I was able to interview James and Steve from TradeDay. As a new funded futures trader evaluation company as of the time of this interview, we get to learn about James and Steve as traders, why they started TradeDay and how TradeDay differs from all the other firms.
I will mention that since this interview TradeDay has drastically improved their offering. I liked them before, now I love them! They have a lot more programs available now as of 2023, and a more generous payout amount, and easier rules.
Ready to get started? Check out my Deals and Promotions page for the best current trader evaluation deals and discounts. I get access to exclusive discounts for you!
TradeDay is offering an exclusive Canadian Futures Trader discount of 20% off lifetime discount! Use code CFTPROMO to receive the 20% off any of their evaluations.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Everyone, today’s video, another interview. And today, guys, you get two for one. I had the privilege of interviewing Steve and James, the founders of TradeDay. Upfront, I want to tell you a few things. As always, we get into their backgrounds as traders, of course, then we talk extensively about TradeDay, what it is they offer, how they differ from the competition, and I think you’re going to learn in the interview, there’s quite a few benefits to TradeDay. I have to say, I am more than impressed what they’ve put together here. And in a second, I kind of want to quickly give you the highlights, just because I think there’s some really standout features. But upfront, I also want to let you know that James and Steve were more than generous and they said, CFT, we want to let you run a special promotion. So guys, starting today, Monday, July 18th, 2022, all the way through the end of day Friday, July 22nd, you can get 30% off lifetime discount at TradeDay using the code CFTPromo. And just to let you know, that code will work in the future as well to reflect any future sales that TradeDay has. But for this week, it’s a special exclusive CFT promo with 30% off. Guys, I also want to mention, I’m going to be signing up with TradeDay and starting their evaluation on this Wednesday. So I’m also going to be making videos about that, the Daily progress videos. That is really how this channel started. I was documenting my progress through trader evaluation companies so we’re going to do it once again. I’m really excited to try out for TradeDay. I’ve kind of been holding out, I’ve been waiting for just the right company to come along that would pique my interest and TradeDay has definitely done that. I mentioned upfront, there’s a few things that stand out about TradeDay, and I’m going to quickly hit them here and then let you get to that interview. Chock full of information. So first and foremost, TradeDay, they’re funding you with their own capital. There’s no sort of live sim, there’s no funding partners, TradeDay themselves, Steve and James, are the ones putting up their capital for you once you pass the evaluation. You go straight from the evaluation, you pass, you are then trading with their capital. As well, since it is actual real money being traded, there is no sort of weird rules around withdrawals. Once you make money in the live account, you are eligible to withdraw it from day one. There’s no waiting a set number of days, there’s no minimum buffer you have to have, all of those types of things you might have experienced at other companies. Another big benefit is, guys, they are offering the Tradovate platform, which is also a CQG data feed. Why’s that important? Few reasons. One, CQG is far more stable than rhythmic, which is what most other companies are using. Second, Tradovate is a web-based platform. So I often get the question, how can I trade from a Mac, how can I trade mobilely? You’ll be able to do all of that with Tradovate and through the TradeDay platform. Guys, there’s even more benefit, but we cover them extensively in the interview so I think it’s time we hear from Steve and James. I hope you enjoy the interview and be sure to take advantage of that 30% off. CFTPromo, runs until Friday. Everyone, today I’m fortunate enough to talk to the founders of TradeDay, James and Steve. We’re going to get to know a little bit about them as traders, we’re going to learn a lot about TradeDay, and then of course, no interview would be complete without my rapid-fire questions at the end. First of all, James, Steve, how are you guys?
James:
We’re good, thanks.
Steve:
Yeah, good.
James:
Yeah, thank you. I think before we get into it, CFT, I just want to say thanks for hosting us. It’s great that we get the opportunity to really tell our story and the reason why Steve and I came into this sort of sim to funded online props space, so thank you.
Canadian Futures Trader:
No, absolutely. It’s perfect. I love doing these interviews, I love learning more about founders of the company, their backstory, why they started the companies, and we’re going to get into all of that. So before we get into TradeDay too much, I want to learn a little bit about both of you as traders. So whichever one of you wants to go first, if you could just maybe tell me and the audience a little bit about your trading background, what products you trade, what software you use, anything you want to share related to trading itself.
Steve:
Yeah, so I have a long institutional history. James and I met actually on a futures trading floor in London on life, which is the equivalent of like the CMECBOT but in Europe. And this is going back into the early 1990s. So we’ve had a long history of trading. I started trading actually individual stocks in the UK when I was about 14, 15 years old, actually, under the guise of my dad’s account. So I’ve been trading for decades now, like 35 probably years. But then more recently, as I said, I have an institutional background. I was at Merrill Lynch for15 years, Credit Suisse, research analyst, broker before that, technical analysis is my forte, but do a lot of macro fundamental analysis as well. But really, on the trading side, really honed that in the last 10 years since I’ve branched out from the institutional side, always dabbled a little bit, but more seriously in the last 10 years trading futures. But also in Europe, I trade the CFTs with a spread bet with IG, and then on my futures side via Tradovate. And my favorite products to trade, really, I trade pretty much from a technical analysis background. I’m swing trading these days rather than day trading and I’ve really moved across from, started off really in fixed income forex world, but more recently now trading stock indices. And you know what? Just trade the benchmarks, trade the big guys. So it’s pretty much trading between the S&P and NASDAQ most of the time, which actually, funnily enough, is what most of our traders are trading. So that’s kind of my history, what I use and how I approach markets without going into super detail, and I’ll tag it across to James.
