Rutger spent five years building a trading edge, two of them on demo (which he now calls a mistake), and went through 15-20 blown prop firm evaluations - including thousands lost to outright scam firms - before finding Alpha Capital. Pure technical analysis kept him at break-even. The breakthrough came when he added fundamental analysis: GDP, inflation, interest rates, central bank policy, and geopolitics as the directional filter, technicals for entry timing only. With that combination, he hit max allocation in one month and earned £23K in performance fees over three months. His core rules: one trade per day, less is more, and trade like a professional athlete - lifestyle, health, and routine included.
Watch the full interview on YouTube
How it started: COVID, computer science, and a game about money
Rutger was studying computer science and economics in the Netherlands when the pandemic shut everything down in 2020. Everyone around him was partying. He wanted to use the time to learn something.
He found trading. He already understood financial markets from his economics background, and the structure of it appealed to him immediately, a competitive arena where only the top few percent consistently take money from everyone else.
"I was like, okay, there's this game where you play against very smart people and only the top five percent make all the money. That sparked something."
He joined trading communities, started drawing break and retest setups on MetaTrader 4, and began building a plan in a Word document. His father was a photographer and entrepreneur who supported the goal but refused to fund it, insisting Rutger use his own money so that every blown evaluation genuinely hurt.
"If you're always trading with your dad's money and you blow the challenge, it's like, oh well, it's not my money. My dad wanted me to feel it. And I think that helped me take more responsibility."
Two years on demo: the mistake he warns everyone about
Rutger spent his first one to two years exclusively on demo. No real money, no real emotions.
On paper it looked good. His MT4 demo was up 20-30%. In practice it meant nothing.
"You learn zero about emotion on demo. On one side I didn't lose money. But I also lost out on emotional experience. When it came to the real thing, I was starting from scratch psychologically."
He had the classic experience: doing well on demo, going live, performance immediately collapses. The settings were identical. The trader was not.
His advice now when anyone mentions demo trading: start with a very small real account or the smallest available prop firm evaluation instead. Get emotional reps in as early as possible.
15-20 blown evaluations and thousands lost to scams
In 2023, Rutger blew somewhere between 15 and 20 prop firm evaluations. Some of those losses were at his own hands. Some were at firms that never intended to pay anyone.
He lost thousands of dollars to The Fund Trader and True Forks Funds, both of which he later discovered were scams.
"I lost all this money. But I was close to finishing my degree and I had a real goal: become a full-time trader when I was done studying. That goal kept me going."
After the scam firms, he started looking at what legitimate options existed. FTMO was his reference point but the pricing put him off. He researched what else was in the market, found Alpha Capital, and started there.
The technical edge that kept him at break-even
Rutger's technical framework is systematic, built like a software engineer would build it. A checklist, not a feeling.
His confluences: market structure direction, higher time frame demand or supply zone, higher time frame liquidity taken out. All three must be present before a trade goes on. He back-tested this model thousands of times to verify the edge was real before taking it live.
"I wanted to trade like an algorithm. Black and white. If you can take a strategy, run it 100 times in a back test environment, and see your win rate, then you know if the edge exists."
His win rate at technicals only: around 35% with a fixed 1:3 risk-reward. That is mathematically profitable. But he was stuck at break-even. He was still losing accounts.
The problem was not the strategy. It was market conditions. A purely technical system does not know when a fundamental trend is strong enough to keep running through every pullback, invalidating setup after setup that looked textbook on paper.
The breakthrough: fundamentals changed everything
Nine months before this interview, Rutger started learning fundamental analysis properly. GDP data, inflation readings, interest rate decisions, central bank policy language, money supply, unemployment. Not just checking the red folders on Forex Factory but understanding what the data actually means for a currency's direction over weeks and months.
"Fundamental analysis was the real breakthrough. I was around break-even or a little losing. Then I started incorporating it and everything switched."
The logic is simple: fundamentals drive the market's direction. Technicals time the entry. Using one without the other is like navigating with only half the map.
He built a scoring model that ranks every currency pair weekly based on the strength or weakness of each economy's data points. That model became ForexFundamentals.com , a free resource he now runs to help technical traders add a fundamental layer to their edge.
The impact on his numbers was immediate. Win rate went from 35% to 45-50%. The same technical setups, now filtered by fundamental direction, stopped catching traders in false reversals inside strong macro trends.
"I will not trade against fundamentals. If the fundamental trend is strong enough, a pullback might look like a reversal on the chart but it keeps going. You get caught. By filtering for fundamental alignment, I massively increased my win rate.”
