Prop firms have become a normal route into trading capital for retail-scale traders, with all the complications that brings. An honest look at the model, the pass rate ranges, the patterns we see in passers and failers, and the math that decides whether the structure is fair.
The retail temptation around Fed days, NFP, and CPI prints is to trade the spike. The pro move is to use macro events as context for restraint, and to model the second-order effects across asset classes. A framework, not a signal set.
A structured 30-day plan for using a trading demo account the way it was meant to be used — observation first, journal second, paper trades last. The exact week-by-week cadence we run with Tradoki cohorts, and why rushing the demo phase is the single most common mistake.
Most trading journals fail because they capture the wrong fields. Here is the exact template Tradoki cohorts use, the four post-mortem questions that matter, and why screenshots without context are noise.