James:
Yeah, like Steve mentioned, we met in the early nineties, which is a long time ago. But I made my first trade in April, 1994 as a funded futures trader, and then I was a professional full-time trader all the way through to 2009. And that was always futures and it was pretty much around sort what we call fixed income and interest rates. So in Europe, it was the European interest rates and the sterling interest rate market. And in terms of a sort of fixed income, it’s the government bond market. So futures on gilts in the UK, futures on bunds, in Germany, but they’re actually the European benchmark bond markets. So yeah, that’s like the equivalent products of what you would have trading in Canada, and also the big ones in the US obviously are the Euro, Dollar and the treasury markets. So that was really where my focus was. Traded a little bit of oil, little bit of indexes in sort of mid 2000s. And then I quit trading full-time in 2009, had a short period of about 18 months working for an exchange in a business development role, and then since 2010 and on, I’ve been managing and developing trading groups, big professional trading groups and the most significant of which was Mercury Derivatives, which is one of the largest day trading companies, prop trading groups in the world, sort of a medium size multinational with about 700 traders across 11 offices. And at that time we were trading around 250 to 280 million contracts a year, so a significant operation. But since I quit trading full-time, I’ve sort of been trading part-time and I’ve had periods where maybe in between roles that I was trading more dedicated full-time. And what’s formed my trading in the last sort of three, four years has been the retail side. And looking at sort of the retail space particularly from 2020 and on when we were developing TradeDay, I thought, well, I need to sort of really understand what retail traders are trading and the products they’re using and how they’re approaching the markets. So to that end, I switched from using platforms like Trading Technologies and Stellar Trading Systems to trading on Tradovate. And then I’ve done mostly in the last two, three years, stock indexes. Prior to that, it was a few sort of commodities and stock indexes, but I’ve really been focusing on the stock indexes for the last sort of two to three years, I think it is. And again, the E-Mini and the Nasdaq. And my sort of style of trading is very much sort of fundamental driven. So I make my decisions. I’m aware of the technicals and I trade around levels of support and resistance, and there are a few other technical indicators that I do lean on, particularly around volume and momentum, but a lot of my decisions start with what do I think the market’s trying to do today based on what’s the sentiment, the fundamental picture, what’s happening, what’s sort of driving price? All that being said, TradeDay is a full-time job so unfortunately, I’m not really trading much these days. And in fact, we experienced a big period of growth in June, which really meant I haven’t really traded much for about five, six weeks. Other than, trading a little bit of crypto and things like that on Robinhood. And I wanted to try the Robinhood app because of how popular it became. I wanted to understand the user experience, why retail is drawn to it and have all sorts of opinions about that, which we could go into another time. So I found myself maybe trading some options on there, so some crypto options and some options on some stocks like Facebook and Twitter. But like Steve says, it’s a bit more swing trading rather than day trading just because of the time I have to dedicate to TradeDay now. But yeah, essentially, that’s my trading career in 10 minutes.
Canadian Futures Trader:
No, that’s fantastic. I think everyone could tell you guys obviously have a deep bench when it comes to trading experience both in terms of time and just products and experience and everything there. You touched on TradeDay a few times, and that’s obviously a big part of what I wanted to talk about. I’m curious, just to start things off, what was the genesis of TradeDay? What really made you want to start TradeDay?
James:
Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a lot of inputs both internal and external going into making sort of a big decision of I’m going to start a company, but I’ll try and keep it brief. Really the genesis was March, 2020. Covid had rolled into town and I had lost my job that I had been hired a few months previous to start a US office for a European company and they decided to pull that investment. So I found myself in Chicago without a role. And at that point, more people were concerned about looking for toilet paper than they were for hiring people. So it’s like, what am I going to do now? And I started trading a little bit and a couple of things came together. The first was I realized trading from home on your own, how sort of lonely it is as opposed to being in a professional trading group. So there was that. There was the second thing. I didn’t have a role, what was I going to do next? And I’d been living in Chicago since 2016 and worked for a number of smaller startup type ventures which obviously carry a lot of high risk. And I thought, well, if I’m going to do something next, why not take that risk on myself and start my own thing. And then sort of a period of introspection where I looked and thought what have I really enjoyed doing in my life and where have I really sort of found success? And I kept circling back to the time when I was at Mercury and my role initially was to sort of recruit traders into Mercury from universities, teach them how to trade, manage their risk, help them grow, help them scale, and build trading offices and trading desks and trading teams. And I thought I want to do something like that. And so it was always going to be around prop and then it was like, well, let’s do some research and that’s when I came across this whole online sim to funded or prop trading industry that was at the time, there were three or four sort of big players. Obviously, the last two years, a lot more have joined. But it kind of aligned with my skillset, what I wanted to do, and what I saw as the big emerging trends in 2020, which were more people at home, more people with time on their hands and more people looking for opportunity. And so I did some research around the sort of sim to funded space, and what I came across was there was a lack of transparency, I didn’t know who was running some of these companies, one was sitting behind a Delaware shell company, there was this kind of strange passing off of the funded trader to a funding partner or not actually funding them, which to me was like a huge sort of conflict of interest. When you fund that trader or that trader goes through your evaluation and you want to back them, if you are not actually funding them and you’re putting them on a sim account and paying out a sim, I was like, wow, that’s a huge conflict of interest there. Why’d you want that person to succeed if you’re going to have to write a check? So there’s kind of lot of sort of murkiness around the industry, and I looked at it and I thought, you know what? There’s an opportunity here to create something that’s a bit more professional that we can deliver more professional, draw on our experience of the professional trading world, and deliver some of those tools and advantages to the retail trader at home, whether that’s Steve’s research, which we can come onto in a little bit, market squawk, our knowledge and our experience, put that into TradeDay, and we can do it transparently and be completely open, look, this is who we are, this is what we do, this is our experience, check out our LinkedIn profiles, we can lean on our professional network, so we have people like Steve Ward creating content for us (again, I can touch on in a moment), and also, we’ll fund traders. We’ll actually fund traders. We’ll back them with our money. So our interests and the traders interests are aligned, right? They’re now trading our money. We’re going to do what we can to make them successful. So really, that was the opportunity that I saw, and it took me 18 months to bring it to market. I floated it by Steve, what do you think, and he really liked the idea. Initially, I went to Steve and said I want to really create quality research. Will you provide research on the platform for me? Because Steve owns his own research boutique. And he said, yeah, I’d be happy to do that, but I actually really like the idea, can I come on board? And that was the start of the TradeDay founding team.
Canadian Futures Trader:
I know most of my audiences is very familiar with just the trader evaluation, trader prop model, but in case someone is watching and they don’t quite understand how it all works, could one of you just explain what it’s all about. They sign up, what are they signing up for and where’s it going?
