From Zero to First Prop Firm Payout

In episode eight of the Trader Dane podcast, I explain how I went from knowing nothing about trading to earning my first prop firm payout in under six months after starting my first prop account and about eight months total trading experience. I shares costs and transparency around my journey, including about $320 spent on prop accounts vs a $635 payout, plus additional gear expenses, while noting I am not fully profitable overall. I describe starting with swing trading, then trading CFDs on indices with $1,500 before switching to TradingView paper trading in August 2025, and beginning a 50K challenge on October 1, passing it in January, and then buying a funded account, meeting payout rules by March. I credit community and three months in Austin Silver’s Black Shirt Club coaching program, where I learned to trade primarily using VWAP, and I finish up by discussing scaling via additional accounts while managing mindset and mechanics.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Before we get started, I want to just say that anything you hear me or any of the guests on this podcast say is to be considered for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a financial advisor. You should do your own research before taking financial decisions. And with that, please enjoy the podcast. Welcome to episode eight of the Trader Dane podcast. Today I'm solo, no guests today, and I will be talking about how I went from a beginner trader doing uh paper trading and a little bit of dabbling with my own personal capital to uh to actually taking a payout uh less than six months after starting my first prop account. So in total, that was roughly eight months of trading uh experience that turned into my first uh ever payout from a prop fur. And realizing that that's actually kind of unusual uh in terms of progress, I wanted to do an episode on that just to tell you how I managed the progress from knowing absolutely nothing to to getting to a payout. Um, I've invested in myself, I've invested in the progress, so it's not a it's not a free lunch, it's not a free journey. I'm also not profitable yet, but I'll get there uh eventually. I am profitable in the sense that I've spent X amount of dollars, I think it's around$320 on prop accounts. Um and I've actually so the one payout that I have taken is$635. So in that sense, I have a positive return on that investment. But I've also invested in gear. Uh I have a new laptop, I have a big 40-inch uh curved screen, I have a microphone to do these podcasts. Um so there's a lot of additional cost on the side of just starting out trading um with prop accounts that I've incurred uh as cost. Um and I'm logging all of that. Uh, I've also shown that on my social media platform to sort of provide full transparency. No one really has to do the same thing. I mean, each person's journey is uh individual, but for me it was important to I'm kind of on a mission where I want to show that it's possible to start out day trading. It's also possible in my age. Uh, I'm 40 years old, so I'm not a sort of coming up a 20-year-old, no commitments kind of person, which is all fine. I have a ton of respect for these young people getting into trading and creating uh uh independence for themselves. Uh, but I've just a different place in my life. I have a family uh that I need to take care of. I have a well-paid day job that I eventually would like to uh to leave behind me and just focus on my trading. But that's the situation I'm in right now. I'm juggling all of these different things, two kids, full-time job, and then day trade. So it started as a hobby, uh, but it's very quickly for me uh developed into my passion. Um and that's also why I'm doing these things on the side of my trading. I'm doing the podcast, I'm doing a lot of activity on my social media platforms, the trade at aine platforms on Instagram, YouTube, and so on. And it's all part of my mission, which is besides just learning how to trade and how to um become experienced and consistently profitable, develop my strategy, develop my rules, and follow all of that in order to become profitable. I also have a mission of wanting to spread the, I would say, good word about day trading, because day trading, I've posted about that before. It really to me is the ultimate self-development program that no one really talks about or never no one really knows about in the mainstream. Um, even if you listen to mainstream media, other big podcasts about investing, even swing trading podcasts, which there are a number of, um they don't um often talk about day trading. And the vast majority of people will say and um expect it to be something like gambling, like going to the casino, you're bound to lose, the house always wins, all of those things. Uh, but the more I get into it, the more I understand about day trading, the more I also realize that it's not gambling. It there is there is so much execution, mindset, and management in how you're doing your trading. That besides just taking the entries, managing your trades right and so on, it goes far beyond pure gambling and just you know, closing your eyes, putting a bet on. Um, so there's a lot more to it. And I understand a lot about that now after these seven or eight months of day trading. Um and I want to spread the word about that because as I said, it's it's a self-development program. It really is, you'll