Apex Funding Trader Review 2024

Overview

Apex Trader Funding was founded in 2021 and it set out to make a better model than any company out there with the goal of payout out the most to traders. Darrell Martin founded Apex Trader Funding after trying and reviewing all the funding companies he could find he set out to build a better model.

He then launched Apex Trader Funding. It has since become the leading trader funding company paying out more than any futures funding evaluation firm to its customers. It has grown into a thriving community of 10's of 1000's of members in over 150 countries. Apex Trader funding is based in Austin, Texas.

ATF offers among the fewest rules, lowest cost, highest contract plans with the rules meant to test traders ability to manage risk, profit, and size to empower those who can pass to move forward to a performance account for the potential to get paid. AFT doesn't restrict traders during holidays, news, or other cumbersome rules. The prop firm wants you to trade anytime you want 23 hours a day between 6PM one day to closing all positions and orders by 4:59 PM ET the next day ET, and do not add in rules like daily drawdowns to knock you out or have plans that limit you with scaling. AFT plans cap your contracts at the max contracts without failing you for going over your allowed contracts.

ATF Evaluation Accounts

Trade full size contracts

• Only 1 evaluation step of 7 trading days

• No scaling requirements

• If you trade too many contracts it simply rejects the trade it does not fail you

• No daily drawdowns

• Trade on holidays

• Trade during the news

• A simple rule manage risk with a large live trailing threshold

• Trade any strategy that best suits you

• Include free real time data

• Get multiple accounts to spread risk and increase profits

• Least expensive reset fee

• Available globally where allowed by law

• Free Ninja License

  Paid Performance Accounts (PA)

  
  

• Free Ninja License $75/month included

• Live data save $55/month included

• Start with a full-size account with no size restrictions like scaling

• Get paid 100% of your first $25,000 profit

• Then get paid 90% of your performance thereafter

  Why Choose ATF Funding Program?

Benefits ATF Offers

Quick payouts, prompt support, always improving

Minimum Trading Days

Qualify with as little as 7 trading days. A trading day counts as 6 PM one day to 5 pm the next day. Half day trading holidays count towards the next day.

Trailing Threshold

With our live trailing threshold, you never have to worry about daily drawdown. You can monitor this live in the rtrader software we provide you.

Trade Any Day, 23 Hours A Day

You can trade on holidays and during news from 6PM ET to 4:59 PM ET. Note trades must be closed and pending orders must be cancelled before 4:59 PM ET.

Maximum Position Size

Feel free to trade up to the max position size. Our system caps your positions, so you will never be stopped out for trading more contracts in evaluation or funded accounts.

Trade During News

You won't fail because you traded your normal day to day system during a news announcement! News trading strategies themselves, directional, multi directional, pre news entries for windfalls of any kind are prohibited.

One Simple Step

Hit your profit target before you hit your max drawdown with 7 days of trading, and you qualify!

Apex Funding Trading Plans

Rithmic Plan

Choose the perfect Rithmic plans fit for your journey!

Tradovate Plan

Choose the perfect Tradovate plans fit for your journey!

Instruments You Can Trade On Rithmic/NinjaTrader

Instruments You Can Trade On Tradovate/NinjaTrader

Apex Funded Trader Programs

ATF account size or Starting Capital: $25k – $300k represents the starting balance in your simulated trading live data environment. That number is roughly the amount of funds you would need in your online brokerage account to cover the initial margin for the maximum available position size in the program. You are getting an opportunity to leverage a small dollar amount into a significant leverage, real money trading account.

Contracts

Maximum position size or most futures contracts you can have traded in your trading exam account. You do not have to trade the full size at once, and you are able to trade just one at a time. And if market conditions get too crazy, you can trade micro contracts too (for example, MES/MNQ are 1/10th the size of ES/NQ).

Profit Goal

This is pretty straightforward – reach the profit goal, and as soon as you place a trade during ten different trading days and have funded account balance above starting balance + profit goal, you will advance to a funded money account to trade for real money profits.

Daily Drawdown

NONE! There is no daily drawdown. Most other prop firms make you adhere to Daily and sometimes weekly account drawdowns. With Apex Trader Funding, you have all the breathing room you need to trade with one drawdown or trailing Threshold.

