How I passed a funding challenge for the first time, and how you can too as a beginner trader

I started taking trading seriously for a year now. I’ve been very interested since I was a kid to learn how to trade and make money from the markets. There’s just something about it that fascinated me.

In this article I’ll tell you my story on how I passed the first phase of a funding challenge and the trades I took so you can learn from me. Let’s go.

In order to trade you need money. I wasn’t gonna risk my own money knowing that I had lost thousands of dollars from a few bad calls in the past.

No, this time I’m getting funded. Using money from a funding company like FTMO and letting them take the risk.

What are funded accounts?

If you’re not familiar with funded trading accounts, is simply a company giving you access to hundreds of thousands of dollars for you to trade with.

To access those accounts you pay anything from $100 to $1000 dollars to buy a challenge.

A challenge is your ticket to the funded account. They give you a demo account with fake money and if you’re able to grow it by say 8% in a month, you passed the challenge and can get access to the money for trading.

From $10,000 to $200,000 trading accounts can be yours.

So for $100 you can get an account with $10,000 inside. Unless you’re a millionaire it makes sense to simply multiply your money with funding challenges.

If you have $10,000 dollars to trade, you can use that to trade and maybe make 10% on a good month earning $1,000…

OR buy 10 funded $200,000 challenges.

Let’s say you pass 5 of those challenges. Now you are trading with $1,000,000 dollars. Making 10% a good month on that is $100,000 dollars profit.

Now instead of taking that money and buying yourself a house or a nice car, you invest it back into funding challenges. For $100,000 dollars you can get 100 challenges (each potentially being $200,000).

If you pass say 30% of them, you’d have 30 trading accounts worth a total of $6 million dollars. From there you can multiply and keep growing.

Those are insane numbers. Anybody can now make life-changing money with extremely low risk. All you need to do is actually be good at trading. If you haven’t considered funding accounts you’re missing out big time in my opinion.

Sounds good right? Well the truth is that passing the challenge is hard, really hard if you’re a new trader. It takes years to get good at it.

Easy to enter but very hard to become good enough to make a profit consistently.

Trading as a beginner

A new trader will start placing orders without any rules. Risking way too much, making too many trades a day, not following any system with emotions all over the place.

However an experienced trader will setup hard limits and follow them remaining un-emotional at all times. For me, I followed the advice from Paladin (a very good trader out there) and made myself follow these rules:

• Never take more than 3 trades a day.
• If you win 2 trades, you stop for the day. Same thing if you lose 2 trades.

Then I started paying close attention to ICT and his way of trading. He’s one of the best and has a mountain of information when it comes to trading.

I made myself a plan based on trading Breakers and Orderblocks combined with buyside and sellside liquidity.

As a beginner, I placed many trades. Way too many but eventually I started to control myself and choosing my battles so to speak.

That system allowed me to pass the first part of the funded challenge.

Getting (almost) funded for the first time

To get funded you need to prove that you know what you’re doing. There are very picky at what trader is accessing the capital of those funding companies, rightfully so.

You don’t want any random person to control millions of your dollars even if you’re closely monitoring that money.

Anyway, let’s get to the juicy part. Here are the trades that made me pass the first part of the challenge. I will use trading terms so if you’re completely new to trading and interested simply search them online.

I made about 30 trades, some I cancelled before they executed and others where simply repeated trades to add to positions. All trades were done for SPX 500:

First trade:

We’re not starting well, an impulsive trade. It could be discouraging but I kept going.

Second trade:

This time I paid attention to breakers. I marked one but it didn’t work out because the buyside liquidity was taken.

My trading system is based on expecting the price to reverse when a liquidity side is taken towards the opposite liquidity.

For instance, if sellside is taken, I expect price to move to buyside next since the job is done.

So if buyside has just been taken, as you can see in the image with the first high formed before the big drop down, then you can expect sellside to be taken. Which is exacly what happened.

Instead of recognizing that buyside was done, I persisted in thinking that the breaker would hold when it didn’t.

If you want to learn more about these concepts check ICT (inner circle trader) on twitter and youtube. Let’s continue.

Third trade:

This third trade I recognized that sellside was just taken and entered at a breaker. That’s exactly the setup I look for.

However price didn’t want to go higher from there. The way you can recognize those points is by checking the higher timeframes like the 1h or 4h chart and seeing if the price action from the left is gonna act as a strong resistance / support.

In short I won the trade because I took profits early the moment I saw the orderblock on top (marked -OB).

Fourth trade:

An impulsive trade. Price wasn’t finished going down and I was simply chasing the price. My greed took over and lost the trade.

Fifth trade:

Even though this trade was a win, it wasn’t following my model of waiting for a reversal after sellside was taken (which was the case) and I simply entered at a breaker.

In situations like those it’s better to wait for price to reach an extreme orderblock, a low price before going to the buyside liquidity which is simply the previous high.

As soon as you see the previous low hold and resist, then you enter. Wicky candles are a good sign for that.

Six trade:

How do you spell it? Sixth? Anyway I’ll just use simple numbers to keep it clear from this point forward.

This trade was taken the same day as the previous trade. As you can see I had very good intentions and I followed my model because sellside was just taken.

However I was greedy in a way where I had an unnecessarily small stop loss. It would’ve been a big win had I covered the previous low and targeted the 5 minute high that we saw in the previous capture.

Seven trade:

Again, same day. This time I took a trade with a wide stop loss which was exactly what I had to do.

The only issue was having a small target. I could’ve went for the previous high. Profit is profit still.