James:
Yeah, so essentially what we’re trying to do from a very high level is find good traders to back, put money in and get a return on our capital. And the way that we do that is that we need to evaluate a trader’s potential to make money when we put them live. And so the evaluation is almost like, if you like, Steve and I’s recruitment period. So you come onto our platform and you go through an evaluation and what we want to do and what the industry does is it removes the ambiguity around funding. So sometimes if you walked into a bank or into a hedge fund or a prop trading group, whatever it might be, and they all have different training processes, but the question is always asked, when am I going to start trading real money? And it’s always a little bit ambiguous like, well show us some kind of results or put up a track record. And what the sim to fund prop trading industry does is it takes away the ambiguity and says, look, here’s a set of rules and here’s a set of objectives. If you achieve these objectives without breaking these rules, we’ll guarantee funding you. And you build those objectives and rules around sort of fundamentals of successful trading. So for example, our three objectives are that we want to see profit targets met and we want to see you trade for a minimum of 15 days. So that shows us a track record over 15 days that you are capable of making profits on a simulated trading account. The third objective is around consistency because we’re looking for risk adjusted returns, but it’s a little bit more complex. It’s explained on the website, but essentially what we’re looking for is people that aren’t going to take huge risks ahead of big numbers or just gamble or just buy at the beginning of the day and hope that it goes up and close it out at the end of the day. That doesn’t tell us anything about their ability to make money. And then on the rule side, they’re all mainly around sort of discipline and risk management, which as everybody knows, to be a successful trader, you have to have discipline and you have to have risk management. So we have a daily stop, trading maximum drawdown, we also have permitted times that we allow people to trade. So we are very much a day trading company. That’s how Steve and I were taught, it’s what we learned and that’s how we’ve managed and developed traders. So we wanted to keep that focus and also remove the risk management issue of people carrying positions over the weekends or when the market’s closed, the stresses you can put on your group’s risk management. If breaking news happens over the weekend when the markets are closed, you have an open position, that market will open significantly or could open significantly away from where you wanted to exit that position and cause all sorts of issues. So we’re very much a day trading company. Permitted products, we have a list of products that we allow you to trade and that’s sort of based on what we assess are sort of liquid and not highly volatile products. So no products are easy, but some products you really want to steer clear with because of the lack of liquidity. So we discount those and we only allow like a core set of products to trade. And so permitted times, products and the amount of position size that you have. So they’re the rules. So you have the objectives and the rules. If you can complete the objectives without breaking a rule, what we do is we open a trading account for you, we put money in it, you start trading it, and if you’re successful, we split the profits with you. It’s an 80/20 split. Actually, the trader gets to keep the first 5,000 and then thereafter it’s an 80/20 split so the trader takes home 80% and we take 20% for putting up the risk capital for that trader. So that’s kind of the journey or the summary of how online proprietary trading works.
Canadian Futures Trader:
One way that a lot of traders get caught off guard is they go through the evaluation, they follow the rules, and then they get funded and funded in quotes possibly for a lot of the companies, but funded, and the rules change but they don’t always know that in advance. So I’m curious. Maybe there wasn’t a scaling plan, but now there is, once you’re funded or whatever the case might be. How do your rules translate from the evaluation to the funded? I guess mainly around things like scaling and drawdowns.
Steve:
Yeah, well, the answer is, if anything, our rules, as you say there, CFT, a lot of other companies maybe make the rules a little bit more restrictive, which is the last thing the trader wants to see. We’ve discussed this a lot in the past and that step from being on the sim to actually being funded and it being real money is a big step. It’s psychological step. And I think the last thing that the trader needs is more restrictions at that point in some ways. So what we would say is actually we feel that there are kind of fewer restrictions in a lot of ways. So we map the same five rules that James mentioned there. So they have to stick by those rules that are on the evaluation. So that doesn’t change. They have the daily stop, the trailing max draw down, position size permitted, contracts that they can do in the permitted times, they still have to close out at the end of the day. But then when that trailing max draw down reaches the starting balance of the account, so once they’re basically starting to move into actual real kind of profit, it freezes and at this point we also remove the daily stop loss. So that means it’s less restrictive. Now even though we do remove that daily stop loss, that might flashlight warning signals really in some ways. But what we tend to find, and we had the conversation with the trader, is that they will put in their own voluntary stop loss and they may actually even make it tighter than what we had on the evaluation to give them more discipline, more room. So that’s voluntary on their side. And then at this point, remember, we are working with the trader, at this point, very much more hands-on. We’ve got more time to give those individuals once they’ve gone through. Obviously, we’ve got a large number of people coming through the evaluation challenge. We can only give them so much time. And there is a mentoring part which I’ll talk about a little bit later, but there is a mentoring. If you are on our advanced course, you get a one hour mentoring with one of us each month. But effectively, there’s fewer restrictions but there’s more handholding because it is this big psychological jump going from sim only to actual funded. Even though it’s not their money, it’s our money and it is our money and we want to protect that as well, so we want to give that extra handholding, but if anything, there are fewer restrictions and more flexibility, which should make it, in some respects, easier for the trader to make that leap.
James:
Yeah. If I could just pick up on two points that Steve’s mentioned, because we get a lot of questions around these two points and I just want to nail them home. The first is the trading maximum drawdown freezes when it reaches the starting account balance. So at that point, the account can grow and it scales. We actually scale the trading. We have allowed the trader to take an extra one lot of risk for every thousand dollars they make. And there’s no stop. So one question we get a lot of is, well, if I’ve got 10,000 in my account and I can trade 12 E-Mini S&Ps, a $500 stop is no good to me. Well, we actually remove the stop completely, as Steve said, when your trading maximum drawdown reaches your starting account balance. But as Steve said, what we find is we work with the traders and some people don’t want working with. They just want to pass the evaluation and do their own thing and that’s fine. But a lot of the traders are responsive and they do want to work with us and what they want is for us to impose a self-imposed daily stop, as Steve mentioned. But what’s really important to point out here is if that daily stop selected in the day, right? So let’s say a trader has $10,000 in their account and they say, I want my daily stop at $2,000 and they lose $2,000 in the day, they don’t lose that trading account. That was a self-imposed stop, that wasn’t a breach of TradeDay’s rule. So it’s a self-imposed stop just in place to help them risk manage themselves when they lose control. And we all lose control sometimes so it’s always important to have these stops in. So that was just a couple of things I wanted to point out or sort of like just really underscore because we do get a lot of questions around those.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Perfect. Yeah, no, I think it was great to clarify some of those things and those are definitely kind of benefits with TradeDay. Just from what I’m hearing and already having looked at the site and whatnot, if someone went and opened their own brokerage account and they set their own stop loss and they hit it, they don’t close your account so it operates much like a real account would.
James:
Yeah, that’s because it’s a real account.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Because it is a real account.
