TRADING as a MOM: Rebecca’s FUTURES Strategy & Prop Firm Journey

Finance-Focused Summary

Rebecca describes moving from Forex trading to futures and developing an approach focused on prop firms. Her main instrument is MES (Micro E-mini S&P 500 futures). She trades short-only, saying her short-side setups have been more profitable. She averages into positions and typically trades 5–8 MES contracts, prioritizing lower stress over the lower per-contract commissions of larger contracts.

Trading Framework and Risk Management

Market Context and Entries

• Uses New York VWAP to help assess trade direction and manage stops.
• Watches the 15-minute opening-range high and low.
• Uses the initial balance—the high and low of the first hour after the New York open—as context, rather than as a direct entry or exit signal. She consults Edgeful statistics on the likelihood of price reaching the opposite side of the initial balance.
• A typical short setup is for price to break below the opening-range low, pull back to it, reject it, and then break the low of day. She also looks for confirmation from a full close below the range.
• Adds to a short when the market continues moving in her direction and she can move her stop, increasing potential reward without moving the stop price.

Position Sizing and Trade Management

• Says reducing position size helped her manage trading stress and interruptions while parenting.
• Advises traders to reduce their size if a stop loss feels uncomfortably large. She suggests closing half the position and accepting a smaller loss.
• Recommends beginners try one micro contract, set a stop and take-profit, and let the trade play out rather than monitoring it constantly.
• Generally takes profits relatively quickly, partly because prop-firm consistency rules and sudden market moves can affect results. She cites $500 as an example of a daily profit she would be happy with, rather than aiming for a large payout every few days.

Self-Imposed Loss Limits

• Aims to allow herself three full losing days, then halve her size. She describes this as giving herself up to six additional days at the reduced size before losing the account, or roughly nine days of losses overall.
• Emphasizes not tying trading to a fixed payout deadline and focusing instead on process and risk size.

Prop-Firm Experience and Performance

• Rebecca says she began trading futures in April and had accumulated roughly 20 failed evaluations before changing her approach.
• Early on, she might stay in an evaluation for a month or six weeks. Later, when the rules allowed, she began using larger size to complete evaluations in three or four days.
• She says she lost four funded accounts in one day after being up about $8,000 across the accounts. A distraction at home led to a losing position and tilt trading, eventually triggering the accounts’ maximum-loss limits.
• After reducing her size and receiving coaching, she says she kept funded accounts for about four months and received roughly $10,000 in payouts from September through January.
• She says commissions on 5–8 micros could be around $50–$70 on a $1,000 day. She considers that cost acceptable given the lower stress of trading smaller contracts.
• She had recently opened a personal futures brokerage account and said she would like to fund it with about $5,000. At the time of the interview, she had no live futures-trading history; her earlier live Forex account was around $200.

Prop Firms and Account Rules Discussed

• Topstep was her first futures prop firm. She notes that it does not offer instant-funded accounts and mentions evaluation rules, including a two-day requirement.
• Tradeify: Rebecca cites a $50,000 Growth evaluation with no activation fee and compares it with instant funding, which she says may cost about $100 more.
• Apex: She found its intraday drawdown difficult to manage.
• She also mentions The Futures Desk and Top One Futures. She describes one firm’s approach as encouraging slower trading and trader longevity, but does not clearly identify which firm.
• She cautions that prop firms have different rules and that traders should consider whether they can afford evaluation fees. She also warns against depending on trading as a sole income source, since even strong traders can experience drawdowns.

Host’s Automation Demonstration

Mike demonstrates TradersPost, a platform promoted during the interview, using MNQ (Micro E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures).

• A TradingView strategy traded two MNQ micros, and the host added two more. The connected Apex and Topstep accounts each showed four contracts.
• The host reports a short trade earning about $400 on four contracts, followed by a long entry after price closed above VWAP. He cites an entry near 20,131, $482 in earlier session profits, and about $957 on the open long trade at the time of the demo.
• The strategy tracked its profit target and daily drawdown. An ATR-based trailing stop used the prior 14 bars and a multiplier of 1; an alert would close the position when the stop was reached.
• Mike says the system can route signals to multiple connected accounts. TradersPost is presented as supporting stocks, options, futures, and crypto, as well as both discretionary signal routing and automated strategies.
• Rebecca expresses interest in testing automation to manage multiple prop accounts without manually copying trades. The platform discussion is promotional, and the host invites her to contact support for setup help.

Instruments, Tools, and Sources Mentioned

• Instruments: MES, ES, MNQ, NQ, GBP/USD (Forex), futures, options, stocks, and crypto.
• Trading tools and resources: VWAP, opening range, initial balance, Edgeful, TradZella (trade journaling), Bookmap (order-book visualization), TradingView, TradersPost, and TrendSpider.
• Rebecca says she previously traded Forex and may consider options later, but is focused on futures for now.

Disclosures and Cautions

No explicit “not financial advice” statement is spoken in the subtitles. Rebecca’s comments reflect personal experience and are not presented as a universal strategy. The video includes a TradersPost product promotion and an offer of a free trial; viewers are directed to the company’s disclosures.

Presenters and Sources

The presenters are Rebecca (“Rebecca Trades”) and Mike, the TradersPost host. Rebecca also credits Austin of ASFX with early Forex education and coaching, and mentions The Best Loser Wins, Edgeful, TradZella, and Bookmap as resources.