Trailing Threshold

or maximum allowed drawdown for trading exam account. Drawdown is the dollar $ trailing your highest reached balance. For example, suppose you have a $7.5k drawdown in a $300k account.

When first starting, the balance cannot cross below $292.5K. As you make profits, the drawdown trails. If the balance reaches $303K, the level you can drawdown to becomes $295.5k.

What is the Trailing Threshold Max Drawdown?

Scaling

Once again, another big advantage of working with Apex Trader is to achieve a real withdrawable money account. Many competitors ask you to scale your positions, sizing up as you make a profit, and try to trap you for violating the contract sizing rules if the balance is in the wrong position sizing bracket. Here you have the freedom to trade maximum allowed contracts from the first trade.

NinjaTrader License

One of the most popular and powerful trading platforms is included with the Apex Funding Program and is ready to go from the start. Ninja Trader’s lease for just the platform is $225 quarterly. So here, you get a chance to get funding for the cost of software alone.

Real-Time Data

In the Apex funded program, you get immediate access to all the live data, including the most popular products from CBOT, CME, COMEX, NYMEX. In addition, you can earn funding trading the 

products of the following futures:

• Index Futures – ES, NQ, YM, EMD, RTY American indexes and even get crazy with wild NKD Nikkei futures.

• Interest Rate Futures – ZB, UB, ZN, ZF, ZT, GE

• Currency Futures – Aussie Dollar, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, Euro FX, Japanese Yen Futures (Inverse of USD/JPY), Swiss Franc, and New Zeeland Dollar

• Agricultural Products – Lean Hogs (HE), Live Cattle (LE), Feeder Cattle (GF), Corn (ZC), Wheat (ZW), Soybeans (ZS), Soybean Meal (ZM), Soybean Oil (ZL)

• Energy Futures – CL, NG, QG (mini natural gas), HO, RB

• Metals Futures – GC, SI, HG, PL, PA, QI, and QO

Newly added micro futures that are 1/10th the size of full contracts:

• Index Micros: MES, MNQ, MYM, M2K

• Metal Micro: MGC

• Currency Micros: M6A, M6E

• Micro Crude Futures

As you can see, there is a large range of financial instruments available for you to trade with a very flexible position size.

Commissions 

Like in real-world trading, during the Apex evaluation account, commissions are charged for trading.

Round Trip commissions:

• Equity Index Futures: $3.98 bet round turn

• Interest Rate futures: $3.12-4.02 / RT

• Currency Futures are $4.72 per round turn trade

• AG Futures: $5.58 RT

• Energy Futures: $3.96

• Metals: $4.62 for full contracts and $3.02 for the minis

• Micro Futures: $1.02/RT or less

Another place Apex Trader shines, commissions are in line with the lowest rates at online brokerages. Some of the competitors overcharge on commissions, especially punishing scalpers.

Reset

If you reach the drawdown and fail the evaluation. You can reset it for $80 and start over. Likewise, you can get aggressive with large accounts and restart for $80. While not ideal for a disciplined trader path, it is an approach you can take with this program.

Connection Guide for ATAS and Rithmic

This guide provides instructions on how to connect an account via Rithmic to ATAS. There are 2 ways to connect your Rithmic account to ATAS - directly and via RTrader Pro. Instructions for each of them are given below.

To configure the Rithmic connection to the ATAS platform,  in the platform's main window, click on Connections - Add - Rithmic, and then click the Next button

Next, windows for signing an agreement will open:

OCO (One Cancels Other) orders for connection are simulated locally on your computer. This means that the platform must be connected to your broker for OCO orders to work properly. If you get disconnected and one of the OCO orders is executed, the other orders in the group WILL NOT BE canceled! If you are okay with that, click I Accept and continue.

Connecting Rithmic account directly to ATAS

The account must NOT be connected to RTrader Pro or another platform.

1. Enter your Rithmic account login and password

2. Select a server depending on the account type and broker

3. If necessary, activate the checkbox next to Aggregated quotes - in this case Rithmic will send symplified market data, which reduces the load on the CPU, but at the same time reduces the speed of updating this data.