James:
Yeah. That’s definitely the world that we come from and that’s what we wanted to sort of give to the trader with TradeDay.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Yeah. Perfect. And yeah, I know a lot of times the feedback is those rules that some of the other companies have do feel a little bit like… they said it that way. And one other thing I just personally wanted to clarify for anyone listening. You kind of touched on it, but I just want to make sure because I know one thing that really gets people is trailing drawdowns. Now I know you refer to yours as trailing drawdown, but I also want to make sure people know it’s not a live intra trade thing. If you’re not up 500 in a trade and then comes back on you. You haven’t impacted your drawdown at all. It’s end of day that it updates, correct?
James:
Correct. It’s a really important point actually, and thank you CFT for pointing it out because I don’t know if any other prop group is doing it the way we’re doing it. So we calculate our trailing drawdown on the end of day balance on the evaluation and on the live trading account. And the reason why we do that, and I’ll be honest, actually, we set it up slightly differently. We initially set up TradeDay with end of day on the evaluation, then intraday on live. And it was just kind of in that process of setting everything up on how are we going to do this, and it wasn’t until we were live and started funding traders, we’re like, God, we’ve made a huge error here. If you think about it, you could be in a trade, you could be long, let’s say, and some breaking news comes out that sends that market rallying, and you are like, oh, great, great I’m making money. But before you have chance to cover that position, it could correct, and then you manage to cover that position and let’s say you make $400, $500 out of that trade, but at one point it was printing at 2000, you’ve had a good day. You’ve made money trading, and you had the discipline not to give all those profits back, and you managed to cut that trade before that market came back and took you offsite. Yet, if you are running a trade in maximum drawdown that’s in real time, you are punishing the trader and it just doesn’t make sense. And you could be fortunate enough to catch one of these lucky breaks, which as a trader, over time we all catch lucky breaks, and you could be fortunate enough to catch one of those. Why should you be punished for it? So we decided immediately, I think it was actually on our first funded trader, we were like, oh, we’ve got this wrong. Let’s make the change immediately. And that was like back in February, I think. And so what we did was like, okay, we’re going to settle trading maximum drawdowns against end of day balances. And that’s why we do it.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Another thing you kind of touched on, but I want to get more into it just so it’s really clear for people is when they pass the evaluation, they’re going straight to funded live account. And when I say live, I mean real money live. Lots of companies use the word live, but it’s still sim. There’s not even option for an in between stage with you guys. It’s just you guys are funding them. Can you just talk a bit more about that?
James:
Yeah, as I said at the start of the interview, looking around the space, I just couldn’t understand what was going on. I was trying to get my head around it because I’ve never seen anything like it in the professional world. Oh, you’ve passed the evaluation or whatever it is, the recruitment process in the professional trading group, and now we’re going to fund you, but actually we’re not really. What we’re going to do is going to pay you out of a SIM account. And I was trying to understand what was going on there and it just didn’t make any sense to me. And as I said the conclusion was, ultimately the trader is not aligned with the company then. Everybody sort of does it differently, right? Everyone has their own rationale, but for us it was like we want to be aligned with that trader and we want to help that trader grow. And I think what’s happening now is some people are beginning to wake up to the huge conflicts of interest that they have when they’re on a sim account with that funding partner. That was it really. And so what happens with us is the minute you pass the evaluation, we start the account opening process and I think it takes, we say on our website, allows seven days, but on average, it’s taking two to three days now to open a funded account for somebody. And all we need from that individual is a proof of address, a government issued ID, and then we ask them to fill in an account opening form. So the quickness that they can get that to us, we turn it around immediately to Tradovate, and then we’re obviously waiting on Tradovate to create the account. But we’re about sort of two to three days on average. We do say seven in case we run into a weekend or that trader’s taking their time returning those forms or for whatever reason, Tradovate are just a little slow in turning it around. But yeah, that’s what we do. We open the funded account and in that short window as well, Steve and I will reach out to the trader and say, Hey, you want to have a call? If you don’t, it’s fine, but we’d like to sort of have a chat with you about what the expectations are and anything we can do to help you. And as Steve touched on, there is this huge challenge that all traders face. It’s what we call sim to funded drop off in performance. We just try and sort of say, look, we’re going to expect this, you should expect this, and probably, we can give you some coping tools or a strategy to sort of work through this until you’ve found your trading confidence and you start making some money and have some momentum in your trading.
Steve:
Just one little thing to add on to that as well is, just to stress if it wasn’t clear, is that there is no funding partner. The money is quite literally ours. And that’s just the way it is. So they lose, we lose directly from our own pockets. So I think that’s really important. There is no third party putting up the cash. It’s our cash so we are very, very much aligned with wanting that trader to succeed.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And quite honestly, I feel like I’ve been around the block with the different evaluation companies for several years now and TradeDay is the only company I’m aware of that the founders are putting up your own money. It’s just unheard of.
James:
But you know what, CFT? In the professional prop trading world, that’s how it is. The people that own the companies, Don Wilson that owns DRW, that’s how he got started. He put his own capital in trading accounts and backed traders, and that’s what they do. So when we came to this space, we were like, what’s this payout on a sim or what’s this passing off to the funding partner? But thank you because it created an opportunity for us to sort of step in.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Yeah, very much so. TradeDay did definitely stands out in a good way. And speaking of standing out and speaking of being basically a real prop firm virtually but real, is you offer a ton of educational content on your site, which I was able to look through some of it, but maybe you can just talk a bit more about what’s available to traders on the educational resources side of things.