Eight trade:

Another great trade. Price took buyside liquidity so I was waiting for it to show signs of going down. That’s exactly what happened. I took a very small profit probably because I was too focused looking at the 1 minute chart.

It helps to have a break and see it from a different perspective and timeframe for a cleared view of what the market is doing.

Nine trade:

Same situation as before. In this case I made a larger trade to conver more ground and setup a reasonable target which ended up working.

Ten trade:

This was a jaggy day. Lots of movement without clear, fast action. I went long thinking that sellside was taken and price was ready to go for buyside.

Didn’t happen. Instead it continued going down for a bit longer.

Eleven trade:

As I say in the image: I waited for price to reach an extreme orderblock and went short with the current trade. It ended up working.

Twelve trade:

I expected price to continue the downtrend but since this is the open of the NY session and sellside has just been taken, it made sense for price to continue going up. It didn’t go down from that orderblock where I entered.

Moreso because price had just came from a very drastic move down during the London session. Which means, we expect the NY session to be consolidating and not expanding / moving towards far away objectives.

Thirteen trade:

I love this trade. It follows my model closely because buyside has just been taken and started moving down. Price didn’t go all the way down, the lowest low was respected. However it moved enough to grab some decent profits.

Fourteen trade:

An impulsive trade fearing that price would move away to the upside without me.

It eventually did happen. However before price moved up, it took sellside very clearly going towards a very far away objective.

So I should’ve waited there and make a decision from 10am to 11am in the NY session.

Fiveteen trade:

A case where the buyside / sellside model didn’t work. It probably has something to do with a higher timeframe setup.

What I mean by that, is that probably price came from a low that hit a very significant orderblock. When that happens price starts moving up very fast and strongly for a few days.

Sixteen trade:

In this case I thought price wasn’t done. I wanted to trade with the trend so I entered long. However it was an impulsive trade because the entry doesn’t make any sense, there are no orderblocks or breakers at that area that would sustain the price.

If you’re learning something from this is to be more patient and wait for price to come to the lowest orderblock before continuing the trend.

Seventeen trade:

This one is a hard one. All signs pointed that sellside was taken and that it should reverse up towards buyside. However this is one of the cases where the higher timeframe is clearly painting a different story.

Price most likely hit a major orderblock up and was rejected in the higher timeframes. That means price is now gonna continue down strongly. That’s what happened here.

Eighteen trade:

See a pattern? It’s always sellside or buyside taken towards the opposite position. However price didn’t break structure. That means it didn’t show any indication of reversing.

Normally when price reverses and changes direction, it has minor breaks of structure, like impulsive moves up before the big move up. You look for those to confirm that price wants to do that.

However more important than breaks of structure are demand / supply levels in control. In a fast bullish moving market, the positive orderblocks are respected. Which means that price creates low points but never goes below them.

So in this case price failed to break above the recent orderblock up and it immediately broke below the recent low, indicating that the bearish move is still not done.

Nineteen trade:

A breaker trade in a trending market. Breakers are good when price is moving fast because they are usually in the middle of empty spaces.

Twenty trade:

Again a continuation trend trade. I entered without a thought for buyside / sellside. This time was using a different concept based on following the trend and entered at a breaker / orderblock following the recent momentum.

Twenty one trade:

I went short as soon as the orderblock was hit and took profits at a fair value gap. Simple and effective.

Twenty two trade:

Entered at a terrible level because I felt like price was moving fast and I would miss it. Talk about emotions messing with your logic.

What happened in reality was that price hit an orderblock and retraced weakly, offering the opportunity to go short at a better area.

Twenty three trade:

A trade using my classic model based on buyside being taken and targeting the sellside. Price did that. It took buyside liquidity, then came back and showed wicks on top, meaning price was rejecting at that level.

Once you see all those wicks up at the orderblock you want to enter short considering what just happened with the buyside liquidity being taken.

Twenty four trade:

Price did take buyside first, then sellside liquidity. Once it took sellside it made a small correction up that didn’t really take the high.

When you see a lot of movement before the NY session you can expect low movement during the session comparatively.

Twenty five trade:

This was a risky trade. Entered after sellside was taken aggressively without any confirmations towards the orderblock. It did work well.

Twenty six trade:

The last trade of the challenge. I entered at an orderblock long towards the previous high. Price was trending bullish so it made sense to go long there.

Conclusion

Trading is hard. It took me 26 trades to earn an 8% on my challenge account. About 3 weeks of trading. Some days you can do 8% in a single day if you risk 1% of your account. It’s all about timing.

However I was playing the slow game by risking 0.5% per trade. Learned a ton by taking the challenge seriously and following my rules.

It slowly builds up your character and makes you understand better the price movements. What price is intending to do.

What has helped me the most is to enter the trading session with a plan. Have an idea about how I want to act. Meaning: I remind myself to look for buyside / sellside liquidity, look for higher timeframe key points and what happened during the London session.

All those data points allow me to make educated decisions. I also mark and draw constantly as I’m watching the charts. When I place a trade, I close metatrader and tradingview because I don’t want to stress myself for no reason.

Either it works out or not. That’s the best way to go about it.

Trading is a long-term game. You come back to the charts everyday with a curious mind and pay some of your attention to it from time to time during the day.

I’m not like other traders that spend all day looking at charts. I simply open them for about 10 minutes, see if there’s something that I could participate in and then come back when there’s an opportunity.

With that said, I hope you learned a few things from my trading style. You can develop your own by learning from people that are massively successful already and choose what you like the most.

It takes years to get good at it and you never stop. You don’t want to stop because it pays your bills and keeps you growing financially, emotionally and consistently wise.

Stay safe and clap this article 50 times if you learned something.