TickTick Trader allures traders by requiring no minimum amount of trading days before passing verification. Alongside this, TickTick Trading is also a one-step Trading Challenge whereby once you pass the initial verification stage, you will be rewarded with a live account. This varies with most prop trading firms, which often require you to complete a 2-step verification process before receiving the live account.
Let’s learn the most important rules during the TickTick Trader challenge.
TickTick Trader Challenge Rules
Daily loss limit
As the title says, this is the amount of money the trader should not lose during a trading day.
You must watch your account balance on the Rtrader platform because all fees and commissions are included in the daily loss limit.
Every account size has its daily loss limit. See the table below for more details:
| Account | Daily loss limit |
| Starter 25k | $500 |
| Advanced 50k | $1250 |
| Pro 100k | $2500 |
Respect the Max contract size
You must ensure you do not open any more contracts than stated below:
| Account | Max positions |
| Starter 25k | 4 |
| Advanced 50k | 10 |
| Pro 100k | 14 |
If you open more contracts than stated, you will violate the guidelines and lose your trading account. In addition, some prop trading firms have soft breaches, where if you open too many contracts at once, they would close your trades and issue a soft violation. However, please be aware that TickTick Trading only has complex breaches, and having too many contracts open counts as a complex breach.
Example:
- Let’s say you have a ‘100k Pro Account’, and you’re trading well, now have an account balance of $106,000 and 10 open contracts.
- Opening a position on another contract would violate the rules, and you would lose your account.
Do not hold a position overnight
TickTick Trading appears to have its rules stacked against retail traders. It is highly stringent when it comes to minor account violations. For example, some prop firms do not allow holding positions overnight. This is the same as TickTick Trading. However, if you accidentally forget to close out your position with a different prop firm, you would ‘soft breach’ the rules, and the trade would automatically be closed for you. With TickTick Trading, if you accidentally hold a trade overnight, this is a violation of the rules and a complex breach, meaning you will lose your trading account.
To avoid violating this rule, you should know that you must have closed out all your trades before 5 pm Eastern Time (10 pm UTC) when markets close. Then, once Asian markets reopen an hour later at 6 pm ET (11 pm UTC), you can begin trading again. In this one hour, your ending account balance will be used to account for the following day’s tick drawdown.
Remember, you are paying a monthly subscription service to access their capital.
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Respect the Tick Drawdown
One of the main features that the TickTick Trader Challenge uses is the Tick drawdown. This feature is highly beneficial for the retail trader since it allows the maximum drawdown to be calculated after the trader has closed out each trade.
The Tick Drawdown is the maximum drawdown you are allowed on your account; if you breach this level, you will fail the challenge. Therefore, I will refer to this level as the maximum drawdown level. To calculate the maximum drawdown level on your account, you should subtract the tick drawdown (this varies depending on account size) from the account balance at the start of the trading day.
Therefore, the tick drawdown does not include the equity of the account, this being all open trades (the live profit and loss).
Let’s compare the Tick Drawdown vs. another prop trading challenge using maximum trailing drawdown. Maximum trailing drawdown measures the monetary amount between the highest account balance achieved (balance + equity).
Balance: this is all of the money in your trading account.
Equity: this is the balance +/- any profits/losses from live open positions.
Maximum trailing drawdown measures the monetary amount between the highest account equity and the drawdown limit.
Tick drawdown measures the monetary amount between the previous day’s account balance and the drawdown limit.
The following tick drawdown limits and maximum loss relative to the account size as a %, for each account are as follows:
| Account | Tick drawdown | max loss |
| Starter 25k | $1,500 | 6% |
| Advanced 50k | $2,500 | 5% |
| Pro 100k | $3,500 | 3.5% |
| Express 100k | $3,500 | 3.5% |
Reach the Profit targets
With the TickTick Challenge, the targets are also lower than the average prop trading firm achieving 10%. For each account, the monetary target is listed, and the % of gains needed to be completed in relative terms of the account size:
| Account | Profit Target | the % of gains |
| Starter 25k | $1,500 | 6% |
| Advanced 50k | $3,000 | 6% |
| Pro 100k | $6,000 | 6% |
| Express 100k | $6,000 | 6% |
Now let’s look at which account provide the most amount of ‘Tick drawdown’ relative to the gains needed to pass the one-step verification stage:
| Account | win ratio | the % of gains |
| Starter 25k | x1 | 6% |
| Advanced 50k | x1.2 | 6% |
| Pro 100k | x1.7 | 6% |
| Express 100k | x1.7 | 6% |
From this, regarding the % of tradable money you have relative to the account size, the TickTick 25k challenge provides you with the most wiggle room and, therefore, the most direct challenge to pass. The TickTick 100k challenges require a win ratio or your profitable trades to be x1.7 the size of your losing trades.