Steve:
Yeah, we’re a long way into this interview already so I’m not going to take too much time on this, but it is a really important part, I would say, to any traders. The best way to see the resources come take the full 14 day free trial. So there’s a little sales pitch in there straightaway. But yeah, come take the 14 day free trial and have a look at all those resources. As you say, CFT, you’ve just started to go through and there’s a load of stuff in there. I will touch on the highlights because that’s what we’re here to do, but I’m not going to go into massive depth. I mean, we have squawk service. I don’t know now how many of the other guys are giving that for free. So you have access to that on the trial, you have that the whole time you’re on the evaluation challenge, and you have that as a funded trader. So again, our close contact, Harry Daniels, runs a school service called LiveSquawk. That’s a 24 hour Squawk service. They’re giving social media updates as well. And there’s some research attached to that, but really it’s the Squawk service. It’s a live audio Squawk giving you updates as data comes out, rumor comes out, breaking news, all that kind of stuff, you’re getting it in real time. So we offer that. On the psychological side, there’s a load of videos in there on the psychological side, but we also have podcasts and load of content from Steve Ward. Now Steve Ward’s actually an ex Olympic coach. He helped with Olympians. He’s segued across from sports into trading and he now coaches many large hedge funds, investment banks, et cetera. He’s exceptional in his field, very, very well known. Just go and Google him, look him up on LinkedIn, Steve Ward. And he’s one of our resources and we’re hoping to get him to do some videos with us going forward as well, this kind of stuff, to actually help out the traders directly. What else do we have? Well, we have my market research which is for market charters. So that’s a daily update on technical analysis. It’s 10 products, but we’re covering the stuff that our guys trade, S&P and oil. There’s also some stuff on there on FX and some other markets as well. And also, we do a weekly kind of macro update. What’s happened the last week, what we’ve got coming up in the in the next week, what’s important on the macro fundamental side. And then we have a whole host of kind of educational videos on risk management, on technical analysis, on psychology of trading, on just some real basics. What are futures? If you’re new to the space, what are futures, how do futures work, how does the rollover work? How do you open up an order? How do you use Tradovate? It comes to all kind of basic stuff. So we we’re taking it from beginner to intermediate. We’re not actually directing. I’ll say one thing we don’t do, and I don’t think we will do this either, is we don’t give strategy. I mean, it’s up to the trader to bring their own strategy and because any strategy is going to change over time. So one, there’s no point in just handing over someone’s strategy. I think it’s really useful but we’ve given them the tools to build their own strategy. And every single trader is different so what works for one guy may not work for another guy because of his own psychological biases. So I think it’s really important that the trader takes the tools that we give, builds their own strategy, we can help out with the mentoring, I mentioned as well in the advanced program, and the last thing I’ll mention is every market day, Monday through Friday, we do a webinar. I’m doing most of those webinars in here as the research analyst where I talk through what’s happened the last 24 hours, what we’ve got coming up the next 24 hours, where are the important technicals, support-resistance levels, what’s the flavor of the market, what are the macro fundamental geopolitical risks facing the market, what are we watching out for today? And obviously they can pick all that stuff up from the Squawk. So I know I said I was going to be quick, that was as quick as I could pretty much get all of that stuff in. I’m drawing breath in here because there’s so much on there. And do you know what? We want to add more. Time is a constraint, but we are adding more continuously and we hope to add even more for our traders because education is key, knowledge is power, and we are trying to hand over a lot of that knowledge. Education, knowledge plus experience equals wisdom, and that’s what we’re trying to hand over. Because our experience has been in the whole food chain of the trading world, everyone thinks, even I speak to hedge fund managers and they think the central banks are having them over. The guys at the banks think the hedge funds are having those. And it goes all the way down. We’ve got us retail, protail guys at the bottom and everyone thinks they’re not getting what the guy above them is getting. Well, we are trying to give a little bit of what is available at professional prop firms and investment banks, and hand that down to the man on the street and hopefully, we’re succeeding in doing that.
James:
Yeah, I’m conscious of time too and Steve covered most of it, but there’s just one small piece I wanted to add. I think the reason why some people come to TradeDay is because of our experience, Steve and I’s experience. And Tara on the trading team as well, the trading manager. And what we want to do is have the traders on TradeDay have access to that experience. So on the daily webinars, there’s the ability to chat and ask questions. We have a forum section where you can post questions or a chat. There’s a chat sort of stream, activity stream, where you can post questions and we will answer them there for you. So you don’t have to be on the advanced program to get access to Steve and I. There are facilities within the platform where you can get your questions answered.
Canadian Futures Trader:
I’m having flashbacks to when I first started the trader evaluation world. I was new to futures, I knew enough to be dangerous, but I was actually really surprised by how little educational stuff was out there. You were just left. You sign up and it’s like, okay, good luck. Wow, where do I learn? I just had to fend for myself. And to this day, I see new traders, I’m on a few discords and whatnot, people are really struggling and they want that knowledge and that education. So I think it’s important a company like TradeDay provides that. And like you said, it’s not just like, okay, here’s a few videos. It’s like you have interactive webinars or whatever you want to call them. So there’s a lot of resources there. So getting back to being funded and you trade for however long a month, you make some money. So one thing that really takes traders by surprise with some of the other firms is kind of the restrictions around withdrawals. Now, I know you guys don’t have them, but in terms of the way the other companies do, I was wondering if you could just spread a bit of light on how do withdrawals work? You know, I make $10,000. Do I have to wait a month and a half to withdraw it? Is there a buffer I have to keep? Anything like that you can talk about.
James:
Yeah, so if you think about, CFT, how you sort of equated what’s happening at TradeDay, what would be happening if you opened your own future’s trading account, that’s pretty much the same experience. If you make money, if you join us, you go live, you make a thousand dollars, you want to pull that thousand dollars out, you can pull that thousand dollars out. There is no restrictions on it. There’s two caveats. The first is that withdrawals under $500, we pass on the bank charges for the transfer, and that’s to stop people taking $50 out. And we’ve been having to pay a lot of $25 by the bank every time we make a transfer. So withdrawals under 500, we pass on the bank fees, withdrawals over 500, we will swallow the fees. And the second thing is risk limits are adjusted after withdrawals. So if you remember, I touched on our scaling plan earlier. For every thousand dollars you make, we allow you to trade one more. So you start out in the beginner program with two lots, 10,000 in your account, you could trade up to 12 lots. Well, if you draw 8,000, we’re going to cut your limits all the way back to reflect the $2,000 balance in your trading account. So there’s that. But aside from actually withdrawing money, you can withdraw it whenever you want. Now I just want to say one thing here because I think this is really important and we mentioned it in another interview. Traders, you are never going to make a million dollars a year with $10,000 in your trading account. You need to grow your trading account balance. It’s the most important thing you can do as a funded trader. So we encourage people not to take withdrawals. Now, as I said, it’s their money. They made it, it’s in a trading account, they have access to it, they can take it. So there are no restrictions. But if you are serious about becoming a successful, sustainable trader that grows and maybe gets to the point where they quit their day job and does this full-time and then maybe goes on to make more money than they’ve ever made before, the only way you’re going to do that is by putting money in your trading account. And that is not like writing a check. You can’t put a hundred thousand in your account and be a good trader. Growing your trading account is a reflection of your skill acquisition over time and your ability to sort of handle and manage bigger and bigger risk. So we do encourage people to sort of keep growing their trading accounts, but we have some traders that take, literally here’s a story for you. We funded somebody last week. They lost a little bit of money, they went down, they made some good money. He emails me and says, can I take a withdrawal? I’m like, yeah, absolutely. He takes a withdrawal and hits two losing days in a row. He’s got $500 left to his trading maximum drawdown and he just hit it today and blew it. He’s gone. And I feel like if he hadn’t taken that withdrawal, he could have ridden out these sort of two or three losing days, had enough of a cushion to recover and keep going. And that’s kind of what it’s about in trading. It’s having the ability to sort of recover from trading losses and you only do that through sort of learning to recover from trading losses, but also having cash in your account to ride out these string of losses and or these losing periods, so you can make the adjustments necessary in your trading, in your risk, reduce your risk, trade smaller, get your confidence back, and then start increasing the trading size again.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Most, if not every single company, out there charges some type of fee once you pass, whether it’s a monthly fee or an upfront fee to move into a, again, in quotes, live account. Do you guys have any fees once you pass or are funded?