hear a lot of people, experienced traders talk about this as well. It is really a mirror into yourself when you confront the market and you put a trade on, you will be faced with all the flaws and mental glitches uh that you possess, that you carry with you uh as baggage all the way back from your childhood, uh, that you've learned how to protect yourself mentally, how to avoid fear, how to avoid mistakes, how to avoid adverse outcomes. And when you day trade, that that's really what you're confronted with. And that's why I call it a self-development program, because when you're confronted with these things, and trading can do that in a way I haven't experienced anywhere else. No coach is going to confront you with your flaws in the same way that the market is. When you get confronted with these things, you really have the chance to overcome them, to work with them and to overcome them and to become a better version of yourself, really. And that's that's what day trading uh has become to me. And I would love for more people to realize that normal people, not you know, not people that necessarily have like a an elite athlete kind of mindset. They just want to devote uh a hundred hours a week to this. It could be the normal, like I started out with a day job, with a family, just someone who who's passionate about charts, about price action, about stocks, indices, whatever it is, and then dive into that passion, develop it, become really passionate about it. And when you have that passion, day trading really has both the intensity and the frequency to fulfill such a passion. If you're if you're a buy and hold investor, you buy some stocks, value stocks, and you hold them for 10 years, that doesn't feed the passion in the same way that that day trading can. Obviously, you need to do a lot of things, you need to manage your risk, you also need to manage your emotions and your impatience to see action. But if you can do that, if you can work with yourself to overcome those things, then day trading is like a perfect balance between something that is high frequency enough you can trade every day to fulfill someone like me who is passionate about it, and also has that element of self-development which is key for me. I always want to learn, I always want to improve myself and develop myself. And day trading really is a cool opportunity to do so. The final thing as an intro, I'm gonna say about that is day trading might appear as a sort of a lonely, uh solitary journey where you're it's you against the market or you against you, and you're sitting there in front of your screen all day. Now, what I've noticed over the past six to eight months is that at least internationally, not so much in Denmark where I'm from, but internationally there is a vast amount of communities. There is a lot of people that you can engage with, you can uh make contact with, you can connect with online, be it through social media platforms, through discourse, through um through Facebook, even I've reached out to some people and and made connections there. So there is a lot of a strong sense of community. If you find the right people, obviously you want to avoid the scammers that are inevitably also gonna be there. But there are a lot of communities, and you I would recommend that you find a community that resonates with you, with your mindset, with the way you trade, if you have started up. And if you're new, I would just dabble uh a little bit, find someone that uh that resonates with you and make sure that that they're serious about it. That is not just gambling mentality and yoga wing accounts and so on, but there are serious communities out there. You can also uh see references to them in my materials on social media. So find find that community because community is is essential. I'm going to a boot camp in the US in a couple of months where that community is really taken to the next level, meet up physically, talk throughout it two entire days, talk trading, trade live as well. Um, and that's gonna be an absolutely mind-blowing experience, I'm sure. I haven't done that before physically. I've only attended a couple of presentation style events in Denmark here over the past six months, and they've been more like monologue, one-way communication from someone who's essentially trying to sell something, but in a serious way, to an audience where this is going to be more uh interactive. And I also want to take these kinds of concepts to my local area, to Europe, to Denmark to say, okay, can we also maybe facilitate some day trading events where people who have that interest or maybe already are passionate about it can find uh find community because that's what it's all about when you're starting out. You need to find someone that resonates with you, that you can see their success and you can mirror that for yourself so you can be inspired and have role models in the space because you really need that when you're starting out. Good. Back to my journey. As I said, I started about eight months ago, and what I did was I was initially attracted to swing trading, swing trading individual stocks, because I wasn't getting enough action, enough high-frequency information or decision-making material from just having my buy and hold stock portfolio that I've been having for seven or eight years. I'm making decent money on that, but it's just not exciting to me. It doesn't feed my passion. So I was