Max allocation in one month, £23K in three months
When Rutger applied this combined approach to his Alpha Capital accounts, the results came quickly.
He had blown accounts on Alpha Capital while trading purely technically. Once the fundamentals layer went in, he went from a 100K evaluation to maximum allocation in under one month.
Over the following three months, he withdrew £23K in performance fees.
He graduated university in September. He reached max allocation in September. He has not needed a job since.
"That money allowed me to live in Amsterdam, travel, do the things I want to do. Trading gave me the financial freedom and the location freedom I was working toward."
The one trade per day rule
One of the most practical things Rutger talks about is his hard limit of one trade per day.
His reasoning comes from his computer science background applied to human behavior. Humans can make a limited number of high-quality emotional decisions per day. A trade is a big one. Taking more than one compresses the cognitive bandwidth available for each decision.
"One trade per day means you cannot revenge trade. You cannot overtrade. Less is more. The more chart time you spend, the worse your results usually get."
He also uses Alpha Capital's Swing account specifically because it gives him the flexibility to hold positions through news events with a wide enough stop loss to survive volatility and still be in the trade when the fundamental trend resumes.
Living like a professional athlete
Rutger is direct about the relationship between lifestyle and trading performance.
He works from an office in Amsterdam with the Trading Academy community, runs morning market outlooks, produces content, does New York session live streams, and goes to the gym. When any of those habits slips - diet, training, routine - he notices it in his trading before anything else.
"A professional trader is the same as a professional athlete. If you're not living like a professional athlete, how are you becoming one?"
He has seen the inverse too. A good month, going out too much in Amsterdam, slacking on journaling, and the unnecessary losses start appearing. Not from a broken strategy but from a brain that is no longer running at the level the strategy requires.
His fix when things go wrong is public accountability. He will open a live stream and show his journal, including the mistakes, so the community and his students can see them. That external commitment makes it genuinely difficult to make the same error twice.
"You don't want to have to explain to your students that you made exactly the same mistake again."
FAQs
What is Rutger's trading strategy?
Rutger uses a combination of fundamental analysis for directional bias and technical analysis for entry timing. On the fundamental side he tracks GDP, inflation, interest rates, central bank policy, and geopolitical factors to determine which currencies are fundamentally strong or weak. On the technical side he uses a checklist of market structure direction, higher time frame supply and demand zones, and higher time frame liquidity. He only enters trades where both the fundamental bias and the technical setup align.
How did Rutger improve his prop firm win rate?
Adding fundamental analysis to his previously pure technical approach moved his win rate from approximately 35% to 45-50% using the same 1:3 fixed risk-reward ratio. The key insight was that fundamentals change market conditions in ways that pure technicals cannot anticipate, and filtering trades against the fundamental direction filters out a significant portion of losing setups.
How did Rutger pass prop firm evaluations after years of failing?
After blowing 15-20 evaluations across various firms (including scam firms), Rutger switched to using a fundamental bias filter on top of his technical system. He chose Alpha Capital for its transparency and reliability, used the Swing account for news flexibility, and applied his one-trade-per-day rule strictly. He hit max allocation from a 100K evaluation in under one month.
Why does Rutger only take one trade per day?
His reasoning is based on cognitive load. Humans have a limited capacity for high-quality emotional decisions each day. A trade qualifies as a major one. By capping himself at one trade per day, he eliminates overtrading, revenge trading, and the degradation in decision quality that comes from spending too many hours actively managing positions.
What is ForexFundamentals.com ?
ForexFundamentals.com is a tool Rutger built to help technical forex traders add fundamental analysis to their edge. It aggregates economic data points across currencies, scores them against each other, and produces a weekly fundamental bias for each currency pair. It is aimed at traders who understand technical setups but do not know how to interpret macroeconomic data or use it to filter their trades.
Ready to start your Alpha Capital evaluation?
Rutger's story is not about one shortcut or one magic setup. It is about building an edge systematically, being honest about what was not working, and adding the missing layer when the data pointed to it. The evaluation structure at Alpha Capital gave him the environment to prove the edge was real and to scale it.
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Alpha Capital Group is a proprietary trading firm based in the United Kingdom. All accounts operate in a simulated trading environment with simulated funds unless a specific product states otherwise. Performance fees are based on eligible simulated trading results and outcomes are not guaranteed. Rutger's story describes his individual experience on simulated programmes and is not a forecast or guarantee for future traders. Always confirm live rules, pricing, eligibility, and evaluation requirements on alphacapitalgroup.uk and help.alphacapitalgroup.uk before purchasing an evaluation.
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