👀 Apex forces top traders to live accounts, CEO explains

Hi everyone, it’s Kieran. Another wild week is in the books, and it’s time to do it all over again. Lets get caught up.

Last week hundreds of traders received emails from Apex saying that they are being moved to “live”. This has been an ongoing trend in the futures side of the industry where firms offload profitable traders from sim conditions into a live account. This usually involves traders giving up most of their earned profits.

Lots of traders on X appear to have been moved. Here’s the email they received.

Apex CEO on X defending the move.

and explaining that they are trying to keep things sustainable.

Problem is, there are no actual details of what their live program is.

📢 Firm Announcements

• Tradeify expanded its ecosystem with a new crypto program ‘APEX-X’. They also extended their London Session streams, now running 3 hours, a new 7AM UK start time.

• My Funded Futures introduced the Builder Plan, a simplified path with 1 day evaluation, payouts every 48 hours, no consistency rule, and flexible loss limits.

• Top One Trader rolled out a 1 Step Amped account with 150:1 leverage and no consistency rule, alongside broader pricing model changes on the futures side to reduce upfront cost.

• Blue Guardian Futures launched a new Instant Plan with no evaluation and payouts in 5 days, while also consolidating Forex and Futures under one platform with new futures plans and pricing.

• Finotive Funding introduced enhanced floating drawdown visibility with warnings at 1.0% and strikes from 1.5%, tightening risk transparency on Instant accounts.

• InstantFunding added new IF1 add ons including extended 48 hour trading windows and increased best trade limits, alongside continued product expansion messaging.

• PipFarm continued expanding customization with add ons for increased max loss and faster challenge completion.

• My Crypto Funding confirmed payouts approved but temporarily delayed due to Rise transfer timing, with processing expected shortly.

• Follow all firm updates live on X → x.com/promojunction

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Here are the firms who paid out the most over the last 7 days 🏆️.

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🕜 Red Folder News

Here are this week’s red folder news events. US Retail Sales as well as upcoming Fed Chair Warsh testifying on Tuesday are the biggest events on the calendar, however events in Iran will of course be centre stage.

📈 Markets

Buy the dip works again...was there ever any doubt?

The most profitable strategy of the last decade notches up another win, as the equity indices hit all time highs again last week. The velocity of this ascent has been nothing short of astonishing, with the index notching an impressive +10.7% gain over the last 11 trading sessions (SPX). This pace even slightly outstrips last year's "Liberation Day" bounce-back, which saw a +10.1% rise over the same period.

Shorts got absolutely destroyed

From oversold to overbought in record time (Nasdaq100).

Returns after the liberation day bounce back

The returns profile looks very similar to liberation day. The following 6 months were a slow, choppy grind down.

Back to greed

It should be noted that all of this happened whilst it appeared that the US/Iran situation was close to being resolved. This weekend the ceasefire looks to be collapsing and the Strait of Hormuz is closed again. If trapped longs were looking for an opportunity to get out of their positions, they couldn’t have planned this better. Futures red this this morning.

OK let’s see how this week plays out, have a good one!

Kieran

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