One Prop Trader a Day – Ricky Byrén: I Never Failed a Challenge Before Getting Funded

One Prop Trader a Day – Episode 142

What if you never fail a challenge because you refuse to take one before you are completely ready? Ricky Byrén, a 27-year-old trader from Sweden, trades NQ, oil, euro and GBP with a fully mechanical, rule-based system, and has hit 10,000 dollar+ payouts multiple times. In this interview, he explains why he never failed a challenge before getting funded, how a 1,000 dollar support and resistance course pushed him to build his own mechanical system, which prop firm rules he sees as red flags, and why he refuses to nit-pick any single losing trade.

Hey, my name is Ricky Byrén, I’m 27 years old and I am from Sweden. I trade mostly NQ, Oil, Euro and GBP.

I became a funded trader about 3 years ago which changed my life because that meant I could do trading fulltime. Before that I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do with my life so I gamed a lot with my friends and tried different things out like substitute teaching, studied to become a chiropractor and even studied different languages like Japanese. Becoming a funded trader allowed me to live the life I always wanted because now no one could tell me what to do or when to do it. No commitments of having to go to work for 9 hours. I could do whatever I wanted to do and I could do it whenever I wanted to. I’ve never been much for flashy cars or golden watches; I just wanted the freedom to live the life I always dreamt of.

The first thing I did with the money I earned was ordering home pizza for the whole family and said “I got this one” and broke the news for them. But on a more serious note, the first thing that really made me understand that I had made it was to pay off my student loan for the chiropractic’s course. It was a pretty hefty one that was slightly over 10,000 dollars so being able to pay that off and never having to worry about it again was a huge relief.

I actually didn’t fail any challenges before getting funded. The reason is I never took one before being completely ready. I think a large number of traders get lost in what their future can be if they make it and forget how hard trading really is and therefore blow a lot of money. I am proof that you don’t need to burn a large amount of money to succeed if you just do it right from the get go. Make sure you have backtest and prove that your system works, make sure you understand WHY it works, make sure to try it out on a sim account live before you try anything else so you get the real feel for it during live markets, and most importantly of all, please make sure your mind is set straight. You could have the best system in the world but if you revenge trade or overleverage etc., you’re a gambler, not a trader. That will always lead to failure.

The single most expensive lesson I paid for was a bullshit course that a “trader” sold me on support and resistance for 1,000 dollars. Long story short all he did was show me that price can bounce from a place and therefore it is now support/resistance (if you don’t already know, this is NOT how that works). But then he would draw out 10 of those boxes and always have a new reason to why a certain box failed and why it was a bad trade and why the winning one was good. But then the exact same scenario would happen and this time another box was good for another reason. In short, a subjective trader (scammer) that did hindsight trading. This is actually a big reason to why I created my own system and made it fully mechanical. A 10-year-old child should be able to take the same trades as you if it is fully mechanical and rule based. Which means you can teach anyone the system and that’s what I did. I will further prove this in the near future since I am coding a fully mechanical indicator that does all the work for the user and marks out the trades. It will even have backtest data that the user can view and prove the results for themselves.

Trading definitely tested my mental a lot of times. There were many times I cried into my pillow. There were many days I didn’t want to study the charts and felt like throwing up due to all the stress. There were many nights I lost sleep over feeling like I wasn’t getting anywhere. But I never quit. I always got back up and put in tons of hours and work the next day with undying faith that one day my breakthrough would come as well. Pressure either makes diamonds or burst pipes. I’ll let you pick which one you’re going to be.