For example, if you risk 1% per trade and win 50% of your transactions, you would need the wins to be x1.7, the size of the losses, to pass this challenge successfully.
Additional information
Commission Fees
Most prop trading firms will use a spread so that the retail trader can pass the challenge. However, in the case of TickTick Trading, they take a commission when you open a trade, whereby this commission is deducted from your account balance. Therefore, you must incorporate the commission costs (below) when calculating the risk per trade.
Suppose you have a $100k account and want to open 6 mini contracts. You would be charged $30 ($5 x 6 contracts). Let’s say you want to risk 1% of your account balance.
To calculate the maximum monetary risk on this trade, you would have to ensure that the trade only risks $970, which is adjusted to include the commission fees.
- Where maximum monetary risk is calculated as maximum loss – commission fees.
- The more trades you place, the more you will pay in commission; ultimately, this is profits you lose to fees.
The scaling system during the funded account
Contrary to the challenge, the traders must respect a scaling plan (known as the scaling system) in the funded account.
During the challenge, you can trade all contracts allowed at any time during the challenge.
But during the funded account, there is a scaling system that you must follow. See the image below for more information:
Example:
Let’s say you have a ‘100k Pro Account’, and you’re trading well, now have an account balance of $106,000 and 10 open contracts.
You would violate the rules if you closed out 2 contracts at a loss of $1,000 each since your account balance would fall to $104,000. Because at that time, your account balance would fall into the “$102,101 to $105,100” category, where you are allowed a maximum of 6 open contracts.
However, remember we had 10 contracts open to start with, you closed out 2, meaning you now have 8 open, but your account balance has fallen into the lower category. So since you have 8 contracts open and are only allowed a maximum of 6 open contracts, you would lose your trading account.
Therefore, once you increase your account size, you should have extra equity before opening the maximum number of contracts you are allowed, just in case you get stopped out of trades and pushed into a lower account balance category.
After winning the challenge, what’s next?
Upon successfully achieving the account target, you will then be asked to validate your account; this is where your account is reviewed to ensure you followed all the guidelines correctly and did not violate any of the rules. According to TickTick Trader, this may take up to 2 business days. After this verification step is complete, you will have to pay an additional activation fee which varies per account as follows:
- $25k Account Fee: $149
- $50k Account Fee: $149
- $100k Account fee: $249
After paying this activation fee, you will be given access to a live trading account and its CME level 2 data.
TickTick Payout policy
To be eligible for the first payout, you must have traded for at least 40 trading days or 8 calendar weeks. This is a significant hurdle since you will not receive your first payout for almost 2 months after verifying your account.
If you have managed this and have a positive balance in your account, you can only withdraw a minimum amount of $1,000, regardless of your account size. Therefore, this is almost 4% of the $25k account balance but only 1% of the $100k account balance; therefore, you should consider this before choosing your challenge. If you trade a more extensive account, you can accumulate the $1,000 faster and reach this minimum withdrawal amount more quickly.
You will also have to have a minimum safety threshold on your account. This means that you must have an account balance of $1k plus the additional safety threshold on your account before being able to withdraw your first $1,000. These are as follows:
| account balance | safety threshold | Minimum balance to make $1k withdrawal |
| $25k | $1.6k | $27.6k |
| $50k | $2.6k | $53.6k |
| $100k | $3.6k | $104.6k |
However, TickTickTrading allows traders to retain all their trading profits for the first 3 months of the calendar month. From month 4 onwards, the profit split for the trader drops to 90%, which is the highest profit share among many prop firms.
- There is a clause that if you wish to withdraw within the 40-day window of passing your account, you must share a 50% profit split with TickTIck Trading.
Therefore, if you are a good trader who trades on a higher timeframe and has a tested strategy, in the long run, you will be able to keep a higher amount of returns you generate on your prop trading account. However, for the average retail trader, the accounts and terms offered by TickTick Trading seem stacked against the retail trader.
