Quick answer: “Trader Kane” (publicly named by Business Insider as Kane Simons) is an NQ futures day trader and co-founder of The Lab, a trading education community. His system, “The Lab Model,” combines standard ICT/Smart Money concepts (SMT divergence, inversion Fair Value Gaps, premium/discount) with three things that are distinctly his: NQ-only execution with ES […]
Retail prop trading has grown into a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Pass rates on most evaluations run between 5% and 15%. Do the math and most funded traders pay for more than one challenge before an account ever goes live. That raises a real question every April. Can any of
ORB AI is a free, open-source TradingView indicator that scores every opening range breakout across seven factors and cross-checks it against a self-learning KNN engine — instead of firing on a single range-break condition.
Every algo trader I know pays for the same four things. A VPS so the bot doesn’t die when the laptop sleeps. A Level 2 data feed. A broker platform subscription. And something to bridge alerts to the broker. Add a charting plan and a CPA, and you’re past $5,000 a year before a single
Prop firm consistency rules are the rule set’s hidden landmine. You can hit every profit target, keep your drawdown spotless, and trade for weeks without a single loss, then watch your payout request bounce because one breakout Monday handed you 60% of your account’s total profit. Just 33.3% of funded traders ever receive a payout,
Prop firm taxes surprise a lot of funded traders the first time a payout lands. The check doesn’t come with capital gains treatment. It comes with a 1099-NEC and a 15.3% self-employment tax bill attached. That’s a different tax world than trading your own brokerage account. I’ve had this conversation with more funded traders than
“NinjaTrader vs Tradovate” is one of the most searched futures platform questions of 2026, and most comparisons answer it like the two are competing brokers fighting for your account. They aren’t. NinjaTrader bought Tradovate back in 2022, and in May 2025 Kraken closed a $1.5 billion deal to buy NinjaTrader itself. Both platforms now sit
FundedNext Futures has paid out more than $9 million to U.S. traders within six months of launching. A big share of that volume comes from strategies automation. Yet the firm bans most forms of copy trading outright. That gap trips up traders who assume automation and copying trades mean the same thing. They don’t. FundedNext
A question has sat unanswered in r/algotrading since December 2024: is there an actual list of prop firm with public trading API ? Not marketing pages, not “we support automation,” but an actual breakdown of who has a real API, who hides behind a broker’s platform, and who has nothing at all. The honest answer
Take Profit Trader (TPT) runs a one-step futures evaluation. It pays PRO+ traders the same day they earn a profit, and splits as much as 90% to the trader. The rulebook shifts often enough, though, that even funded traders lose track of the current numbers. Searching for take profit trader automation because you want a