James:
No. The only thing that we don’t charge, but the exchange charges is the CME’s market data charge, the professional market data charge, which is currently $132 a month per exchange. We have no control over that. Because you are now trading our money in the eyes of the exchange, you are now classified a professional trader so you have to pay professional market data fees. But to help with that, what we do is the day that people are funded, we stop charging them the monthly subscription to our members’ site. So there’s no monthly fees to TradeDay and you have access to TradeDay and all our resources and the Squawk and everything for the lifetime that you remain a funded trader with TradeDay for free. So that kind of helps alleviate that additional financial pressure that comes once they’re funded. But there’s no activation fee, there’s no minimum account fee, there’s no, Hey, you’ve got to trade for six weeks, let’s hope he blows the account type period that we sometimes see on these sim accounts and payouts accounts. It’s just like you pass the evaluation, we’ll stop charging you there, fill out the forms, send them to us, we open the account, start trading, off you go, make money, withdraw it whenever you want.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Tradovate is your trading platform, which is actually a huge benefit because again, not a day goes by that I don’t hear from traders. And they say, how do I use Ninja Trader on my phone or on a Mac? And I’m like, well, there’s ways, but it’s not like there’s just an app. You guys have Tradovate though, which they can use just on their phone or on the web. So I don’t know if you could just talk quickly about Tradovate. I know myself, they’re both the brokerage and provide the platform. Maybe just explain it a bit for people how it works.
James:
Yeah. So Tradovate is what they call an Introducing Broker and we have our master trading account with Tradovate, and that’s how we fund people. But Tradovate provide us with the simulated market so that’s how we run the evaluation challenge. The big difference between a platform like Ninja and Tradovate or two big differences are Tradovate is web-based. So you can trade on your Mac or on your pc, on your Android or on your iOS, and it actually has its own downloadable dedicated application in the Google store and the App Store. So very, very flexible in terms of its access whereas Ninja is a downloadable Windows-based application. Period. So there’s that. And the second thing is Tradovate runs on the CQG data feed. So when we were looking in assessing platforms from the professional world, what you look for when you’re creating trading infrastructure is stability, particularly stability around connection. Because if the trading engine goes down or your ability to connect to the trading engine at the exchange goes down, then it could be the death of a company if they’re working lots of orders in the Order book and they can’t control them. So I come from a world where stability is important, and when I was looking around the space, it appeared that the CQG data feed is more stable than the rhythmic data feed. And anecdotally, somebody told me on Friday, trading to Ninja in the afternoon closed down because of the rhythmic data feed instability. So that was why we chose Tradovate. And then subsequently, there has been an acquisition in the space. So Ninja’s bought Tradovate, and this is really, really great news for the trading community because right now they’re going through an integration and essentially what it means, if they get it right, is that you’ll be able to sort of trade on Ninja if that’s your preferred platform and trade out or close your position or check the market on Tradovate. You know, they’ll go complete interoperability. So it makes really good trading infrastructure for traders. It’s coming down the pipeline. And what it means for TradeDay is that we can offer Ninja very soon. We actually were hoping it would be this month, but we’re waiting on the integration of the software at Tradovate and Ninja before we can offer it to our traders. So we’re very much on their timetable.
Canadian Futures Trader:
I’ve used Tradovate myself before, and it is a little bit easy. I mean, on top of the web base and everything else and the C Q G feed, it’s just a little bit easier, I feel like, for a newer trader. The C Q G feed you touched on, I was going to tell a story, but you almost said it already. Yeah, rhythmic has been having problems lately. To be honest, the more people using it and newer companies using it, it’s really been stressed. And yeah, Friday went down. Last night, it went down for a little bit, so I’m not going to say anymore, but yeah, C Q G, definitely, big benefit it seems, because you’re right, stability. Nothing like panic, you’re in a trade and your connection just won’t work.
Steve:
Yeah, it happens a lot.
Canadian Futures Trader:
We’re getting close to the end. I think you’ve thrown out a lot of fantastic information, intelligence for people, but I am curious, do you have any last final thoughts when it comes to tips for traders passing the evaluations? It seems like I can tell people all day, all night and nobody listens to me, but maybe you guys have some tips for people.
