Lewis Daniels

Before starting an evaluation with Traderscale, I had been trading for almost 2 years. Like most traders, I was strategy hopping, impatient, sloppy and not consistent with my trading.

I heard about Traderscale through my previous mentor, who had nothing bad to say about the firm. He suggested I give one of the $10K challenges a go, and the price for the evaluation was really attractive.

I failed my first challenge and then the next 7 challenges before eventually passing my first account — so around 8 failed attempts before my first pass.

I’ve failed a number of challenges and also passed multiple phases since then, but I don’t have an exact number of attempts for each individual phase.

Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint one reason, but I’d mainly put the failures down to impatience and overtrading. Those were the biggest things I struggled with.

Over time, I learned that patience and consistency were much more important than constantly trying to force trades.

I started with $10K accounts. Since progressing and passing Phase 1s, I’ve now purchased a $25K account and plan to continue scaling into larger accounts.

Right now, I have 3 evaluation accounts with Traderscale and 2 passed $10K accounts.

I couldn’t really put a fixed time on each evaluation because I only trade when I see my setup. That could mean trading once a week, once a day or sometimes even waiting much longer.

I don’t want to force trades just to complete an evaluation quickly.

I use the Daily, 4-hour and 1-hour timeframes to establish my overall bias, and I execute my trades on the 5-minute timeframe.

I look for a previous session liquidity sweep followed by a fakeout. From there, I look for a 5-minute break of structure (BOS) and aim to enter around the 0.618 Fibonacci retracement level.

Failing multiple challenges was difficult, especially early on, but I kept going because I knew failing evaluations was part of becoming a better trader.

Over time, passing challenges showed me that progress was possible if I stayed patient and consistent.

One thing that has always stuck with me is how I felt after blowing my first evaluation.

Even though I knew failing happens to even the best traders, at the time I thought it would never happen to me. It humbled me very quickly.

I’ve failed many challenges since then, but I’ve also passed many since, and that experience helped change my mindset.

I signed up to Traderscale around 4 months ago and received my first payout about a week ago.

My first payout was $273.

It might not seem like a huge amount, but when you realise I originally paid around $50 for the account, that’s roughly a 5x return compared with what I initially put into the account.

For me, it was proof that the process can work.

I’m putting the money back into more evaluations because I know that in trading, a big part of the journey is about scaling and gaining access to more capital.

The biggest surprise was how fast and straightforward the payout process was.

There wasn’t any messing around or unnecessary difficulty compared with experiences traders can sometimes have with other prop firms.

If anyone is on the fence about trading or trying a prop firm, my advice would be to take the leap.

You never know where it could take you, but you also need to accept that failing challenges can be part of the process.

The biggest thing I wish I knew from the beginning is that trading is all about patience and consistency.

Without those two things, it’s very difficult to become a successful trader.

Stay patient, stay consistent and, most importantly, don’t keep strategy hopping.