With months in between jobs and nothing certain lined up yet, the idea of needing some sort of income stream is necessary.  The usual routes, like remote teaching work or other 'digital nomad' type stuff are not looking too promising.  Remote work is too hit and miss.   While talking to my brother in Kazahstan, he runs some sort of remote work attendance tracking app for his businesses.  It got me intrigued.  How do people actually "show up to work" if the job is online?  Apparently there are systems for this as he explained.

But what is more up my alley is trading futures with prop firms.  The research looks solid.  I've been experimenting in general with my own money but the losses are hard to stomach.  That's mainly due to the inevitable learning curve and the atrocious bear market conditions we've seen since Trump's tariffs.  But that may all be changing soon.  Regardless of market conditions, at some point you have to get good at trading in all environments and gain the confidence to realize:  yes I can also make money in a bear market.  If you get involved in a prop firm then you have no choice.  They give you profit targets and if it's a bear market they don't give a shit:  you still have to make money or you're essentially fired.

The way a prop firm works, they give you access to their capital to trade with.  But they won't let just anybody do it.  You have to pass tests and show consistency over a period of time with an evaluation account.  If you can make a monthly profit target  (it's around 10%) and not fall below the capital threshold, you will then be funded.  Funded means you can choose amounts of capital to trade with by the firm, usually $25k, $50k, $100k, or up to $200k.   Each capital amount carries a corresponding monthly fee and you're not keeping all the profits either:  it's around 90% you keep and that depends on the prop firm too.

In short, the company is partly using you to make their money.  The benefit for you is that you can trade higher amounts of capital by using theirs as opposed to risking your own.  It's a fair deal.  After all, a traditional company is using you anyway and trying to milk value of out of you.  In many cases, sadly, they can go beyond the boundaries of respect and they will exploit the workers while violating labor laws.  That is after all why I ran.

This might be the way to finally get ahead.  I've been stuck in a dead circle for months trying to manage a small-value secondary $8000 account for futures trading (predominantly) and losing a shitload of money in the process.  Sure we can call it  'tuition' but I've already sunk over $20k into this account by making dumb beginner mistakes.  Quite frankly, I'm getting mighty sick of this and always find myself losing, losing, losing, and losing money.  I can't afford to sink anymore capital into this either as I don't have a fucking job.  Any capital I have right now is necessary to survive on this midnight run until I do land into the next chapter.

At the same time, this learning curve is necessary before taking on the challenge of a prop firm and passing the rigorous testing if I want to pursue this further.

As usual I asked ChatGPT for this and to develop a plan moving forward

Step 1:    Finish building and refining your System 2.0 (we're almost there!)  To make a long story short, System 2.0 means allocating my existing small-value account to trade three asset classes:  futures, currencies, and naked options on stocks.  Currencies and naked options I have a lot of success at already.  At first I was allocating everything in this account to futures as I wanted to get better.  But after losing so much money I resigned to cut back and return to what was working before.  Naked options I can simply do and make money over time.  But no prop firm will hire you to trade those because there's nothing really in it for them if you do.

Step 2:  Run 6–8 clean weeks of personal trading with your own money on the small account and use real tracking (net P&L, no broken rules for the new system)

Step 3:   Practice the prop firm Challenge Rules (basically their test) at small scale.  That means to simulate drawdown limits, profit targets, and no daily overtrades.

Step 4:  Pick 2–3 top firms to research (like Topstep, Apex, FTMO Futures Division)

Step 5:  Only enter a Challenge with a prop firm after you have done all this and have proven readiness, not gambling

If this all goes according to plan, I'll aim for around a $100k capital allocation then fully use this for futures trading and meanwhile abandon all that on the former account.  The former account will simply be for naked options on stocks and currencies, basically the bread and butter strategies.

Let's see what happens!