setup up when it shows.

The inversion 04

Price rejects that respected gap and reverses. The reversal leaves a fresh gap behind, and when price closes back through it, that gap inverts. Support becomes resistance, resistance becomes support.

One clean candle gives you a single gap to work. Two to four candles, you combine them into one zone and wait for the whole zone to invert. Do not treat a four candle cluster as four separate signals. It is one zone and it inverts once.

Your entry is the close of the candle that inverses the gap. Not the wick through it, not a limit order inside it, not a guess partway. The close. That is the trigger, and it is the only trigger in this model.

Why the flip means something 05

A gap is unfinished business. Price moved through that range too fast to trade both sides of it, so orders are still sitting there. When price returns and the zone holds, the orders got paired and the level did its job.

When price then closes back through the same zone, those orders are now offside. Everyone who was filled defending that level is now underwater, and their exits become fuel in your direction. That is why the flip produces a move rather than a pause. You are not trading a line on a chart. You are trading a group of positions that just became wrong.

Risk and target 06

Risk sits at the IFVG. Below it for a long, above it for a short, or behind a protected swing when there's one. If price closes back inside the zone after inverting it, the inversion failed and the idea is done.

Your target is a clear draw from the list: data highs and lows, equal highs and lows, session highs and lows, the previous day, week, or month high and low. Stacked draws are better. Two of those sitting at the same price is a stronger magnet than either alone.

Once structure gives you a spot, an FVG, a swing, an order block, move to breakeven and let the rest run.

Grade the stack 07

Six confluences make this setup: the sweep, delivery, the inversion, a clear draw, SMT, and CISD.

The draw and the inversion are always there. The draw is your target and the inversion is your entry, so a setup without both is not a setup at all. The other four grade the trade.

Six of six is A+. Five is A. Four is A-. Three or fewer, you pass.

Grading is not decoration. It is how you decide size and how you keep an honest record. A journal full of trades labelled A+ that were really A- is a journal that will teach you the wrong lesson about your own model.

SMT, and what it adds 08

SMT runs NQ against ES or YM. You are looking for the correlated instrument to disagree at the level. NQ makes a new low while ES holds above its own, or the reverse.

That disagreement is the tell that the low was a raid rather than genuine weakness. If both indices break together, the move is real and your reversal setup is trading against actual momentum. If one refuses, the sweep was engineered.

SMT at the exact moment of your sweep is worth more than SMT twenty minutes earlier. Check it at the level, not in general.

Timeframes, and how to combine them 09

It runs on any timeframe from monthly down to 15 seconds. That is a feature and a trap.

The strongest version is a combination: look for delivery out of a higher timeframe gap, then drop down for the inversion and the entry. A 4 hour gap gets respected, and you take the 5 minute inversion inside it. Higher timeframe supplies the level, lower timeframe supplies the entry and the tight stop.

The trap is dropping down to find a setup that is not there. If nothing is happening on the timeframe you planned to trade, going to 15 seconds does not create an opportunity. It just creates a smaller version of noise.

The sequence, in order 10

One. Mark the draw and read bias from the closes. Two. Wait for a sweep with real displacement. Three. Check whether price delivered into a gap and respected it on that gap's own timeframe. Four. Watch the reversal leave a fresh gap. Five. Enter on the close of the candle that inverts it. Six. Stop beyond the IFVG, target the draw, breakeven at structure.

Count your confluences at step five, not afterwards. Grading a trade you already took is scoring your own homework.

Three mistakes 11

Entering inside the gap. A limit order sitting in the zone gets you filled on every tap, including the ones that keep going. The close through is the whole signal. Without it you are just buying a level.

Judging respect on the wrong timeframe. A gap formed on the 15 minute is judged on the 15 minute. Watching a 1 minute chart and calling a body close inside it a violation will talk you out of good setups all day.

Taking the A- because you are bored. Four of six is a real trade. Three of six is a pass, and the difference between a trader who follows that and one who does not shows up over a month, not over a session.

Where it fits 12

The IFVG is an entry model. It tells you where to get in and where you are wrong. It does not tell you which way the day is going.

That is what the Fractal Model in Lesson 01 is for, and Lesson 03 is how you pick the draw both of them point at. Run the read from the fractal pairs, pick the draw, then use the IFVG to get in with tight risk. Almost nobody runs all three as one system. That is the edge, and the playbook walks it through candle by candle.

Most traders open NQ and ask one question. Up or down. That's a coin flip with extra steps. The traders who stop losing ask something else first: where is price trying to get to? Answer that and direction stops being a guess. It becomes the leftover.

