Matt (Arman's co-interviewee from the Alpha Capital event) declined a call from the RCMP to become a police officer, taught himself to trade during night shifts at a jail, and has now earned over $230,000 in performance fees across multiple prop firms. His $35,000 single-day win on a $400K simulated account nearly ended his career by making him think he could repeat it every month. He uses only buy and sell limit orders, takes 2 to 3% bi-weekly rather than chasing big performance fees, journals every trade, and keeps himself deliberately busy outside of trading to stay mentally detached from the markets.
Watch the full interview on YouTube
From a jail cell desk to the charts: how it started
Matt's path into trading did not begin in a trading office or a finance degree. It began on the night shift at a correctional facility in Vancouver.
He had spent years working toward a career in law enforcement. Being a police officer was the goal. He took a job at a jail while the process moved forward, checking on prisoners, feeding prisoners, running his shift. And then, when the desk was quiet, he opened the charts.
"I would check up on prisoners, feed prisoners, make sure everything was good, and then I would go to my desk and start trading the London session."
That was the routine: corrections work by night, chart study in whatever gaps the shift allowed. Trading was the escape. It was the thing that made him ask whether he wanted to spend the rest of his life in that environment.
The answer came when the phone rang. The RCMP were calling to move him forward in the process. A career he had worked toward for years was on the other end of that call.
He turned it down.
"That was the best decision I ever made. I do not regret it to this day.”
The signal group that lit the spark
Before the jail shift, during the COVID lockdowns, Matt had been laid off from a car dealership. He was collecting employment insurance payments and had time on his hands. His cousin was running a signal group and invited him to join.
He put in around $1,000 a month to follow the signals. They won some, lost some. At the end of it he had lost money overall.
But something happened that losing the money could not take away.
"It showed me what is possible. It lit a spark. And that spark never went off."
Matt's view on signal groups, looking back, is the same as most experienced traders. Do not take signals. They do not work, and the people selling them are almost never consistently profitable. But there is one thing a signal group can do that nothing else quite replicates: it shows a beginner that money can move quickly, and that if the strategy behind it were sound, the returns would be real. That revelation is what sends a lot of people down the path of learning to trade themselves.
"The only benefit you will get from signals is if it sparks that drive. That is the only one."
Six figures in performance fees, and the lesson that almost cost everything
Over three years of prop trading, Matt has earned between $230,000 and $240,000 in performance fees across multiple firms. That covers losing periods, firm collapses, and months of rebuilding.
His biggest single day came in 2023 on a $400,000 simulated account. A GBP/USD limit order he had set before going to sleep tapped his zone overnight and ran straight to target.
He woke up to $35,000.
"It really changes you as a person."
And not entirely for the better.
After that day, Matt convinced himself he could now hit those numbers every month. He started forcing trades to match the outcome. He raised his expectations of himself to a level that was not based on consistency but on one outlier result. He describes what followed as destruction.
"I had the intentions where hey, I made it, I am a guru now. And that ultimately led to my destruction."
He spent four to five months unprofitable, chasing that number, not understanding why his edge was no longer working. The edge had not changed. His psychology had.
The lesson he carries from it:
"You have to just be humble. You have to accept profits for what they are. Making any dollar amount in the market is a blessing. If you are consistently making profits you are in the top 1% of the world. The sum of the money does not matter."
If he makes $30,000 one day and $5,000 the next, both are wins. The second one does not cancel the first. Treating every performance like a single data point rather than a bar to clear or a target to repeat is the only way to stay consistent over years.
The strategy: limit orders only
Matt trades exclusively with buy limit and sell limit orders. No market execution. This is not a preference; it is a survival mechanism.
"I am an emotional trader. If I market execute, I am a mess. I cannot trade. If I am using limit orders, I am an insane trader."
The strategy itself is built around a few core components. He identifies zones using failed supply and failed demand (breaker blocks), confirmed with the Fibonacci tool as an extra layer of confluence. He uses 100 EMA and 200 EMA taps as part of his entry logic, alongside M1, M5 and M15 correlation to validate the setup.
Once the zone is identified, he sets the limit and leaves it.
On the night before one trade he showed during the interview, he had set a limit at a zone he thought was unlikely to get tapped. Markets were closing the next day. He expected a range. He went to sleep.
"I woke up and price had tapped my zone and gone straight to target. That is the power of limit orders. The amount of times you doubt your zone and it does exactly what it was supposed to do."
He made $44,000 on that single trade.
The limit order approach also removes the execution problem entirely. The emotional spiral of watching price approach a level, second-guessing the entry, moving the stop, or not entering at all disappears when the order is already in the market. Price either gets there or it does not.
Finding an edge: you cannot buy someone else's strategy
Matt spent time and money on courses when he was starting out. He is not regretful about that. But the conclusion he arrived at is one he pushes hard to anyone who asks.
You cannot just buy a course and run the strategy. The strategy worked for the person who built it because it was built around who they are, how they think, and what psychological patterns they bring to the market. It does not transfer.
"I took one thing I really liked from each course that connected to me as a person and I designed my own strategy. My course works for me because it fits me as a person."
He quotes something he heard that he now uses himself:
"I can teach you how to trade. But I cannot teach you how to be a trader."
Every trader in a room will trade the same chart differently. The way you were raised, the experiences you have had, the pressure you feel when you see your account move: all of it affects your decision-making. The strategy has to match that. The search for the right one is not about finding the best indicators. It is about finding what speaks to your psychology specifically.
Playing the long game with performance fees
Early in his career, Matt was chasing the big paydays. Large single performance fees hitting his bank account felt like progress.
He no longer thinks that way.
"If you want to survive in this game long term, you have to play the long game. What I like to do is cap myself at around 2 to 3% bi-weekly and just take my profits."