4. Uncheck the box next to Connect via RTrader Pro

Connecting a Rithmic account to ATAS via RTrader Pro

Only one Rithmic account can be connected to ATAS via RTrader Pro

ATAS and RTrader Pro connector settings must match

1. Log in to RTrader Pro by activating the Allow Plugins [ON] and Aggregated Quotes [ON] functions

2. In the settings of the Rithmic connector in ATAS, check the boxes next to Aggregated Quotes and Connect via RTrader Pro

3. If necessary, activate the checkbox next to Aggregated quotes - in this case Rithmic will send symplified market data, which reduces the load on the CPU, but at the same time reduces the speed of updating this data.

After configuring the connection, it will appear as a separate line in the list of connections.

You can read about the settings of this window at the following link: Connection Settings Window

1. Add - add a new connection.

2. Type - connection source.

3. Name - connection name which you can set yourself.

4. Status - connection status.

5. Quote Provider - option to select a quote provider (this connection will be used as a quote provider).

6. Auto-Connect - if you want the connection to automatically occur when the platform is launched, you need to enable this option.

7. Connection settings button.

8. Remove connection from the list button.

9. Connect/Disconnect - connect/disconnect the connector.

An important feature of Rithmic connection

An important feature of Rithmic connection.

Often the Rithmic connection is quite sensitive to the communication channel and CPU load. If the CPU is heavily loaded or there are problems with the communication channel, the Rithmic connection may become unstable.

There may be the following connection problems:

If you enable the plugin connection and then try to connect without the plugin, it will not work until the application is restarted.

1. If you create 2 connections, one with the connection via plug-in, and the second - without, the second one will not connect.

2. If one of Rythmic servers is unavailable, the connection may be waiting for a long time. You connect, a minute passes, you get an error, then you change the server and connect again->you will ned to wait a several minutes until the previous connection closes completely.

3. Connection lost. In this case, ATAS will pop up the notification.

4. Potential connection loss. This is a kind of intermediate state between connected and broken connection. At such moments, Rithmic sends messages like: ‘PnL Connection - Heartbeat has been quiet for XX seconds’ . Instead of a PnL connection, there can be Trading Connection, History Connection, etc. These messages indicate that there was no data exchange with the corresponding Rithmic connection (PnL, trading, historical, etc.) for a certain number of seconds. For a trader, this can mean the following:

   1. If there are problems with the PnL connection: perhaps the price, volume, direction of positions (which were received before from a working connection) in ATAS may be different than others on the Rithmic servers.

   2. If there are problems with the trading connection: submitted orders may be sent to the Rhimtic servers, but their state may not be received back to ATAS

5. That means, if there are problems of this type with Rithmic connections, ATAS cannot guarantee if the displayed information is correct. Therefore, ATAS provides 2 mechanisms to protect a trader from such situations:.

   1. When receiving messages likePnL Connection - Heartbeat has been quiet for XX seconds , ATAS displays a pop-up window in which it displays the text of this message.

   2. If user tries to place orders or change the position after receiving those messages, ATAS will require confirmation of the operation, which will indicate all messages from Rithmic that were received earlier:

In this case, the user will need to decide for himself whether to execute this order or not.Similar messages are issued if the user trades through a Portfolio Group,which includes the Rithmic account that received the message data.

Apex Trader Funding User Experience

ATF team has put in a lot of work behind the scenes to improve their very popular trader funding product. The new dashboard covers all the technical and account management needs for the trader’s whole journey.

Most Features Are self-explanatory, new additions that make the experience easier and more stress-free.

You can see all the subscriptions on the homepage of the dashboard. All important information is included in the snippet – expiration, profit goal, drawdown, and account ID for multi-account traders.

Account Summary – a very welcome addition to the trader dashboard.

Before you had to go into the Rithmic dashboard and manually scroll through days to count how many days have had a trade, after reaching 10 days trader and profit target traders would have to submit advancement to funded account requests manually. 

In all new Account Summary Tab, all accounts list balance, and days traders for each account. Traders may also view the chart with the running balance and location of the trailing drawdown. Great quality of evaluation improvements here. Payout Requests can now be handled from the dashboard.

