Interview noteThis page restates a public interview in new words. Dollar results, win rates, and payouts are claims made by the speaker or the host. They are not this desk's record, and they are not a result to expect.
Jonas Bearthrop is a prop trader the host credits with more than $50,000 in payouts, $30,000 of that in two months, from a start he describes as $300. The system is three parts he will not separate: market structure, order flow, and liquidity. He has been at it about a year and a half. The order-flow and liquidity pieces arrived in the first two months, and he has not switched. Chart patterns and ICT are things he will not trade, not because he has tested them and found them dead, but because he thinks an edge that everybody already knows is no longer an edge for him.
A day with edges, not a day in front of the screen
What he thinks a full day of watching him would show is the routine, which he calls half the game. Two-hour blocks. One hour at the start of London, only to see where the market is trying to go. Another block late in London, around 13:00 or 14:00, an hour or two before New York. Then New York itself. Before he had a system he was in the market whenever he could be. The blocks are what replaced that.
Before a position he wants two facts. Is the market trending up, trending down, or ranging? He reads that as ordinary structure. Consistent higher highs and higher lows are an uptrend. Consistent lower lows are a downtrend. Anything between is a range. The second fact is where the liquidity is, which he takes from a heatmap of resting limit orders, because that is where large participants are trying to get in. Liquidity is an exit tool more than an entry tool. He wants to get out where a large participant is trying to get in. A large pocket, his example is four, five, or six hundred lots in New York, is likely to get filled, and filling that much at once is likely to produce a pullback the market cannot absorb cleanly. He would rather lose the trade outright than be up a thousand dollars and leave with two or three hundred. The wall is the target because the move is likely to halt, pull back, or exhaust there.
The trade he is proud of is the Friday before the interview, an all-time-high breakout on the Nasdaq. Asia had already made a new high, then pulled back about 250 points in that one session. He likes overextended moves. The public read, as he heard it, was that the rally was over. He stayed bullish because the fundamentals had not changed and he thought the drop was manipulation. He was right, on that day. He checks fundamentals every day, and he does not think the data are the important part. He cares what Donald Trump says about them, because important news tends to get a reaction from the president, and he prefers that reaction to the event. If Trump is bullish, Jonas is bullish. His addition is that Trump is always bullish, and has always been right. That is Jonas's description of his own filter, not a tested claim about the presidency.
What a prop account exposed
He believes anyone can take a payout from a prop firm, profitable or not, because the structure pays the good stretch. A trader who is break-even across six months can still make money in the good period. The mistake that says someone is not ready is risk. A short drawdown exposes it. The market pulls, the stop gets moved, and an edge that cannot survive two or three losses in a row is worthless. Good risk, for him, is not a fixed 25, 50, or 100 points. Every morning the market looks different, so a static distance never fit. The stop goes where structure says the market should not go. In a long, that is the previous low. A lower low means he is wrong. Either it was manipulation and he was unlucky, which is part of the game, or a new direction is building, and he does not want to be long inside it.
The difference between an occasional payout and a living, in his account, is how many accounts can fail. He started with one to three funded accounts. He now trades ten or fifteen, and sometimes ten challenges at once. Bad days happen to everyone, and they get worse if trading is the whole income, because the instinct is to limit the loss by doing more. Lose one, two, or three accounts and the work starts over. Copying four or five accounts on each firm, and losing one firm, still leaves payouts elsewhere. Payout cycles matter in the same way. Some firms need a long run and a large buffer, twenty trading days or whatever the rule is. Mixing those with a firm that pays quickly, and he names the firm as that end of the spectrum, is what makes the cycle work. Funded, he uses the same strategy everywhere. Evaluations he cannot. The firm, he says, has a large evaluation drawdown and cannot be passed in one day. A firm he compares it to, the Trading Pit, has a 40 percent consistency rule on the evaluation, which already means at least three days. The same strategy does not fit both rule books.
What the large accounts exposed was greed. His personal account is worth $3,000, and he does not expect life-changing money there. On $500,000 accounts, one good day can, in his words, possibly make $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000. The first time he felt that, he thought he was the best and wanted more, and then he could not get out of the hole. The greed was not only in the market. He found it in ordinary life, and he does not think the market version can be fixed while the other one is intact. Meditation came first. Then a kind of attention to being alive, and gratitude, which is what he says killed it. It did not happen overnight, and he is not sure it is finished. On a large position, when he wants to add, he remembers the turn that blows the account. Six or seven hundred dollars, or start again.
