Telonics is a single systematic portfolio: eight independent edges trading five futures markets, the Nasdaq 100 (NQ), Gold (GC), Dow (YM), S&P 500 (ES), and Crude Oil (CL). It is not a signal service, an education product, or a discretionary trading room.
The portfolio executes fully automatically on your own brokerage or prop-firm account. There are no alerts to follow and no orders to place by hand, the system handles entry, management, and exit for every position.
Once your account is connected, the portfolio runs without intervention. Each trade follows the same path, from signal to close:
You set a single parameter — risk per trade — and the portfolio sizes every position to your account balance automatically. A larger account trades more contracts; a smaller one, fewer.
Any track record can be assembled after the fact. The relevant question is whether an edge holds up when it is tested honestly, and most do not. Every edge in the portfolio had to clear the same process before it traded a dollar of capital.
The edges that survive are published in full. Every number, total return, Sharpe ratio, win rate, profit factor, and the complete backtested equity curve, is on our Performance page.
Give a strategy enough freedom and you can always make it look brilliant on the past, you keep adjusting it until it fits the history in front of you. That isn't finding an edge; it's memorizing the answers. The only way to know whether a strategy learned something real is to test it on data it has never seen.
That is out-of-sample testing, and the idea behind it is simple: hide some of the data, and save it for a final test.
You take a block of market history and set it aside, untouched. You build and tune the strategy on all the rest. Then, at the very end, you run it once on the part you saved. If it still works on data it has never seen, that is strong evidence of a real edge. If it falls apart, the strategy was never real, it was just fitting the past.
Telonics withholds the entire 2025–2026 period, eighteen months, as a true out-of-sample test, and publishes how the portfolio performed on it. A cherry-picked chart, by contrast, is one hundred percent in-sample: it only shows the trades that already worked.
Every real trade costs money, and those costs are the difference between a backtest that looks good and one that would actually work. There are two:
Commission is the fee your broker and the exchange charge every time you place a trade. It's a fixed amount per contract, and you pay it twice on every trade, once to get in and once to get out. Small on its own, but it adds up fast across thousands of trades.
Slippage is the gap between the price you wanted and the price you actually got. Markets move constantly, so in the split second between your order being sent and it filling, the price can shift a little against you. Usually a tick or two, but it's real money, and it gets worse when the market is moving fast, around news, or right at the open.
A backtest that ignores these shows profit that would never have existed in a live account. And it matters more than it sounds: plenty of strategies have edges so thin that realistic costs erase them entirely — profitable on paper, negative once you subtract what it actually takes to trade.
So we don't skip them. Every Telonics figure is calculated after costs, not before: each simulated trade is charged real commission plus a full tick of slippage on both entry and exit, the same friction you'd hit in a live account. When you see a return anywhere that doesn't mention costs, assume it hasn't survived them.
A proprietary trading firm gives you access to a large account in exchange for an evaluation fee, typically $100–$600. Pass the evaluation, often called a combine, and the firm funds you with $25,000 to $250,000 or more, with most of the profit paid to the trader (commonly 80–90%). In return, the account runs under a strict rule set: daily loss limits, maximum and trailing drawdown, consistency requirements, and time limits.
The economics are worth understanding. A large share of prop-firm revenue comes from those evaluation fees, and most people who attempt one do not pass. The reason usually is not the firm, it is that most traders arrive with a strategy that has no real edge, and a strict rule set only surfaces that faster. Even those with a workable approach tend to break the behavioral rules under pressure: revenge trading after a loss, oversizing to recover, forcing trades out of impatience.
This is the case for automating a validated edge: a real, tested edge solves the first problem, and automated execution solves the second. The rules that trip up discretionary traders are behavioral, and automation removes the behavior.
The portfolio is constructed to respect these constraints: each edge carries a defined, ATR-normalized stop; the portfolio is sized to a fixed fraction of the account; exposure is diversified across sessions and five markets; and all positions are flattened by the daily cut-off. Automation is not a loophole, it is discipline enforced in code.
Automation removes the behavioral errors that fail most evaluations. It does not guarantee that you pass or remain funded. Prop-firm rules — trailing and daily drawdown, consistency, and news restrictions — continue to apply, and a sequence of correlated losing days, slippage, or a technical failure can still breach them. Results vary, and past performance does not predict future results.
Before subscribing, confirm that your prop firm permits fully automated trading executed by a third-party service. Some firms restrict or prohibit it, and compliance with your firm's terms is your responsibility. See our Risk Disclosure.
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