starting to swing trade, and what I did was, I think it was in July, a Norwegian company called Kongsburge, which is in the defense sector, marine sector, and defense sector, came out with a bad earnings report. And I figured because defense was already last summer was uh in high value, there was a lot of demand for that. Defense stocks broadly were going up. They came up with a bad earnings report, which made the price dump. I don't know, eight, ten percent, something like that. Uh and I figured that was a bargain. So I I picked it up at a lower price, betting uh on a uh price increase over the coming weeks. Um now I know that now, but that wasn't the best kind of entry, technically or fundamentally, I would say, because what happened was I was in that stock for about three weeks, uh, where it just gradually declined, uh slow and steady, grinding towards my stop loss, uh eventually stopping me out for a small loss. Now I know a lot about risk, I'm actually quite risk averse. Uh so I always try to position size pretty conservatively, so I didn't lose a lot of money on that. It was a very small position. I also knew I was going to learn about this, and so it was very important for me to not over-leverage. What I did from there was okay, I had this first initial swing trade uh experience, and I dabbled in swing trading throughout the next six months. Actually, I'm still dabbling in swing trading, it's just been very difficult with these sideways markets uh over the winter. Um, I might pick that up a bit more again now. Uh if we are indeed bottoming out here uh in April 2026. But let's see. But in early August last year, I actually started um with my broker platform that I was doing swing trading on. They were also offering CFD trading. And then it's it's proper day trading, right? Because you don't want to really keep uh or hold your CFDs overnight. It's just getting too expensive. You can go long, you can go short. So I was also getting exposed to this way of trading derivatives, leveraged derivatives, and I didn't know much about you know the drawbacks of CFDs versus futures. I had no idea about futures at that time. So I was just trading what was available, what seemed attractive from a risk reward perspective, um, not knowing too much about spreads and commissions and the counterparty risk that you carry with uh with CFDs. So I was I was logging, uh I had my favorite set. I had CFDs on US 30, so the Dow Jones Index, the SP 500, the Nasdaq 100. I also had the European indices like the FTSE 100 and the DEX. And also actually, I tried a couple of trades in the Danish C25, COVID 25 index, uh, which was just ridiculous. There was no, I mean, there was no fluctuation. There were no volumes, no volatility, so I I quickly quit that as I went along. But I was trading the US indices on CFDs and I had set aside about 1500 US dollars to do so. I was ready to lose all of it because I knew this was a learning experience. Eventually, actually, I did I made a little bit of money on some of the trades and I lost some money on some of the trades. And I think I did that for about two or three weeks. Uh, having lost net about 10 or 15 percent of those$1,500, I realized if I kept going like this, it would eventually come to zero. So I never actually burned that whole pot of$1,500. I only burned about 10 or 15% of it before realizing I need to I need to learn this better before I'm risking my real capital. And that's when I came across TradingView. I did that in um in August as well, mid-August 2025. And I realized that for free I could paper trade in TradingView. And paper trading, if you're new, it's just a demo. It's really just play money that you get you get a hundred thousand US dollars uh completely fictional. Uh and you can place trades on whatever instrument you can find on uh on TradingView, which is really most instruments that are available out there. So I started doing that. I remember placing my first paper trade on August 18, 2025. Uh I think that was in the DEX index, uh, and it was a win, by the way. Uh probably more statistical win or a beginner's luck kind of win than than anything else. I was using the the I would almost say usual uh beginner indicators. I was using high-sR MAC D moving averages to inform my trading, not knowing uh much about it, but trying to apply those technical indicators to my trading. And that went, I would say that went decent. I was paper trading for about a month and a half, uh, so into the end of September last year. Uh, and I think by that time I had a profit on my initial hundred thousand, I had a six percent profit. So in a month and a half, I had with losses and wins, my net result was 106,000 US dollars on my paper trading account. I knew very well uh from the beginning that paper trading doesn't equate to actual trading, let alone, I mean, not even to prop trading, but certainly not to actual trading, real capital. Uh, there is the psychological element. I wouldn't say there is no psychology involved in paper trading because you still think I still at least project my emotions into this needs to work out long term. Otherwise, I won't be able to trade prop or real capital. So if my paper trading doesn't work, then um then nothing will. And if I'm affected emotionally by my paper trading, it will multiply when I'm trading prop or actual capital. So I also use the paper trading to sort of condition my mind to deal with dollar values, to deal with fluctuating numbers on a tick-by-tick basis. And I think that was a pretty good preparation, uh, at least mechanically, if not emotionally, to start my first prop account, which I did on October 1st. So by this time I knew the mechanics of the trading, how to place a trade, how to quickly place stop-loss orders, limit orders, take profit orders, and so on. And I would uh know the indices, the tickers, um, and how they were behaving quite well at that point. So on October 1st, I started my first prop account. Having read a little bit about prop firms, also listening to uh the day trading show podcast, that was something that inspired me to dabble with or to go into prop firm trading. I think like most uh beginning day traders, it's it when you come across prop firms for the first time, it almost seems too good to be true. It's like like you you're getting a high potential return on investment for very little down payment. And of course, it is a little bit too good to be true. Uh prop firms are businesses that rely on the fact that most people fail, both their challenges and their front-end accounts. That's how the business runs. But for the people who are passionate about it, who really dive into it and leave the gambling mentality behind them, see it as a process, uh as a business, and take only take the necessary trades, the good setups. For those people, it's actually an incredibly attractive model to take money out of the out of the market when you think about it. So I was attracted to that and I started my first top step challenge, uh, a combine, 50k combine on um October 1st. If you don't know about PropFirm uh accounts, this is basically so at the PropFirm is a place where you buy an account with fictional money. So I might buy a$50,000 challenge account for let's say$60 or$70 per month. And then that$50,000 are fictional, so they're simulated money, but the markets that I'm trading them in are real. And you get that access to a platform where you can trade, you get access to real-time data, so you can see the futures data ticking along, uh, pretty much tick by tick, real time. And then you place your trades inside of that platform. Uh, it can also be for some prop firms, you can trade directly through TradingView. Everything that happens in there is simulated, especially in the challenge level, which is typically where most people start. So a challenge account is an account that if you pass it, it allows you to move on to a funded account where eventually, if you create a profit, you can withdraw some of that as real money. But the challenge account is typically a place where, for my the example with TopStip, that was a place where I was getting 50,000 uh simulated dollars to trade with. Uh and I trade index futures, so futures of the Nasdaq and the um SP 500 and the Dow Jones index typically because that's where the high volume is and the good volatility. And then without, so if you follow the rules of that account, um you need to generate 3,000 in profit, that's 6% that passes the challenge without ever seeing more than$2,000 of drawdown. There are lots of videos online that you can find that explain these rules, but it's basically that's the simple way to put it. There are also consistency rules, so you cannot generate all these three thousand, thousand three thousand dollars in one trade. You have to do it over, uh, in this case, over two days of maximum fifteen hundred dollars. So that's both it's a way for the prop firm to make it a little bit harder for you to not get lucky, so to speak, but actually trade consistently. But it's also something that conditions you to follow uh a consistent path and not just um gambling uh really. So there's pros and cons, but I would say over the long term, the rules of a prop firm is actually something that allows you to get good habits in your trading and not um over-leverage, oversize, uh, and and gamble your money away. Now, if you pass this challenge and I passed my first challenge, so the one that I bought on October 1st, I paid a monthly subscription. So I paid, I think by January, I had paid three months of of monthly subscriptions for it. So about$200. I passed the combine at that point, so I got to the$53,000 uh without uh getting too much drawdown. And once I got that, I I got the chance, I was sort of qualified to buy a funded account. So that was$129. And this is this is where it gets real, I would say. It's not a live account yet, it's still simulated money. But if you generate a profit from that, you can actually withdraw it in um in real money. The rules are that you need to generate with top step on an account like this, you need to generate five days of at least$150 of profit on the 50k account. And I managed to do that by early March this year. So five months after I started the Combine uh the first time, and I could withdraw my first payout. I got that into my account by mid-March uh this year, that's about a month ago now, which was$635, which equates to 4,200 Danish kroner, which is actually a sizable amount for someone like me. I have a good salary, my day job pays well, but still taking$635 out of the market, out of the prophet from really just clicking buttons uh every afternoon for an hour or two is something profoundly uh interesting uh and attractive to someone like me. And I can see how this could scale because I've shown to myself now that I'm able to