Steve:
This is from both my experience and from watching and mentoring people over the last at least 10 years and even to some extent of banks pre prior to that, but certainly more in the retail space, the protail space. From my own experience as well is and it’s a bit of a cliche, but it is a marathon, not a sprint. People are trying to make money too quickly. I’m seeing it all the time now, having to buy resets minute to minute sometimes, because they’re trading too big. They’re just trading, their size is too big. And so don’t trade too big, know your risk limits. Markets are volatile at the moment, which is fantastic for traders. It’s brilliant for day traders particularly. That’s what you want as a trader. You want volatility. That’s why the whole meme thing blew up through covid because of the volatility. And that’s what we want. It’s not good for an investment of an investor, but it’s great for a trader. But that volatility is a double-edged sword. And so my biggest tip will be you can still make good money by trading smaller size when there’s more volatility so reduce the size. Give yourself more breathing room maybe on your stop loss a little bit because the market is going to chop back against you aggressively at some point, not only in current markets, but particularly in current markets. And we had many years of markets in the doldrums of low volatility where you did have to increase size, but a lot of the people we’re seeing now are newer to trading. It’s been volatile for some time now, you don’t have the excuse of coming from the times that James and I have seen when you did have to up your size because it wasn’t moving and so that’s the only way you could make money. So that’s the biggest tip I could possibly give. And also I think I see a lot of people as well, and this is kind of talking us out of some business in some ways, but I’d rather be open and frank and honest, is don’t come to us, in a sim to funded, without taking a trial, without having a look around and without having a strategy. Don’t learn how to trade using real money. Don’t go into the evaluation challenge without your strategy being kind of tested in a pure CM environment where you’re not paying for anything. So I would say do that. And it’s something we are looking to launch. We’re looking to launch basically an area, space where people can come to TradeDay, they can pay a much lower fee, have access to our resources, but don’t actually go on the challenge, learn the craft first before diving in. CFT, you said when you were new there was no education and you were straight in there on the challenge learning. You basically had to donate funds to the company, right? Well, so those would be my two tips. I’ll throw it across to James and see if he wants to add anything to that.
James:
Steve touches on the most important point, which I’ll elaborate on in a moment, but I’ll start with this. I’ll tell you who doesn’t pass the challenge. The people trading on their phones. And I see it because we see how people are entering the order or how people are entering the market. And as soon as I see somebody trading a lot on their phone, I’m like, oh, this guy’s not going to be around long. I get it. It’s the entertainment factor, that value, okay, that’s fine if that’s what you’re looking for. I’m certainly not looking to put money in a trading account for you, but hey, so don’t trade on your phones people. The phone really is there as a backup if you lose your internet connection or you just want to check where the market is or you have to step away from your desk in an emergency, but don’t do it on your phone. So there’s that. But Steve touches on basically it. Basically it can be summed up in over leverage. It’s the number one reason why traders blow up. It’s the number one reason why hedge funds blow up. It’s the number one reason why Lehman Brothers blew up. Over Leverage, over leverage, over leverage. And what we see is on the beginner program, we only allow two contracts, but even really that is over leverage with a 500 daily stop in the Nasdaq for unskilled traders, even for skilled traders. And some people come in and start hammering at the Nasdaq in two lots and before you know it, they’re triggering their daily stop. So watch the over-leverage, take your time. Really just take your time. You are much, much better off cycling through two or three months of membership, trading micros, finding your feet, gaining confidence, slightly increasing your size, the minute you’re sort of running to trouble, reducing your size. Those are the people that we see pass rather than people that come at it, hammer at it trading many times in the day, taking big risks, big swings in their P and L. You know, eventually these people blow out within a handful of days or in a few weeks. Don’t do that. As Steve said, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time, just work up slowly. Just work up slowly. And remember, these markets are very, very, very tricky at the moment. They’re very dynamic in their volatility changes and their volume. The problems with lack of volume in certain spots and, God, the data that came out this week sends it motoring in one direction and then you think that’s going to set the trend for the day and for the next four hours it grinds up against you. It’s like really, really difficult, tricky markets to trade. So know that you don’t have to trade every day, right? As a day trader, you’ve somehow put yourself under pressure that I’ve got to make money every day. Well, first of all, it’s not about making money every day. Day traders should be measuring their performance over the course of the week and expect to have one, maybe two losing days in that week. But what I’m going back to here is that trading every day. Don’t feel that pressure. If that market is not suiting your strategy or you don’t have a feel for what’s going on, don’t feel the pressure to trade that day and just so you can mark up one day on the evaluation challenge. Take your time, wait for your trade setups to form, look for good risk reward, and have a strong risk management overlay when you go in, and those are the sort of people that we see do well on the platform.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Well, this has been fantastic. We’ve learned a lot about TradeDay. I’m excited. Just to let my audience know, I’m going to be trying out with TradeDay. I’ve kind of been holding out, waiting for a company to come along that could offer more than a lot of the pop-up companies lately have. So TradeDay fills that need. So I’ll be recording some videos, doing some trading, starting in a few days and look for those updates. So I’ll be able to give firsthand experience using TradeDay. But any good interview ends with my patented rapid-fire questions. Are you guys up for some rapid-fire questions?
James:
Sure.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Okay, cool. I’ll call your name. We’ll alternate back and forth since there’s a few of them. Okay, let’s start with Steve. Steve, what’s your favorite color?
Steve:
Blue.
Canadian Futures Trader:
James, if you could only trade one product and one product only for the rest of your life, what would it be?
James:
E-Minis, S&Ps.
Steve:
Oh me too.
Canadian Futures Trader:
No, feel free if you both want to answer, that’d be cool. Steve, would you rather be long or would you rather be short in a trade?
Steve:
Oh, that’s a good question. I kind of learnt my craft in bull markets when I was young. I guess long.
Canadian Futures Trader:
James, what you’re answer?
James:
I’m the eternal pessimist. I’m a short.
Canadian Futures Trader:
It’s what makes the world goes around. We need to have different opinions. This is a good question at both of you. I do need your answer on this one. Have you ever yoloed a trade? Whoever wants to admit first.
Steve:
You know what? As much as we preach this, I think you’re not human if you haven’t thrown yourself out there and we’re not kind of Buddhist traders. So I think, yeah, I’ve gone out, I’ve stretch risk limits in the past, usually when I’m on a winning streak, which is a dangerous time to do it, and you know what? I’ll be honest as well, it’s bitten me as well. And I’m always glad it has bitten me because if it doesn’t bite you, then what you tend to find is further down the line, you get a bitten a lot harder. So yeah, I’ve learned a few lessons from those yolo trades.
Canadian Futures Trader:
James?
