Chapter 4:
How to Complete Your Chosen Challenge?
Becoming a prop trader is an exciting process filled with lots of opportunities and challenges.
Our goal is to help you make the best decisions at every step of the way and make your dreams come true as a member of our community.
Check out our seven-part series of posts and become a successful funded trader!
The Importance of Complying with the Rules
Hexa Prop virtual accounts display real market movements and situations, with exchange rate data provided by our partner companies. It is essential that you are aware of the rules, including your own trading methodology and the prop provider’s rules. Discipline and working within a set of rules (strategy) is a prerequisite for long-term success in stock market trading. The verification stage is designed to prove that you can adhere to the key principles that distinguish a trader from a gambler. This principle applies not only to prop trading but to all successful traders.
The Reasons for Failure in a Prop Challenge
External circumstances are part of trading and can never be completely avoided. Respect the market! Furthermore, you should also strive to keep errors caused by internal factors to a minimum. For both categories, you can keep the risk of failure low by applying appropriate money management.
Excessive Risk-Taking can Easily Lead to Failure
For professional traders, it counts as the golden mean to risk only 1% of their account balance on a position, and not wanting to double the account size immediately, but to build up the account little by little and patiently. Hexa Prop does not impose on you how many lots to open or whether to use a stop-loss.
The size of the position is limited by the leverage and account size. However, be careful, because if you open a position with too large a lot size, you can quickly make a big profit, but if the price moves against your expectations, you can incur a large floating loss, which can quickly reach the allowed, daily loss limit. This latter value varies from account type to account type.
Have a Strategy and a Set of Rules
We recommend trading in the prop challenge based on rules and strategy, not on emotions! If you trade without a concept and make your decisions based on your emotions, you are gambling. Of course, short term you may be lucky enough to get to the Funded stage, but in the long term, this approach is not recommended.
If you achieve temporary success through undisciplined and emotion-based trading, you will create a false belief in your mind that you can still make a profit in this way too and don’t need rules. But this is wrong and will not work in the long run because one of these misconceptions will eventually cause a violation of the rules in the Funded section.
Holding a Position Over the Weekend
Hexa Prop allows you to keep positions open at the weekend during, but you should be aware of the risks involved.
Formation of Gaps
Stock exchanges are closed on Saturday and Sunday, so there are no quotes and no trading. However, during these two days, there may be events occurring that could trigger strong reactions on the markets. In such cases, there could be a significant gap at the start of trading on Monday.
If you are lucky, this move will be in the direction of your position, but if not, it could even take the balance over the stop-loss level and into a significant negative floating loss. If such a loss exceeds the allowed daily loss limit, the system will deactivate the account.
Widening the Spread
Spreads widen on all instruments at the weekend, which means that the distance between the Ask price and the Bid price will be wider.
Since the ask price will be higher on the weekend, this may close out the open short position as it reaches its stop-loss level. Therefore, we recommend that you watch out for the spreads over the weekend before leaving a position open for the weekend.
News Trading
Hexa Prop allows you to trade directly at the time of news in the valuation sections, but you should be aware of the risks involved.
There can be extreme increases in volume and activity at the time of – and in the minutes following – the release of significant news and data in the economic calendar.
At such times, the spread also widens, which means that buy orders are executed at a much worse price. Furthermore, during heavy trading, slippage can also occur, meaning that buy orders are filled at higher prices, and sell orders are filled at lower prices.
What Is the Next Step?
In this post, we discussed the importance of personal commitment alongside objective qualities when choosing a prop firm. In the next post, we’ll look at how to choose one of our challenge packages that will help you become a funded trader as quickly and efficiently as possible.