A draw is a destination, not a direction 01

The draw on liquidity, the DOL, is the price level the market is being delivered toward. Not a prediction. A magnet. Price is always working toward some pool of resting orders, and the whole trade exists because that pool is sitting there unclaimed.

Once you name the draw, everything else falls in behind it. Your bias is just "the direction that gets price to the draw." Your target is the draw. Your invalidation is the level that says you picked the wrong one. That's the entire read, and it starts before you think about entries.

Stops are the fuel 02

Size can't fill itself. A desk that needs to sell 3,000 contracts can't just sell into a quiet tape without wrecking its own price. It needs buyers. The most reliable pile of buyers on the chart is the cluster of stop-losses sitting above an old high, because every one of those stops is a buy order waiting to trigger.

That's buyside liquidity. Stops from shorts, plus breakout orders from longs, resting above highs. Sellside liquidity is the mirror: stops from longs and breakdown orders resting below lows. Price runs at those pools because that's where the fills are.

The ranking problem 03

Here's what nobody tells you. On any NQ chart there are six or seven valid draws visible at once. An old daily high. Equal lows from Tuesday. The previous day high. An unfilled FVG from the London session. The gap left over from Sunday's open. All of them real. All of them liquidity.

If you can't rank them, having them marked makes you worse, not better. You'll take the trade toward whichever one you noticed last. The rest of this lesson is the ranking.

Tier one: unmitigated swing highs and lows 04

A swing high that price has never traded back through is the strongest draw on the chart. The orders above it have never been touched. The longer it sits there, the more stops pile up behind it, and the more it's worth to whoever needs that fill.

Mark them top down. Monthly first, then weekly, then daily, then 4 hour. A monthly high that's been sitting untouched since March outranks a 15 minute high from an hour ago every single time, and it isn't close. Higher timeframe wins because more orders accumulate at levels more people can see.

The word that matters is unmitigated. Once price trades through a level and takes those stops, that liquidity is gone. It got used. Don't keep drawing lines at levels the market already cleaned out.

Tier one, sharper: equal highs and equal lows 05

When NQ prints two or three highs within a few points of each other, that's not a double top. That's a shelf. Retail draws resistance across it and sells the touch, stops just above. Every one of those stops is a buy order in a tidy little stack.

Equal highs and equal lows are the cleanest draws you'll find, because the liquidity is concentrated instead of smeared. If you have an unmitigated high and a set of equal highs at similar distance, take the equal highs. Tighter pool, sharper reaction.

Tier two: the levels the whole market watches 06

Previous day high and low. Previous week high and low. The high and low of the Asian range. These matter because they're on everyone's chart, which means orders genuinely rest there.

PDH and PDL are the intraday workhorses. Most NQ sessions are a story about one of them: sweep the PDL in the London kill zone, reverse, deliver to the PDH by lunch. Ordinary. It happens because that's where the orders are.

Asian range high and low deserve their own line. That range is the accumulation phase, and the London open exists in large part to raid one side of it. A sweep of Asian high followed by displacement down is the Judas swing doing its job.

Tier three: the data candle 07

When CPI or FOMC or NFP hits, NQ prints a candle with an oversized range in a couple of minutes. The high and the low of that candle become liquidity for days.

Reason: everyone who traded that release has an opinion parked at its extremes. Stops from people who faded it. Breakout orders from people waiting for a retest. The news doesn't move price. The volatility around the news is the cover under which size gets filled, and the wick it leaves is a draw you can mark and trade back to a week later.

Mark the high and the low of the release candle. Not the close. The extremes.

Tier four: imbalance as a draw 08

A fair value gap is a three candle sequence where candle one's wick and candle three's wick don't overlap. Price moved so fast that a slice of it never traded both sides. That's an imbalance, and the algorithm comes back to rebalance it.

FVGs are draws, but softer ones. There are no stops sitting inside a gap. Price returns to rebalance, not to fill orders, so the reaction is usually smaller. Treat a gap as a waypoint rather than a destination.

One refinement worth knowing: price often turns at the consequent encroachment, the 50% midpoint of the gap, rather than filling the whole thing. If you're targeting an FVG, target its CE and take partials there.

Opening gaps sit in the same tier. The New Week Opening Gap is the space between Friday's close and Sunday's open, and it stays in play all week. The New Day Opening Gap works the same on a daily scale. Both act as PD arrays, both get revisited, and both are worth a line.

Tier five: suspension blocks 09

A suspension block is a candle hanging between two volume imbalances. A body gap above it, a body gap below it. Price ran so hard through that pocket the bodies never touched at either end. Always exactly three candles, never more.

That's what makes it hold. Normally a level means both sides showed up and traded against each other. Inside a suspension block that never happened. Not at the top, not at the bottom, not in the middle. One side was absent for the whole run.