The trade, from the range to the color on the book
A full trade starts with a trend, or a range that looks ready to break. Levels come from order flow, structure, and liquidity together. In London, a new daily high, then a pullback that fills orders, imbalances on the volume profile or on a fair-value gap. He does not make much distinction between those two drawings. A bottom, a new higher low, and a confirmation in delta or on the heatmap that a large trader has entered. That is the permission.
London is the session he likes because it mixes volatility with structure that is still readable. New York, on the days everyone knows, can chop for two or three hours before a setup exists. London usually does not. The philosophy is a breakout, and the breakout is not always the previous swing high. Asia's high can be attacked and declined once or twice, and the break can then come from the middle of the range. That had happened the day of the interview. They were not near the Asia high. He saw it because limit orders on the heatmap were being pulled closer and closer.
The heatmap is stacked limits. In a London range that has done nothing for two or three hours, he wants an imbalance between buy limits and sell limits. A thousand buyers and two hundred sellers is his illustration. More passive interest on the bid, and a long breakout is the likely result. He is looking for a lot more limits on one side, visible as dark red lines running through the book. Directional interest is not the entry. He wants price to build toward the liquidity, aggressively. Five large orders sitting 225 points above, and no drive, is not a trade. The upside can be stacked with limits and still go nowhere without active participants. Volume and delta are how he sees them. He does not use cumulative delta. He uses a mirrored delta, because absorptions are easier for him to see there. The best version of a range entry is price rising, a brief range, and someone throwing something like 200 lots at the market on the short side, taking slippage, with the market not moving at all. Someone tried to pull it down. The buyers were too strong to allow it.
There is no lot threshold. He tried, early, to require 400 lots absorbed before a long. It made no sense. Asia, on the day he mentions, printed bubbles of 600 or 700 lots. Europe normally does not. The heatmap filter is a percentage, not a count, and most of the time he does not care how many lots are there. He cares about the color. Deep red means the participant is large. The setup is invalid if price breaks the previous low or the previous high against him. In a long that has been building higher highs and higher lows, a failure to make another higher high, or worse a lower low, and he is out. Even if it might be a liquidity sweep. He thinks a shift is a real shift about 90 percent of the time, and he will not sit through the 10 or 20 percent where the sweep was only a sweep. His stop is always under the last low, so if he is swept he is stopped, and he does not mind. A sweep, as he defines it, is a push through the last higher low, 20 or 40 points in the example, that does not close beyond the level it was aiming at. Participants pulled the market and could not hold it. The liquidity they set free becomes fuel. A swept low is bullish. A swept high is bearish. He has thought of liquidity as fuel since he started.
The target is the largest pocket that makes sense in the area he is trading, not the largest blob on the entire heatmap. Most often that is the day's high or the day's low, or a previous high, because that is where the interested buyers and sellers are. A break of the day's high is a new long. A break of the day's low is a new short. People try to get in where the action is, and large orders sit in front of that break because they want to be filled before it happens. He takes a partial on the way. He has targeted four or five to one, reached three to one, and then been unable to close the rest in gain. The partial is how he stopped giving that back. He will not jump a breakout of the day's high. He waits for price to accumulate again. The trend can still be long all day. Last Wednesday, in his example, London had already made 150 points and he was sure New York would continue. He missed another 100 points there and still found another long. Overextension does not matter if the structure is intact. When it rains, it pours, long or short. He will hold through the day's high if he entered after the break and the accumulation. He will not sell a day's high. The odds from structure are already against that short. It is why he stopped fading those levels with absorption trades once the market is already up 100 or 150 points.
What he will not trade, and the stretch with no payout
Head and shoulders, double tops, double bottoms: he knows they might work, and he will not trade them on a prop account, because everybody can see them. ICT is the same objection. He does not know how to trade it. Everyone he knows does, and he feels that destroys the advantage. He has heard the originator did not do well in some areas, and his gloss is that the edge was taught away. He does not say ICT cannot be profitable. He does not trade it. Support and resistance is his counterexample. Everybody knows it, few use it, the people who use it find it easy, and it still works. ICT might be that case too. RSI, which he used on the fifteen-minute because he thought oscillators work less as the timeframe gets smaller, can still work if someone knows how. He does not see an edge there for himself, and he will not change his view of an overextension to match an oscillator. His objection to ICT, more precisely, is that it tries to predict order flow instead of using it, and prediction is the start of a bad habit. Reaction is the job. Market structure and order flow are the bread and butter. He has enough screen time that five, ten, or fifteen losses do not make him doubt the thing, because he has watched it come back.
