One Prop Trader a Day - Neville Hornsey: Trading Reveals Who You Really Are
Neville Hornsey
Neville Hornsey is a 49-year-old UK futures trader who has been funded many times, since long before the modern prop-firm model existed. Here is his story, in his own words.
My name is Neville, I’m 49, and I live in the UK. Currently I trade the NQ.
I’ve been funded several times over many years. The first was through a company called London Stone Trading, after I’d paid to be trained by them. The model back then was to pay £2,000 to a firm, get some training on their strategies, and then, if you made 2% a month on the account they provided, you would get an increase in account size. There were several more companies like that before I ventured into the current model we see from funded-trader firms, and I moved over to the likes of Topstep to trade futures specifically, rather than forex. I have since tried many firms, in both forex and futures, and I have settled on futures – mainly for the volatility and the day-trading aspect they encourage.
I had early wins, so I thought trading was easy. I went on holiday, and paid off other relatively large-ticket items and credit cards.
It did not stay easy. When I moved over to Topstep – the first firm in this space – I was trading through Covid and watching limit-down days. At the time you had to hit a ridiculous target over a couple of evaluations, and you could pass in a single day, so I was seeing massive moves, hitting winners, and then, once funded, hitting massive losers because I was trading multiple minis at a time. I failed many times. But I could sense there was enough potential in the market to make all of the money spent back in one or two payouts, so I kept going, and just treated the losses and failures as an education fee.
My most expensive lesson was not even in this space. It was putting a lot of money into an ISA. It should not have been an expensive mistake; the mistake came from choosing which companies were in it. I put the majority of my eggs into one basket, based on what the CFO of a company called Xcite Energy said in an interview. That was probably £20,000, and the company went to zero, so my ISA was basically worthless. Set against that, losing a $3,000 funded account is not so bad when the initial payment is less than $100. Although when you consider that the whole industry is designed around taking money from you, the costs mount up quickly. I have been fortunate enough to have been able to afford them – so far.
I used to consider quitting a lot. I even met a trader who was looking for someone to mentor, and he asked me point-blank at what point I would leave the industry if I was not profitable. I made a decision a long time ago that I would not give up fully, because the only thing holding me back was my mentality. I could dedicate my life to learning, and executing was super easy – making good decisions all the time is a lot harder. The only reason I would quit now is if I were hurting the people around me by being toxically addicted to this. I have responsibilities, and providing for others is what keeps me on the path towards my goals.
I have overtraded. I have had FOMO. I have been greedy and stupid. I have attached my poor results to every psychological label that traders use to justify why this is not working for them. I stopped blaming the market a long time ago, and I am actively trying to remove my ego from trading every day. It never affected me in a depressive way, but trading has revealed who I really am, and it makes me very honest about who I am to myself every day.
Today I monitor the ES and the NQ, and trade the latter mostly. Day to day I am on the lower timeframes, though I have strategies for the daily and everything in between. I like momentum trades that hit a target dollar amount I feel is reasonable for the day, and then, in a perfect world, I close the screens down or lock myself out. I have also started using algorithms I have built – and in a really ideal world, in the not-so-distant future, I will not even open up the charts. I will just manage a portfolio of strategies.
I trade Monday to Friday and have traded Globex and RTH equally. Being in the UK, I am up for the London open and awake for the New York open, so if there is a trade after the London open and it works out, I am free for the rest of the day – especially if I am not being greedy. The worst days are the ones where I am grinding in the markets to get back to break-even, or as close as possible. A loss made in the London session over a few hours can be made right with one A+ trade in the US session. I do not really have a set routine, and anything that was mechanical and useful is tied into the algo side of things.
My most recent losing trade was on a Lucid account. I had taken three payouts, so the ROI on the account’s initial fees was good. I went short at the bottom of the initial balance, with an overleveraged size for the remaining account balance. The market decided to rip higher, and I had not put a stop loss in. The account was liquidated before the direction changed and went to where my take profit was. That sort of trade can blow your account or make you a few thousand in a day, and it is a risk I feel is worth taking every now and then. It is a gamble, and doing it all the time is bad practice and does not foster good habits – but the industry still allows that behaviour, and there are no real consequences like there used to be. In the past, if you lost an account, or even 10% of an account, you would be given your marching orders and told never to come back. The only thing I would do differently on that particular setup is trade a lot smaller size and limit my losses.
I have spent a good amount of time trying to unlearn everything I have been told and taught, but the biggest rule I was advised of is that the risk-reward ratio should be at least 1:2. I am a true believer in base hits for day trading, and massive asymmetric trades for everything else. The reason for base hits is that you can build, and you get out of the markets and reduce the inherent risk. The massive asymmetric trades just get your account to a place where you only need to be correct every now and then, which takes the pressure off.
No one around me understands what I do, or my mentality to want to do this. As for lifestyle, it just needs to pay the bills, so I do not need to impact or change anything – though when I have nothing to do during the day, I do feel like an early retiree.
What separates me from someone who washed out at their third evaluation? Grit and self-belief – but probably also having a way to afford to carry on. The advice I would give myself one year ago is short: stop, and wait for AI to catch up. If prop firms disappeared tomorrow, I would still be trading; I would have a spread-bet account with IG. And if you gave me a $1,000,000 funded account today, I would do the same as if you gave me $10,000, and hope there was a trade set up. The only difference would be the size I put on.
His Topstep Certified Funded Trader and TakeProfit Trader Professional Funded Trader certificates.
About the writer – Neville Hornsey
Neville Hornsey is a 49-year-old futures trader from the United Kingdom who trades the NQ. He has been funded many times across more than a decade in the industry, starting with London Stone Trading long before the modern funded-trader model existed, and going on to trade with Topstep, Lucid, Take Profit Trader and many others. A momentum day trader who favours base hits and the occasional asymmetric bet, he is now building his own algorithms with the goal of managing a portfolio of strategies rather than watching charts.