James:
I think what we should do is we should have a whole new YouTube video where we can discuss things like this and the lessons that have been learned along the way. And I’m actually pretty serious about that. l learned some of my biggest lessons and some of my biggest mistakes. One thing I hear, and I know it’s supposed to be quickfire, but I can’t help myself, I’m sorry. One thing I hear a lot in trading is, oh, you need to be a robot and you need to remove emotions from trading. And I just think to myself, that is such BS because you cannot remove. As a day trader that’s manually pointing and clicking, you cannot remove your emotions from trading. It’s impossible. You are human, right? You react to your emotions. The trick is to understand your emotions and when you are at your most vulnerable. And for me, my yolo, which I’m going to say for another time was when I was so overconfident that the market was going to do one way, and I actually, Steve, me and you, and I think I can’t remember who they were, a couple of other people, were in a pub the night before and I’m going, this thing’s going to crash tomorrow, I’m going to make a fortune. And I went in the next day and started smashing it on the open and the thing just like squeezed up, squeezed me out. And it was such a bad loss that it was 10x my average loss. We were trading on the floor so the clerks were matching the trades, and they came in and they tapped me on the shoulder and they said, hey James, I think we’ve input a number wrong in the computer. We’ve added a zero. And I like, looked at them and I said, you didn’t add a zero, I’ve lost 10 x what I normally lose. And I actually ended up walking out the pit and walking home, and again, a story for another time. But know, as Steve says, we’re all human, you’re subject to your emotions, you’re vulnerable. The trick to being a good trader is being honest with yourself, understanding your emotions, and knowing when you are vulnerable to trading and managing yourself and perhaps even stepping away from trading at that point. So the short answer is yes, I’ve done it. The long answer is I look forward to our next YouTube video.
Canadian Futures Trader:
No, absolutely, and I love that idea. The lessons learned from it are much more important than the immediate monetary loss, which is painful because of course. I’ll put it this way, I’ve yet to interview somebody who says they haven’t yoloed a trade. Let’s see, let’s just do it for both of you guys. So what’s your ideal number of monitors? You’re sitting there on your desk trading away. How many monitors do you want to look at?
James:
That’s a really good question, more lessons to be learned. I like three. I’m going to leave it there, right? I like three.
Canadian Futures Trader:
I feel like there’s more to that story.
James:
There’s a lot more to that. Well, I have the experience of managing traders and trading groups, so I know the propensity for people to want more and more as they become bigger and bigger traders. But you’re over complicating the decision-making process and paralysis through indecision starts creeping into your trading. Try and keep it simple, but on the one hand, don’t do it on your phone, there’s not enough information. I can swing trade on my laptop, but if I’m sitting down day trading, I want two, maybe three screens.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Cool. Steve, what do you say?
Steve:
If I have screens, it’ll be four. Now, I’m sitting in front of a big Mac here, an iMac, so I can divide that up really nicely and it’s effective, but I do divide it into quarters on the iMac. So yeah, I think four. Anything more than four…
James:
Yeah, you’re wasting your time.
Steve:
It’s like having that sports car, right? It’s compensating for something.
Canadian Futures Trader:
The final rapid-fire question and I’m going to take a guess. I know your guys’ answers so whoever wants to answer or both of you can do it at the same time. What’s your favorite online futures trader tryout company?
James:
That’s a tough one. Do you think it has to be TradeDay?
Canadian Futures Trader:
TradeDay.
Steve:
I think it has to be TradeDay.
James:
Come and try us out. Look, you know what, we’re new to the space. We got going in November 21, so we’re about eight months old. And what we did is, because we were new, we were like, let’s create a 14-day free trial and make everything that we have available in that 14-day free trial. So all our education resources, our market squawk, our daily research, our daily morning meetings, it’s all there on the 14-day free trial. You know, just come and see if you think we’ve delivered and that we are the right partner for you.
Canadian Futures Trader:
No, I love it.
Steve:
I’m sure there’s going to be a discount code in there some way, CFT?
Canadian Futures Trader:
Yeah, I was going to say, I think first of all links down. Anybody watching this video on YouTube, go, links down below, links from my site. I even put up a little summary review of TradeDay on my site already. But because TradeDay are more than generous, they’re offering everybody who’s watching this video or just visits my site, 30% off this current week. So when you’re seeing this video, the discount will run from Monday until Friday, 30% off. And as everybody loves, it’s a lifetime discount. So if it does take you more than a month, you’ll get the 30% off in the future months as well. And as I said, I’m going to be taking advantage of the 30% off and signing up myself. So I’m looking forward to putting up progress videos and showing people the entire process of signing up, trading it, and I’m going to say hopefully passing, but I’d like to be pretty positive. I’m going to pass and I’m going to show people that process too.
James:
That’s fantastic.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Yeah. So, cool. Well, that is it for my questions. I want to thank James and Steve for being here. This has been fantastic.
James:
Yeah. And thank you CFT. We really appreciate it and I know it’s a while and if your audience is still with us, thank you for listening to us and we hope to see you on the platform.
Steve:
Cheers guys.
Canadian Futures Trader:
Thanks everyone for watching.
Steve:
Have a great trading day.
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Risk Disclosure:
Futures and forex trading contains substantial risk and is not for every investor. An investor could potentially lose all or more than the initial investment. Risk capital is money that can be lost without jeopardizing ones’ financial security or life style. Only risk capital should be used for trading and only those with sufficient risk capital should consider trading. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
Hypothetical Performance Disclosure:
Hypothetical performance results have many inherent limitations, some of which are described below. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to those shown; in fact, there are frequently sharp differences between hypothetical performance results and the actual results subsequently achieved by any particular trading program. One of the limitations of hypothetical performance results is that they are generally prepared with the benefit of hindsight. In addition, hypothetical trading does not involve financial risk, and no hypothetical trading record can completely account for the impact of financial risk of actual trading. for example, the ability to withstand losses or to adhere to a particular trading program in spite of trading losses are material points which can also adversely affect actual trading results. There are numerous other factors related to the markets in general or to the implementation of any specific trading program which cannot be fully accounted for in the preparation of hypothetical performance results and all which can adversely affect trading results.
You can read more here: Risk Disclosure
Affiliate Disclosure:
The external links on my site and in my video descriptions to trader evaluation companies and software companies are primarily affiliate links. I earn a commission from these companies on any sale made from people visiting these links. That said, I only recommend companies and software I personally use and actually do recommend. Believe me, I turn down a lot of companies who approach me. You can read my full Affiliate Disclosure here.
Additional Disclosure:
The content provided is for informational purposes only. I do my best to keep the content current and accurate by updating it frequently. Sometimes the actual data, rules, requirements and other can differ from what’s stated on our website. CanadianFuturesTrader.ca is an independent website. You should always consult the rules, faqs, knowledge base and support of any of the websites and companies we link to or talk about on our site. The information on their site will always be what ultimately dictates the current rules of their program, software or other. While we are independent, we may be compensated for advertisements, sponsored products, or when you click on a link on our website. The contributors and authors are not registered or certified financial advisors. You should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions.