Performance Report: March 31, 2026

Two weeks ago I published a report from a position of cautious optimism — two funded firms, a pipeline of Lucid eval accounts building toward their second and third payouts, and a trajectory that suggested I was maybe a payout or two from going green overall.

Then I blew it. Not metaphorically. I literally blew most of my accounts in a single evening, bought more, blew those, and spent the better part of two weeks climbing back out of the hole I dug for myself.

This is that report.

At the time of my last report, net P&L was −$779.36. It is now −$1,567.82. That gap — roughly $788 — is the cost of what happened between March 14 and where I sit today. It would have been considerably worse without the sessions that preceded and followed the blowup period.

The short version: I got impatient, convinced myself I could sprint to funded status before the FOMC announcement, and paid for it across multiple sessions in mid-to-late March.

The long version is more uncomfortable to write. On the evening of March 16 I had multiple Lucid eval accounts that were each up several hundred dollars — the kind of session where the smart move is to close the platform and go to sleep. Instead I kept trading. I was trying to push accounts over the finish line before the Fed announcement the next morning so I'd have more funded accounts producing during what I expected to be a volatile session.

What followed was a textbook example of how quickly things can unravel. A misclick on MGC instead of GC — a position 1/10 the intended size — left me without the hedge I needed. I held instead of closing for a small loss. The loss grew. I started compensating by trading other accounts harder to offset, which meant those accounts started taking on risk they shouldn't have. One by one, accounts I had spent weeks building collapsed in a single night.

The worst part isn't the accounts. It's the sequence of decisions that were each individually recoverable and collectively ruinous. I had a chance to exit the TopStep 150K XFA at +$950 with a $1,800 balance, two days from payout eligibility. I was closing out apps for the night when I saw a market spike, decided to "take a quick $100," was immediately down $200, held, got down $400, tried to hedge, and eventually blew the account with a senseless final trade that had no business being placed.

There is no sophisticated analysis to offer there. I was done for the day and I traded anyway.

At one point during this stretch I was buying new accounts and blowing them within two hours. That's when I started asking myself an uncomfortable question: is this still a business, or is this becoming something else?

I locked myself out of the platforms for ten hours. It helped. But the question stayed with me.

I want to document these specifically because I have rules for a reason, and breaking them is how accounts die.

Not hedging when I should have. Multiple blown accounts trace directly to being unhedged in a volatile moment. On March 10, I was perfectly hedged short NQ / long ES, the NQ take profit filled early, and I was left exposed on the ES side as the market gapped down on Iran news. A simple re-hedge would have saved it. On March 19, I was long MGC without a SIL short to offset, watched gold bounce and then drop, and took the full loss.

Pair trades failing due to unusual divergence. Gold and silver decoupled harder than usual across several sessions in this period. Normally MGC and SIL move closely enough that shorting one while long the other gives reasonable protection. That relationship broke down in ways that turned calculated risk into unmanaged exposure. March 19 is the clearest example: gold dropped over 200 points while silver barely moved, meaning my MGC long had no real hedge at all despite my thinking it did.

Not cutting losses at the first clear signal. The pattern repeated more times than I care to count: initial loss, a window to exit for −$100 or −$200, decision to hold for a bounce, loss doubles or triples. The right trade in hindsight was almost always the first exit.

After the blowup I stepped back and started over more deliberately. I bought new Lucid evals, managed them more carefully, and gradually worked down to a single account focus.

The new TopStep 50K Combine — account 50KTC-V2-475170-76670341 — was my stabilizing force. Here's the recent run:

The account passed the combine on March 27 — small, steady, and disciplined. No heroics. The most noteworthy trade of the passing session was a crude oil short I nearly talked myself out of, cut a −$250 drawdown on, and ultimately closed for a small gain. That's the version of me I need more of.

TopStep 50K XFA — EXPRESS-V2-CT-475170-15867357

Passed eval March 27. Currently in funded express account. TopStep Consistency rule selected. Day 1 of 3 minimum trading days completed as of March 30 (loss day, −$161.70). Day 2 completed today, March 31 (+$567.99 net). One more trading day required before payout eligibility.

I chose TopStep's Consistency Rule for this account deliberately. My goal is a payout before April 7 — I have a medical bill due that I'll be short on otherwise. TopStep typically processes payouts in about two days, so the math requires me to have a qualifying payout request in by approximately April 4 or 5. That means completing the third minimum trading day by April 3 at the latest.

Today's session (March 31) went well — +$567.99 net. I traded crude oil, MNQ, MES, and briefly Heating Oil. The HO trade was profitable but uncomfortable — it's a futures contract I should probably leave alone. More on that below.

After April, the financial pressure eases considerably, and I can trade more patiently without a specific payout deadline forcing decisions.

This stretch clarified something I'd been resisting: not all futures are equal for my style of trading, and trying to trade everything is a liability, not an edge.

MNQ and MES are my home base. Nasdaq and S&P minis are where I'm most comfortable. I can hold longer, the correlations are predictable enough to trade directionally, and the tick size means I'm not immediately underwater from bid-ask spread. Stress is lower, patience is possible, performance is better.

MGC is acceptable. SIL is not. I've slowly come to terms with exiting the Gold/Silver pair trade as a primary strategy. The issue isn't that it doesn't work — it does, when the metals are correlated. The problem is the hard decoupling that's been happening with increasing frequency. Gold drops 200 points, silver barely moves. My MGC short is supposedly hedged by my SIL long, but the offset evaporates. The loss is full-size. Since I can't trade fractional SIL contracts the way I can with MGC, I lose the granular risk management that makes the strategy survivable. MGC alone, with small size, is still fine. SIL is done for me — or close to it.

Crude oil (MCL) is situational. The Iran situation has put oil in play in ways that are actually tradeable at times. I've noticed a correlation with NQ/ES: when oil is up, equities tend to be down, and vice versa — but the relationship is short-lived and doesn't hold on longer timeframes. Today I shorted MCL near the daily range high and got filled twice. It worked cleanly. But I'm still treating it as a one-contract instrument until I'm more confident. CL full-size is out of the question for now.

Heating Oil (HO) is a curiosity I need to leave alone. I have no business trading this. Every trade I've placed in it has been profitable, which is partly why I keep coming back. But it tracks CL inconsistently, the bid-ask spread is significant, and being wrong by even a little in size means immediate hundreds-of-dollar losses. It's genuinely gambling on my current account size. A $5K+ drawdown might change the math, but right now I'm treating every HO trade as a lapse in judgment that happened to work out.

The financial picture is messier than it was two weeks ago. Net P&L is −$1,567.82, which is roughly double where I was. But I'm not starting over — I have a funded account, I have two minimum trading days completed, and I have a payout coming in the next week if I execute cleanly.

The discipline issue is the real one. Not the instruments, not the firms, not the market conditions. Me. Knowing when to stop is the single skill that separates this from a trading operation from an expensive hobby. I'm working on it.

I'll post the payout update as soon as it clears.

Every payout you see documented in this report triggered or will trigger a Rewards Club distribution. As the payout frequency and size grows, so does every pool.

The community is still small. That means the pools are split among fewer people right now than they ever will be again. If you have been considering upgrading your tier, the math is most favorable while the subscriber count is low.

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All figures in this report are real and verifiable. This is not financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results.