In a recent trader interview, I sat down with Brandon, a prop trader who has been with Funded Trading Plus since 2023. On paper he looks “successful”: multiple passed evaluations and three simulated payouts, including two back-to-back.
But what really matters for you as a developing prop trader is how he got there – and what you can learn from it.
This blog isn’t a transcript of our chat. It’s a breakdown of the key prop trading education points that came out of Brandon’s story: from blowing accounts with no stop loss to building a simple, disciplined breakout strategy that actually fits his life and personality.
🎥 [Watch the full video]
1. You Learn More from Losing Than Winning
Brandon’s journey into trading started in 2020 during COVID. Like many, he was sold the idea quickly, jumped in even quicker, and started trading without really understanding risk.
At one point he was literally trading with no stop loss, just hoping the market would move his way.
“You learn a lot from losing… you learn discipline.”
This is a harsh truth a lot of new prop traders ignore:
- Your early phase is usually messy.
- You will probably lose accounts.
- The goal is not to avoid all pain – it’s to extract lessons from it.
Brandon didn’t quit when he blew accounts. Instead, he started asking better questions:
- Why am I losing?
- What times of day am I losing most?
- What’s happening emotionally when I place these trades?
If you’re in that “I keep failing evaluations” stage, you’re not uniquely broken. You’re just at the start of the learning curve, as long as you’re actually learning.
2. One Market, One Playbook
One of the turning points for Brandon was deciding to specialise.
He trades US30. That’s it.
“I don’t like to jump around. I learned from taking so many losses – everything is different.”
This is a huge educational point for prop traders:
- Every market has its own tempo, liquidity profile and behaviour around sessions and news.
- Spreading yourself across 5–6 markets early on usually means you learn none of them well.
Brandon also noticed something important about his time of day:
- Early in the day he’s busy with work and coaching baseball.
- Around 1–4 p.m. (his time), he could focus – and his results improved.
He started to think about the market like traffic:
- Morning = rush hour = congestion and noise.
- Later = traffic thins out = cleaner movement.
You don’t have to copy his timing, but you should ask:
- When do I genuinely have clear headspace?
- When does my chosen market tend to move most cleanly?
Your “edge” is often as simple as one instrument + one session + one routine.
3. Higher Time Frames Beat High-Adrenaline Scalping
Like many new traders, Brandon started on the 1-minute chart because it felt exciting.
“On the 1-minute I’d be going crazy… then I started losing.”
Over time he shifted to:
- 4-hour for structure and momentum.
- 5-minute or 30-minute for refining entries and avoiding being wicked out.
That’s a classic educational journey:
- Low time frames = more candles, more dopamine, more noise, more overtrading.
- Higher time frames = clearer structure, fewer decisions, more time to think.
If you’re constantly glued to the 1-minute or 3-minute chart, ask yourself honestly:
- Am I trading a plan?
- Or am I just chasing stimulation?
For most prop traders, especially in a rules-based evaluation environment, slowing down is one of the fastest ways to improve.
4. Daily Drawdown Discipline and the Power of Small Wins
One of the most educational parts of Brandon’s story is how he related to risk and daily drawdown.
On his simulated accounts (around $15,000), he:
- Tries to keep individual losses around $100–$150.
- Constantly checks his daily loss limit on the dashboard before he starts trading.
- Recognised that many of his earlier failures came from smashing the daily drawdown.
“If I can be disciplined not to blow the daily drawdown, that keeps me in a good range.”
He also embraces the “small snowball” mindset:
- $100 a day doesn’t feel glamorous.
- But $100 a day, five days a week, can compound surprisingly quickly.
And here’s the big educational point from his stats:
On one of his passed evaluations he had:
- A losing win–loss ratio (he lost more trades than he won),
- Yet his average winning trade was roughly three times his average losing trade.
You do not need to win 80% of your trades.
You need to:
- Keep losses small and controlled.
- Let your winners be meaningfully larger when they run.
- Respect the daily and overall drawdown rules of your simulated prop program.
That’s how you survive long enough to collect payouts.
5. Build a Strategy That Fits Your Brain
This is one of my favourite parts of Brandon’s story.
He did what many of you have done:
- Took a bootcamp.
- Learned the basics – candlesticks, reversals, support/resistance.
- Watched other traders using different analogies and styles.
But something wasn’t clicking.
“I understood the basics… but something wasn’t me. I needed my own style.”
So he did something very important:
- He accepted that he needed to see the market his way.
- He simplified everything into an analogy that made sense to him.
Brandon’s “Uber at the Gas Station” Breakout Concept
On the 4-hour chart:
- He identifies consolidation and marks it with a rectangle.
- He treats that range like an Uber sitting at a gas station.
