This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kane Simons, a 32-year-old day trader and the founder of Prop Firm Compare. In 2024, Simons earned a $1.9 million payout from Apex Trader Funding, one of the largest in the firm’s history, according to the prop firm’s website. Business Insider verified his payout through bank statements and payout receipts. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve bought probably 500 prop accounts over my lifetime. And at some point, I’ve lost them all. I’m not the best day trader in the world. I hate to break the facade. I don’t profess to trade better than any algorithm, nor do I think that I’m better than Citadel or BlackRock or any of these large institutions. I would be a fool to say otherwise. I simply have to turn up to the market in the small windows where I think I have the most edge.
I’ve actively been in the financial markets for just over 11 years. I got involved in trading just like how everyone does at the start: They saw something flash online — someone driving a fast car, or the idea of retiring their parents and living in the countryside. Whatever everyone falls victim to. I was in tech sales, working 12 hours a day, selling the tech boom to large conglomerates, and it wasn’t fun. I wanted to get out of that.
In 2014, crypto started really kicking off, and I got involved in buying bitcoin. I also bought a bunch of other stuff on Coinbase and kind of forgot about it. I went to cash it out one day, and I just saw a very large number. That was my real indoctrination to trading. Suddenly, I was like, “I’m going to make a lot of money. If I can do this three or four times, I’m done. I don’t ever need to work.”
The characteristics that led to my success came out of a bad period in my life where everything went wrong. I lost a lot of money when FTX went bankrupt. I went from being probably a liquid millionaire on paper overnight to being in debt, which is ridiculous, and suddenly I was struggling to pay my bills because I’d built up this lifestyle. It was the worst period of my life.
I had no money. There was no way I was going to ever make the money trading crypto again. The landscape of buying something and making 500x on your money just doesn’t exist anymore. So it’s like, “How do I put in a small amount of money and extract a large amount of money?” I rolled into prop trading, and that was kind of how I was introduced.
I ground my teeth and put my head down in the futures market. I caught the boom of new futures-trading firms that came up.
Apex Trader Funding did a sale at the time. I bought 20 prop accounts, and over the next 72 days, I accumulated a combined profit of just over $2 million.
My strategy
When I show someone my life, the first thing they say is, “Can you trade money for me? Then, “Can you each teach me how to trade in a year or two?” Wrong mindset already. You think you can fast-forward the years and skip the tuition that I paid for 11 years. I just put an unfathomable amount of hard work over those 11 years to the point where I know what works for me.
My trading model probably took me about five years to develop. It may not work for other traders, depending on the tendencies they have.
I look for sharp pullbacks.
I look for what I call “efficiently delivered markets,” but I think a lot of people would call it a 50% pullback retrace.
If you look at the stock market over time, it has historically pulled back 50% before moving higher. So, let’s say an asset has traded from $10 to $20. The likelihood that it falls to $15 and rises to $20 is quite high.
I use that principle to trade on a shorter four-hour timeframe. I look for either a four-hour low or a four-hour high and try to stay with the overarching trend.
I look for a market that moves aggressively in one direction, pulls back, and then aggressively heads back in the same direction. That’s my most optimal trade.
I limit trading to just a few hours a day.
I typically like to trade in the first hour of a four-hour candle. That period, for me, has netted the most return over a prolonged period of time. The first two hours of the New York trading session are also the most profitable.
Then, I get 22 hours of my day back to myself to choose what I want: work on businesses, go see my friends, spend time with family, walk the dogs.
I am just of the opinion that the more you’re in the market, the more you lose. I accept that all of the big losses in my life come from me being at the computer for too long, me being tired — all the situations where I could have chosen not to trade. But I chose to do it. I’ve been up at 2 a.m. before, down $40,000 in a bitcoin position. Those times replay in my mind.
If I were to lose all day, every day, that would beat me down. So I need to control my exposure to that.
I avoid markets that aren’t volatile.
A really slow, uptrending market is hell for me. I like markets that pull back, and when we don’t pull back, I don’t really trade a lot.
It’s not the most rewarding strategy in the world. It loses just as much as it wins, but I take no shame. I’m net red on the year, which I think is okay. The market changes, regimes change — we’ve had a new president, we’re getting a new Fed Chair — the market’s adjusting. At some point, the market will correct, and then I can start trading again.
I journal inside and outside of trading.
I do journal my trades. It’s more of a track log or performance history, just to keep me accountable to the market.
I also do journaling in my personal life on a month-to-month basis. Trading is completely mental. The reality is that you can very quickly forget what happened months ago or how you felt. Maybe my trading was really bad, and it was connected to my personal life.
There have been days where I’ve lost $100,000. I would have felt really bad if I had not known that, months prior, I had made $100,000 in a day as well. It keeps you level.
I’m okay with small wins.
If everyone just broadens their time horizon of how quickly they want to quit their job or how fast they want to make a million dollars, everyone will just have a much better time in trading. You’ll be happy with the 50 bucks on the table during a trading session. 50 bucks, I’ll take that. That’s a decent amount of money in my pocket.
I think that the average trader takes around three to four years to really find their feet. They come into trading, they experience some sort of beginner’s luck. You give it all back and then some, and you realize, OK, I have to figure this out.
Do you have a unique story to share about trading the markets for a living? Contact this reporter at jsor@businessinsider.com.