Sometimes the algorithm comes back and cleans it. Sometimes it sits there for weeks. Mark them, but never build a trade around one. A suspension block is a level that explains a reaction after the fact more often than it predicts one.

Ranking it in ninety seconds 10

Before the open, in this order:

One. Higher timeframe first. Any unmitigated monthly, weekly or daily high or low within reach today? That's your primary draw. Everything else is a stop along the way.

Two. Now look at distance. A draw 400 points away isn't today's draw, it's this month's. Ask what's reachable in one session. On NQ that's usually a range of 150 to 300 points, so pick the pools that live inside it.

Three. Break the tie with cleanliness. Equal highs beat a single high. A level that's been swept twice already beats a fresh one for chop and loses for reliability. Untouched and tidy wins.

Four. Write one sentence. "NQ is drawing to the equal highs at [level], and I'm wrong below [level]." If you can't finish that sentence, you don't have a read. Sit out.

What kills a draw 11

A draw dies two ways.

It gets taken. Price runs the level, clears the stops, and the pool is gone. Once an unmitigated high is mitigated it's a used level. What matters next is whether price accepted above it and kept going, or swept it and slammed back. The first is continuation. The second is a reversal signature, and now your draw flips to the opposite side.

Something better appears. A red folder release prints a new candle with fresh extremes. A run of equal lows forms during the session. Draws aren't set at 8 AM and frozen. Re-rank when the chart gives you a reason, and only then.

Three mistakes that cost the read 12

Marking everything. Twenty lines is the same as zero lines. Three to five draws is a chart you can trade. Anything more and you're just decorating.

Trading to a draw with no confirmation. Knowing where price wants to go doesn't tell you it's going there now. The draw sets the target. The sweep, the displacement and the structure shift give you the entry. Never skip that half, and never enter outside a kill zone because a level looked ready.

Falling in love with one level. If price sweeps your draw and closes cleanly beyond it, you were wrong. That's information, not an insult. Flip the read and find the next pool.

The pre-session checklist 13

Five minutes before the open, every day:

Unmitigated monthly, weekly and daily highs and lows marked. Equal highs and equal lows from the last five sessions marked. PDH, PDL, PWH, PWL on the chart. Asian range high and low on the chart. Any data candle from the last two weeks, extremes only. Open FVGs on the 4 hour and 1 hour. NWOG still unfilled, yes or no.

Then rank them, write the one sentence, and don't touch the mouse until price gives you a sweep inside a kill zone.

That's the read. The entry model is a separate job, and lessons 01 and 02 cover it. Draw first, always.

Almost nobody blows a combine because their setup was bad. They blow it because they never worked out what one bad day costs, or they hit a rule they didn't know existed. The combine is a risk test with a profit target painted on the front. Read it that way and it gets a lot easier.

The target is the easy half 01

Every eval gives you a profit target and a drawdown. Traders stare at the target and ignore the drawdown. That's backwards. The target has no deadline on most accounts. The drawdown ends your account the instant you touch it.

So flip it. Your job isn't to make the target. Your job is to not touch the drawdown for long enough that the target happens on its own. Those are different jobs and they produce completely different behaviour at the screen.

Know your drawdown type before you place one trade 02

This is the single most important thing on this page, and most people funded today can't tell you which one they're on.

End of day trailing. Your drawdown floor only moves at the close. Unrealized profit during the session doesn't drag it up behind you. You can be up 60 points at 11 AM, give it all back, and your floor is exactly where it was at yesterday's close.

Intraday trailing. The floor follows your unrealized peak, tick by tick. Go up 60 points and back to flat, and your floor came up 60 points with you. You didn't lose money and you still lost room.

Same trade, same result, two entirely different risk pictures. On an intraday trailing account, letting a winner run to +80 and then round-tripping it is genuinely dangerous. On EOD it's just annoying.

What that changes about how you trade 03

On intraday trailing, take partials. Bank something at the first clean target so the peak that sets your floor is a peak you actually got paid for. Trailing your whole position for a home run on an intraday account is how people end up with a $200 buffer and no idea how they got there.

On EOD trailing, you can hold for the full draw with a lot less anxiety, because a giveback doesn't move the floor until the bell.

Which firms use which, and the exact numbers, are on the Prop Firms page. They change, so read it there rather than trusting anything you memorised, including this lesson.

The daily loss limit is on your side 04

Most traders treat the DLL as an insult. It's the only thing standing between one bad morning and a dead account. It locks you out at a fixed daily loss so you can't revenge your way through the whole drawdown in forty minutes.

Two things to check on your specific account. Does hitting it just lock you out for the day, or does it fail the eval outright? And is it measured on realized P&L, or does open trade drawdown count? Those answers differ by firm and they change what "safe" means for you.