This year it was tested. His last payout was around March 5. The next was April 20. In between he blew evaluations because he was still greedy and wanted the money back, and the only way back was the plan. He does not question the strategy or the discipline when a long stretch fails. What he did learn is that one or two weeks away is not a missed opportunity. He had treated breaks as failure. Abundance, knowing he does not have to trade today, is what he says actually pushes the edge. Sometimes no trade is the best trade. He started in January 2025. From the week of April he took no break for over a year, and it burned him out. Meditation, which he had learned quickly, could not fix it. He could not concentrate enough to sit.
A bad day now is not sticking to the plan. He can blow five accounts inside the plan and not be angry, because that is the game. He can lose $2,000 inside the plan and be fine. Twenty or thirty trades, and the same loss, and he knows he left the plan, and he is angry at himself. The best traders have bad days. The day is defined by the actions. What breaks the plan is being human. Anyone who says emotions can be switched off is, in his line, selling a course or lying, and probably both. He has days where the trade is working and he still feels wrong about being there. The fix is to let the setup run and leave the screen. Clean the room, shower, walk. He does not get emotional when he is not looking at the monitor. Abundance and emotion move against each other.
On a losing streak he backtests, to prove to himself that the edge is still there. He thought backtesting was a waste for the first nine months, and he thinks he left time on the table, because for those nine months he did not know whether he had an edge at all. One or two months of Nasdaq, in software. He names TradeZilla, after first calling it Trade Scalper. The limit is that order flow is not in the replay. That is acceptable, because only the first third of the edge, the structure, is already enough to make money in the test. Without the heatmap he uses ordinary volume bars. A volume spike, for him, is one large trade. It is too unlikely that twenty, thirty, or forty people hit the same button together. It is a limit getting filled. On that structure-only test he usually sees a 45 to 50 percent win rate at an average of two to one. Live, the win rate is higher, because the other two parts are present. Knowing a third of the edge already works is what makes him comfortable, and he would rather be comfortable than uncertain.
He would have everyone backtest, not every day, once or twice a month, to see what changed. He was trading the S&P with a 15-tick stop until a replay of his own sessions showed that 25 or 30 ticks was what the market required, with the same targets. Live trading did not show him that as fast. The first nine months, the real cost of not testing was that he had a system and could not prove it to himself, and he lost a lot of money in the first year with nothing to look at.
Making money without a test, he says, is the casino. A year of winning does not mean the player has the edge. His mentor wanted one or two months of demo before real money. Jonas does not think that is required at the very start, because the first three to six months are unlikely to make money, and if they do it is probably luck. Most of the traders he knows made money after a lot of experience. The reason people hate the test is that at the beginning they do not know what to test: market, timeframe, edge. Three months of testing a borrowed idea still does not say whether it works for them. He started in a group of friends who all backtested. He was the only one who did not. The ones who started with the test stopped trading. Copying someone else, even while rejecting the idea that you are copying, is imitation, and imitation does not build an edge, and it may not fit. He began as a position trader. A long at 10:00 that ran until 20:00. He needed to know he was wrong now, not in ten hours. The strategy does not make the money. Matching the strategy to the person does.
This week, and what to stop
For someone who wants consistent payouts, the thing to do this week is to stop needing the money tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Before his payouts he learned an 80/20 he rewrites for trading. Eighty percent of the gains come from twenty percent of the trades. Most of the rest are trash or ordinary targets. Twenty percent are the high ones. People who target less still get days that close a month's P&L, and months that close negative. He still has weeks in the red. He knows people who make more than he does and close a quarter red. Relaxing into that, and trusting the process, is not something that starts next week. It has to be pictured now. Nobody else will trust the edge, the process, or the development for him.
What to stop immediately is blaming an outside thing and then taking it to the market. He has had a payout rejected and he still gets angry. He also sees people post the rejection, rage, and buy more accounts to prove they can do it again. The hate does not belong on the next trade. A fight at home, with family or a partner or, his example, the dog, means do not open the platform. The emotion is real and it does not have to be denied. Using the market to get the feeling back is gambling. He was emotional on the screen for a long time and thought the cause was the loss. It was coming home from an eight-hour shift and then losing. The hundred dollars was not the anger.
What to track is discipline, by hand. Entry, exit, whether the stop was moved, whether the target was moved, whether he scaled in, whether he forced another trade, whether he sized up on purpose. Outcomes do not matter. If the plan is real, the outcome arrives from execution over time, not from today's execution. Getting better is sticking to the plan. The plan also has to be able to make money. A new trader who does not have one yet has a different first step. Find a strategy that suits them, not the one everyone says makes so much money. That search, if it is daily and includes a test, should take a month at most. Backtest it, write the rules, define the plan, and then spend two or three months only trading the plan. He thinks a profitable plan is not the hard part. The hard part, the one people do not want to hear, is that building an edge is easy and keeping it is not. People lose because they cannot trust themselves.