manage my emotions, follow my rules, follow the prop firm rules, and get to a stage where I can take money out of the prop firms, out of the market. I have to say, along the way, I also invested in a coaching program. So I was part of the Black Shirt Club, which is Austin Silver's coaching program. I was in there for three months and I learned heaps. That's also, I mean, it basically taught me the way that I trade today. So I'm using VWAP, the volume weighted average price. You will hear me talk about that all the time, which is is really the guide to my trading. Um, I combine it with a few other things uh nowadays, but VWAP really is the the key to to how I generate profits in my trading. So I have to say that also uh I said in the beginning, you find you need to find community. If you can combine that community with something that can teach you uh the basics about trading, but also deep dive on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, and get that coaching element into it, then you've then you can really come a long way in a short amount of time. So I think that it was an investment. It was five hundred dollars a month for three months. So if you add that in, then I'm also still not profitable into my costs, but but it really was an investment and it was definitely worthwhile because I've learned so much, not only I mean how and what to trade, uh and what it what does a good trade look like, what does a bad trade look like. I've also come to a place now where I can tweak the strategy with with my own personality uh so so that it matches my personality perfectly. And that's I could not have done that on my own in over the course of three months. That's really something that accelerated with being on this this coaching program. So I would also, if you can find the the the time and the money to invest in something like this, and if you're serious about your trading, then then I would really give something like that a shot. Again, there are multiple coaches out there that that offer these things. You want to be selective because there are also scammers that uh are mostly just making money from from you paying them for their courses. Um, but if you listen to my podcast episode with Griffin, you'll hear that at least the coaching program that we were on, the Black Shirt Club, they really want their pupils, so to say their coaches, uh to uh to succeed. And that's the kind of place you want to be in as a new trader. Some place where you where you feel the seriousness and the wish for people to succeed when they start out trading. So that was a significant part of my development over the past uh six months as well. And I have no doubt in my mind now that I have the tools and I also have the mindset to succeed with day trading. I want to keep going with uh with prop trading. Um and I'm I don't actually have an expiry date on that. I think prop trading still is an incredibly uh attractive model for someone like me, still starting out, coming up as a trader, where you don't have to put that much money down uh up front uh and you can have an amazing return on investment. Think about it. I spent$320 and prop accounts, and I've generated$635 of income from it in just a few months. I am one day from getting my next payout, which is also something like probably something like five to six hundred dollars again. So that just adds or compounds uh the return on investment because it's from the same account. So it's the same account that cost me these$320 in total if you put combine subscription and funded account together. Let's say I take$1,200 out of that. That's a factor of four to one uh return on investment. That's actually really, really attractive. And then from there, I have two other funded accounts. I'm just, you know, steadily, steadily just buying uh one or two accounts uh as I have room in my my personal finances to do so and gradually scaling that. The ideal is of course that I have the um that I can use the income from payouts uh to fund more accounts and scale that way. So right now I'm I'm going through the planning of this. How can I use payouts to both fund, of course, some running expenses um and some more gear? I want some more gear as well, but also use them to fund um the the journey forward. How do I scale this up? How do I scale the uh the prop firm gain, uh which you'll also hear a lot of people talk about? And then from there, I mean, my mentality is the limiting factor because the sky is the limit in terms of what I can take and payouts and accounts and so on. But my mentality is what I'm working most on these days in terms of handling drawdowns, handling higher uh account sizes, higher lot sizes when I trade, handling copy trading across several accounts. Um, so that's something I'm conditioning my mind to now, scaling up mechanically as well as mentally to hopefully generate a lot more profits uh in the coming months and the time to come. So I hope that gave you a sense of what I have been doing uh to get from zero to payout in about seven months uh of dabbling with day trading. If you're inspired by this, um check out my channels. Uh, I have Trader Dane on Instagram, trader Dane on YouTube, um, and of course, it's also running here on Apple Podcast and Spotify uh as a podcast. And if you want to hear more, subscribe to the podcast, give it a five star review if you uh if you're up for it. And then yeah, I'll see you next time.