Best practice regardless: set your own limit well inside theirs and stop there. If the firm's DLL is the wall, yours should be the line in the sand thirty feet before it.

The consistency rule people meet at the worst possible moment 05

Most firms cap what share of your total profit can come from your single best day. Make the whole target in one lucky morning and you'll pass the number but fail the rule, and you usually find out when you request a payout.

The fix is boring and it works. Spread the target across more sessions than you think you need. If the cap is a third, no single day should be more than about a quarter of the target. That means closing a monster day early, which feels awful and is correct.

Also check whether the rule applies to the eval, the funded account, or both. It's often different between the two phases on the very same account.

Do the arithmetic before the trade, not after 06

This is the part people skip. Before your first trade on a new account, work out three numbers and write them down.

Risk per trade. Half a percent to one percent of the drawdown, not the account size. If your total drawdown is $2,000, one percent is $20 and half a percent is $10. That feels tiny. It's supposed to. It means ten losses in a row costs you a tenth of your buffer instead of your account.

Contracts. Risk divided by stop distance divided by tick value. On MNQ a point is $2, so a 20 point stop on one contract is $40. If your per-trade risk is $40, you trade one. Not two because the setup looks good. One.

Losses to failure. Drawdown divided by risk per trade. If that number is under 20, your size is too big. Under 10 and you're gambling with extra steps.

If the math says the stop is too wide to size properly, the trade doesn't exist. Skip it. There's another one tomorrow.

Fewer trades, not more 07

The instinct in an eval is to trade more to get there faster. Every extra trade is another chance to hit the drawdown, and the marginal ones are always your worst.

Two setups a day inside a kill zone beats nine all session. If you take one A grade setup a day at 1:3 and win half of them, you're up a lot more than the person taking six B grade setups and holding a coin flip.

Set a hard trade cap. Two or three. When you hit it, you're done whether you're green or red. The cap is what stops a normal red day turning into the day you talk about for a year.

Build the plan in weeks, not days 08

Take your profit target and divide it across four weeks. Now divide the weekly number across four trading days, not five, so you have slack built in. That daily number is usually small enough to be almost boring.

That's the point. A target that looks like one great week is a target you'll chase. A target that looks like a small number twenty times is a target you'll execute. Same destination, completely different behaviour.

When you hit the daily number, stop. Going for double after you've made your number is the single most common way a clean week turns red.

What to do after a red day 09

Close the platform. Not after one more trade. Now.

Then journal it before you sleep, while you still remember what you were thinking. What was the setup, what was the rule you broke, what would you have needed to see to not take it. Written down, not thought about.

Come back the next session at half size. Two clean days at half size and you're back to normal. This isn't soft. It's the only reliable way anyone gets through a drawdown without compounding it, and the Mauler Mindset page has the full reset protocol.

Funded is a different game 10

Passing is not the finish. The rules often change the moment you're funded, and the ones that bite are the payout rules, not the trading rules.

Check these before your first funded trade: minimum trading days before a payout, whether there's a profit buffer you have to leave in the account, per-payout caps, how the split works, and whether consistency still applies. Plenty of people pass an eval and then sit on a funded account for weeks unable to withdraw because of a rule they'd never read.

And there's usually an activation fee to turn a passed eval into a funded account. Some plans bundle it, some don't. That's a real cost and it belongs in your comparison before you buy, not after you pass.

The rules that actually get people 11

Holding through the close. Most futures accounts require flat by a set time. Miss it and you can be liquidated and breached in the same minute.

News restrictions. Some accounts restrict trading around high impact releases. Know whether yours does before CPI, not during.

Scalping and minimum hold times. Some firms have a minimum seconds held or filter out very short trades from your stats. If you scalp, read this one twice.

Micro versus mini scaling. Contract limits are usually expressed in minis with a micro conversion. Overshooting the limit is a breach even on a winning trade.

None of these are hidden. They're all in the funded trader agreement that nobody opens. Open it.

The checklist 12

Before you buy an account: know the drawdown type, know whether the DLL fails you or locks you out, know the consistency cap and which phase it applies to, know the activation fee, know the reset policy.

Before your first trade: risk per trade written down, contract size calculated, losses to failure above 20, daily trade cap set, personal daily stop set inside the firm's.

Every day: two or three setups maximum, inside a kill zone, stop when you hit your number, journal the day whether it was green or red.

Do that and the target takes care of itself. Skip the arithmetic and no strategy on earth saves you.

Trading futures carries substantial risk of loss and isn't for everyone. Nothing here is financial advice, and no rule in this lesson replaces reading your own firm's funded trader agreement.