The logic is straightforward. Going for a massive single performance fee means staying in positions longer, taking on more risk, and increasing the chance that one bad week unravels everything you built on the account. Consistent smaller performance fees, taken regularly, compound. The account survives longer. The firm relationship stays stable.
"As soon as you start stacking your simulated capital, that is when the big money comes in. Just going for 1 to 2% per account, if you scale that to a million dollars in simulated capital, that is $20,000 a month. And you cannot complain about that."
He is currently working toward max allocation with Alpha Capital and two other firms, treating each account as a consistent generator rather than a lottery ticket.
Why he almost quit props entirely
When The Funded Trader and MyForexFunds collapsed, Matt had been max allocated with both. He had worked hard to reach those positions. Both accounts disappeared.
"I was like: I cannot trust props anymore. If this could happen to two of the biggest props in the game, they are all going to go down."
He moved to live trading. But when results on his live accounts did not hold up as expected, a friend who was having a good experience with Alpha Capital suggested he come back to the prop space.
He bought an evaluation account with Alpha Capital. The experience was different.
"The infrastructure gave me similar vibes to trading with an actual bank. The website, the support team, the way the whole business is laid out. I just feel safe."
He now holds around 100K in simulated capital with Alpha Capital, with two evaluations in progress bringing his total exposure with the firm closer to 300K. He says he would not want to see himself trading with any other firm right now.
On the rules, his view is unambiguous:
"The only reason traders hate on the rules is because the rules do not justify their gambling. These rules are straightforward. If you are a genuine trader playing the game properly, these rules will never affect you."
The full-time trap: why too much free time kills your trading
Matt has been a full-time trader since 2023. He would be the first to tell you that going full-time too early is one of the most dangerous things a developing trader can do.
"Full-time trading will eat you alive. There are so many times I took the leap to full-time trading and it made me unprofitable. It is too much pressure."
His specific warning: do not go full-time until you have enough in the bank to sustain yourself for years, not months. The moment your trading income is also your living expense, the psychology changes. You are no longer trading to trade. You are trading to pay your rent.
"You need to be trading to trade. Not trading to make money. When you trade to make money you are going to get destroyed."
Even once the financial safety net is in place, full-time trading creates another problem that Matt did not anticipate: free time.
"Having too much free time kills you. All you do is eat, wake up, and think about trading. And thinking about trading throughout the day is the worst thing you can do."
His solution is to stay busy. He runs a security company. He runs an educational platform. When it gets to 11pm before the London session, he zones in on trading completely. Until then, he does not think about it.
"At 11 o'clock at night through London open, that is my trading window. Other than that I am not a trader."
The $35,000 day lesson and the fine line between confidence and fear
The biggest psychological insight Matt draws from his career is about the middle ground between the two states most traders flip between.
"You cannot be confident in the markets. You cannot be fearful. There is a fine line between them and that is emotionless. The moment you are confident, the markets will humble you very quickly."
The $35,000 day produced confidence. Confidence produced greed. Greed produced four months of losses. That is the loop. It does not discriminate.
Getting back to emotionless trading after a run like that requires the same thing every recovery in trading requires: data. Matt has been journaling for three years. When a losing streak hits, he goes back through his journal, looks at what he was doing two weeks ago, checks last month's percentages, and finds the context.
"Journaling will pave the road for success. If you are not profitable and you are not journaling, that could be one major reason why."
FAQs
What is Matt's trading strategy?
Matt trades exclusively with buy limit and sell limit orders on simulated prop firm accounts. He identifies zones using failed supply and demand (breaker blocks), uses the Fibonacci tool to confirm zone strength, and looks for 100 EMA and 200 EMA taps with M1, M5 and M15 correlation. He sets his limit and leaves it. The strategy is built around removing emotional execution entirely.
How has Matt earned over $230,000 in prop firm performance fees?
By trading consistently over three years across multiple firms, taking 2 to 3% bi-weekly rather than chasing large single performance fees, and surviving the cycles of winning weeks and losing weeks without abandoning his edge. He also had some large single-day results including a $35,000 performance fee from a GBP/USD trade on a $400K simulated account.
What happened after Matt's $35,000 day?
He became overconfident and set the expectation that he could replicate that result every month. This led to four to five months of unprofitable trading as he pushed positions beyond what his edge warranted. His advice to anyone who has a big day: treat it as a normal trade, reset, and keep going. The moment it changes how you size or how often you trade, it will lead to your destruction.
Is it a good idea to go full-time as a trader?
Matt's position is clear: not until you have a financial runway of several years, not months. The pressure of needing trading income to cover living expenses changes your psychology in ways that are almost impossible to override. He also recommends staying busy with other work or projects throughout the day, only switching on to trading during your actual trading window. Having too much free time leads to over-monitoring and over-thinking.
Why does Matt prefer limit orders over market execution?
He is self-described as an emotional trader who makes mistakes under the pressure of market execution. Limit orders remove the real-time decision entirely. The zone is identified in advance, the order is placed, and price either fills it or it does not. This eliminates FOMO, second-guessing, and the psychological spiral that comes from watching price approach a level and having to decide in the moment.
What does Matt recommend for traders who are stuck and unprofitable?
Find solutions instead of repeating the same approach. If you have been unprofitable for four years it is because you have been doing the same thing for four years. Identify the problem in your trading, whether it is emotional execution, poor risk management, or the wrong strategy, and then find a specific solution for each one. He also strongly recommends building your own strategy rather than copying someone else's, taking the best elements from everything you learn and designing something that fits your specific psychology.
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Matt built six figures in performance fees over three years by playing the long game: consistent percentages, limit orders, a trading journal with years of data, and the discipline not to let one big day change everything. Alpha Capital's evaluation structure rewards exactly that approach.
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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. Matt'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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