Flatten Accounts Feature – Incidents occur in the fast-moving trading world. Power goes out, volatility causes trading software to crash. Orders get stuck somewhere between your click and the data feed provider’s servers. Now there is no need to panic to try to figure out what to do with hopes of reaching support in time to avoid disaster. Simply log into your trader dashboard online and request to flatten the accounts. This saves a significant amount of time and is potentially an account saving feature.

Data and Second login management can be handled from the dashboard and be activated in 15-30 minutes.

New account sign up can be handled from the dashboard as well – select new account of your choice, enter discount code: GFRGUWLB to save 80% Off Evals & $35 Resets.

Going Live - Becoming a Funded Trader !

Once a system detects that the Profit Target and Minimum Day Traded requirements have been met, traders are sent a funded trader contract and request to pay set up / data fee. The contract is fairly simple; they go over funded account rules and pay-out instruction. No super intrusive inquiries and disclosures necessary like with some of the competitors. The accounts we got funded in May, contracts were filled out 7AM, live accounts were ready before the market open at 930AM. Process is very smooth. It is very Important to note that the contract has to be completed in two business day from being sent out. Please pay attention to your emails after completing the evaluation.

Getting Paid - Apex Trader Payouts

Good News! Apex Trader Funding is a very trustworthy company. They have a low fee evaluation that allow you to be funded in 10 days and be on the way to trading for 100% profit split at first.

Keep 100% of your first $10,000 profit withdrawals.

Not so good news: It is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Traders are encouraged to grow accounts and not make large withdrawals at first. There is a minimum trading day requirement for requesting withdrawals. There are many opinions on this format. While it is great for growing account and having sufficient cushion to work with, many traders would like to have an option to get paid for great performance. At the fourth withdrawal is when things finally open up and you get to unlock full value of Apex Trader Funding:

• Low Fee

• Fast Funding

• Trusted Company

• High Available Leverage

• Trading software included in evaluations and live phases

Note: Withdrawals are paid out on the last day of the month.

Let’s take a look at ATF two favorite accounts the $50K and $150k, which in our opinion, offer the best value.

Payout Requirements

Traders are asked to successfully complete multiple criteria to make withdrawals at Apex Funded Trader Program:

• 25 Days Traded to request the first payment

• Keep a cushion above which you will be withdrawing

• Request a minimum of $1000 withdrawal

• Make sure you request withdrawal under the max allowed amount

• Request payout so it can be paid out on the last business day of the month

Things open up nicely after first pay-out. Over the next two months, only 10 trading day are required with the same minimum and maximum amounts in place.

During the fourth month on trading live with Apex, traders are only required to trade 10 days and no maximum withdrawal limits are imposed.

This format is very common in the funded trader industry. It allows companies to get better sample size of trader’s performance to know how to handle the live accounts on their back end. Don’t worry, you will still get paid, but companies might let reckless traders blow up without copy trading them.

Get Paid More For Same Performance at Apex Trader

Firstly, when purchasing evaluations, use discount code: GFRGUWLB to only pay half price for evaluations. Big savings right there! There are techniques and approaches to being funded at Apex Trader Funding as they allow multiple evaluation accounts under one master account (DO NOT create multiple logins, only one per person is allowed!)

Disadvantages of ATF

Apex Funding Trader, while offering traders access to significant capital, does come with a few disadvantages. One notable drawback is the strict trading rules and guidelines, which can limit flexibility for those who prefer more creative or high-risk strategies. The evaluation phase, required to access full funding, can be challenging, with stringent profit targets and drawdown limits that some traders may find difficult to meet consistently. Additionally, fees for resets or monthly evaluations can add up, particularly for traders who experience setbacks in passing the initial stages, making it a potentially costly venture for those not prepared for its demands

Conclusion

Apex Funding Trader offers a valuable opportunity for traders seeking to access significant capital without risking their own funds upfront. Its structured evaluation process, while demanding, ensures traders develop discipline and consistency, making it a great option for those serious about refining their skills. 

However, the strict rules, coupled with potential costs from resets or failed evaluations, may be challenging for less experienced traders. 

Overall, Apex provides a solid pathway to funded trading for those willing to meet its rigorous standards, making it ideal for disciplined and resilient traders.

FAQ link

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