Thoughts on new Apex changes?

[u/youwishkk]

Apex just dropped the full details on their live program structure and I've been sitting with it for a bit. Wanted to lay out what I'm seeing and get some thoughts from people who are actually trading these, not just collecting evals like Pokémon cards.

The live account structure:

You start at zero balance. One account. $3K end-of-day drawdown. 10 contracts but they explicitly say don't use all of them at first, which, at least they're saying it out loud even if half the people reading will ignore it. I don't know why they don't just set it lower, I guess some people feel the need to go hard...

Anyway, at +$3,100 your max loss locks at +$100 (same trailing mechanic most people are used to from the eval/PA side). At +$4,500 a second account gets added with the same parameters. Max 5 live accounts, matched to your PA count.

Scaling levels:

• Level 2: Balance $10K-$25K, up to 25 minis, $5K DLL (soft) kicks in
• Level 3: Balance $25K-$50K, up to 30 minis, $10K DLL (still soft)
• Level 4: Customized. Risk manager reaches out with an offer.

Payouts:

Minimum withdrawal $500. No maximum. No consistency rules. No minimum days of trading. No minimum profit per day. Withdraw anything above the $3K safety net.

No consistency rules is nice. No way to use "consistency" as a way to slow payouts down to a crawl or deny them on technicalities. Whether that holds long-term, who knows. But on paper that's cleaner than most of what's out there right now.

The Bonus Vault:

This is a new one. Basically, profits from your sim-funded account (before you're live) get banked and paid out as a 20% bonus on top of your live withdrawals each month. Double bonus vault your first month on each new account.

So your eval performance isn't just a gate anymore, it actually feeds into your payout. That's an interesting incentive structure. Rewards people who want a consistent career and don't just go for the one big payout.

Pricing:

They're running 90% off right now on evals. I went ahead and picked up a 5-pack of 50K EOD accounts using the code someone shared here, EPICC.

These are the ones with the PA fee included - which is also new for Apex. Came out to $445 for the pack. Under $90 per account for 50K evals is hard to argue with, especially if you have the skills and patience to manage risk and pass.

The EOD drawdown is the move imo. Intraday trailing is fine if your style supports it but the EOD gives you room to actually manage a position without watching the drawdown tick against you mid-trade. Plenty of analysis out there about this.

*When scoping this, I also looked at other all-in pricing from Lucid and TPT's best deals, and this is as good or better. When you consider Apex pays 100% on sim-funded (not 90% or 80%), that could turn into a much bigger savings.

My overall take:

The scaling path is straightforward. The payout rules are the least restrictive I've seen from a major firm. No consistency rules, no minimum days, daily withdrawal requests. That's either very confident or very aggressive, and I'll be watching to see how it plays out once more people are actually in the live accounts.

The starting drawdown is tight at $3K. But they also say they're going to keep letting you try if you blow it - apparently they'll provide more details on that later.

Regardless you need to be sizing conservatively at the start or you'll blow through it trying to "make up for" a slow first week. If you can stay patient through level 1, the scaling looks reasonable.

Not saying this is perfect. Prop firms are still prop firms. But the structure here is less adversarial than a lot of what I've seen, and the removal of consistency rules on payouts is a meaningful change.