The prop firms I’ve used is Apex, Bulenox, Takeprofittrader, Lucid, Tradeify and Blue Guardian. The most important rules for an account in my opinion are the consistency rules, days needed to trade and withdrawal rules. If you have for example a 20% consistency rule, that will only limit you and force you out of trades that you may want to stay in on. It could even force you to earn more than your target because you are now outside of the “rules” which postpones your pay-outs a lot. That is a big red flag in my opinion. Days traded will lock your profits in the account which means you haven’t actually earned anything yet. You’ve only actually earned your money when you’ve withdrawn the money to your bank account. Lastly if a prop firm has weird withdrawal rules like only processing pay-outs during certain days/weeks of the month that would allude to them locking your profit in once again and forcing you to wait for your money. In that time, you might take days/weeks off because you want to protect your profit which hinders your ability to earn more money and miss for example a huge win streak. Other than that, a 1:1 pass/fail target or at least as close to it as possible is of course mathematically very good for traders so if you can get that then it is a huge positive as well.

My trading style is day trading and I would consider myself a high probability day trader. I don’t take trades just to trade. I take high probability setups but I still get on average 2-3 trades a day during the 3 hours I trade. I am on the 5 minute timeframe for execution and I use the 1 hour timeframe for overall direction.

A typical day of trading would look something like this:

I get to the charts 10 minutes before my session; I check the higher timeframe to see what price is currently doing and prepare for what I think will happen. Then I check the lower timeframe to see if it comes true. If it does then I will take an entry with my entry function. If not then I reevaluate with my mechanical system if the direction has changed on the higher timeframe or not and then start the process again. In short, I check higher timeframe for direction and take trades when I get my entry function in the same direction as that. I think it is very important to understand which way the markets are moving first so that we can position us correctly and look for where we think price will go. At the end of the day price can only do 1 of 2 things, go up or go down. Understand where price is heading next and there are plenty of entry functions that can take you there. Absorption, FVG, IFVG, BB, CSD, value area bounce, Fibonacci, RSI, SMT, VIB etc. etc.

There is not much to say in terms of losing trades in my opinion. Everyone will lose sometimes in these markets. No one has 100%-win rate so there is nothing I would do differently in a losing trade. If my rules have been met then I know that I have a statistical edge and understanding of the market that it is far more likely to turn in to a winner for me rather than a loser. No single trade defines any person or trader and you have plenty of chances to go again. The important part is risk management and how you have set up/protect your capital. In my case my system is a 1:2. That means I win twice as much as I lose when I win. That means I could for example win 5 trades and lose 5 trades and STILL earn money. So, to focus on any single losing trade and nit-pick what you could have done “better” makes no sense to me. That’s not what defines a successful trader and believing you could always have done something better can lead to a really unhealthy obsession of “control” in these markets which spoiler alert, we do not have. No matter how much you want to drive price in a certain direction you can not do it.

I would say the milestone I am most proud of hitting is being able to wakeup every day knowing that I can do this for a living and live life to its fullest on my own conditions. But since you’re specifically asking for a materialistic milestone, I would say the 10,000 dollars+ pay-out (multiple times). I think we all dream of the 5-figure pay-out when we start out and to be able to hit it on multiple occasions is something I think is really cool!

I have been really fortunate in life to have a family who has backed me every step on the way so even though they didn’t entirely understand what it was I was doing in the beginning they always wholeheartedly supported me and kept asking questions on what it was until they got it! For that I would like to say thank you dad for showing me there is more to life and inspiring me to take a different path. Without your constant backing, encouragement and shielding from the outside world this journey wouldn’t have been possible. Thank you, mom, for always being in my corner and cheering me up when I was down. I’ll never forget the day I broke down crying in your arms celebrating my first passed prop firm challenge. And thank you to my brother for absolutely nothing (kidding of course). Thank you, Jimmy, for always believing in me and cheering me on no matter how hard it got. Bouncing ideas with you helped take the edge off a lot of times! Thank you to the best family I could have asked for.

If I got a 1 million dollar funded account today, I would make a gameplan based on drawdown, target and days to pass. I wouldn’t need to make any special plans because my system stays the same. It’s all about maths at the end of the day. How many trades do I need to pass and how many chances (lost trades) do I get to do it in. Everything else is just noise.

My take on the firms

Had no issues with this firm what so ever.