- His rule:
- Don’t get in while it’s parked.
- Wait until it starts leaving the station.
- Don’t get in while it’s parked.
- When price breaks out, he still doesn’t jump straight in.
- He waits for it to move a bit further, confirming momentum, and then “gets in the Uber”.
And if he wakes up and price is already far away?
“Don’t jump in – that Uber already gone. Wait for another car.”
Educational takeaway:
- Your strategy doesn’t have to sound “fancy”.
- It needs clear rules you actually understand and can follow under stress.
- It should be based on fundamentals (structure, consolidation, breakout, momentum) but expressed in a way your brain naturally grasps.
That’s where discipline comes from: understanding what you’re doing, not just copying someone else’s lines on a chart.
6. Routine, Emotions and the Hardest Trade of All: Doing Nothing
Brandon has made some very practical emotional adjustments:
- He rarely trades Monday and Tuesday because he noticed he lost more on those days.
- If he feels himself guessing or forcing trades, he stops and goes to coach baseball instead.
- He avoids holding trades over the weekend after painful experiences of giving back profits on Monday gaps.
- He’s working on placing trades, trusting the setup, and not obsessively staring at them on his phone.
He also pays attention to how he feels during different times of day:
- Trading while coaching clients? Distracted, emotional.
- Trading in a quiet afternoon window? Much more comfortable.
As I said to him in the interview, I genuinely believe:
The hardest trade in the book is sitting on your hands and doing nothing.
Most traders lose more from overtrading than from not trading enough. Sometimes the most professional decision you can make is:
“Nothing is clean today – I’m going to walk away.”
7. Why the Right Prop Environment Matters
We also talked about why Brandon chose to trade with Funded Trading Plus.
The education angle here is simple but powerful: your environment matters.
Here’s what he highlighted:
- Fast, honest support – when he used live chat, he got answers quickly.
- Other firms often didn’t respond for a week, or at all.
- FT+ continued to support US traders even after platform changes impacted many.
- When he blew accounts, he felt he was treated fairly and with respect, not just as a number.
- Even around payouts, the communication was honest:
“If you need the money, take it. But here’s how it might impact your account growth.”
On top of that, he mentioned the value of having:
- A CEO who is active in public Discord.
- An education team whose job is not to hype, but to help traders think long-term.
As Head of Trader Education, that’s exactly what we want:
A simulated prop environment where traders can:
- Practise disciplined, rules-based trading.
- Get data, feedback and human support.
- Learn to treat trading like a craft, not a gamble.
8. Brandon’s Advice to Struggling Prop Traders
I’ll let Brandon’s message speak for itself here, because it’s pure trader education:
“Invest into your own craft. Invest into you. Don’t try to be anybody else. Be you…
To find your own style, you have to do the work. Don’t be scared to lose. When you lose, it’s a W because you learned something. And if you win – cha-ching – you made money.”
From an educational perspective, that’s exactly the mindset we want our traders to develop:
- Stop chasing other people’s highlight reels.
- Stop obsessing over “secret strategies”.
- Start doing the work: tracking, learning, refining, staying humble.
Final Thoughts – and Watch the Full Interview
Brandon’s journey isn’t perfect, and that’s precisely why it’s educational.
He’s:
- Blown accounts.
- Traded without stop losses.
- Overtraded low time frames.
- Fought with his own emotions.
But he’s also:
- Learned from his mistakes instead of quitting.
- Specialised in one market and one window.
- Built a simple breakout framework that fits his own way of thinking.
- Respected drawdown rules and kept losses contained.
- Earned multiple simulated payouts as a result.
If you’re a prop trader inside a simulated evaluation and you’re struggling, there are a lot of practical lessons you can borrow from Brandon – but the most important is this:
Your trading edge starts with understanding yourself.
🎥 Watch the full trader interview with Brandon
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Disclaimer:
FT+ programs involve simulated trading accounts only. No real-money investment services are provided, and no client funds are managed.
Any “payouts” are performance-based fees from a simulated program. They are not investment returns.
Trading and trading education involve significant risk of loss. This content is educational only and does not constitute investment advice.
Past performance examples (including case studies or testimonials) do not guarantee or predict future results.
Program eligibility and scaling are subject to stated rules and terms.
About Andrew Lockwood
Andrew Lockwood is a seasoned professional trader with over 40 years of experience in financial markets. Starting his career on the floor of the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) in the 1980s, Andrew has traded through multiple market cycles and volatility regimes. Today, he specialises in prop trading strategies, focusing on technical setups, risk management, and trader psychology. As the founder of PropIQ and a leading mentor, Andrew is dedicated to training the next generation of prop traders with proven, real-world trading methods.