Take Profit Trader review, 2026
Take Profit Trader holds 4.3 on Trustpilot across 10,226 reviews, with 80% at five stars and 12% at one. We read 81 of the one-star reviews in full.
Support leads, the platform follows, and account closures account for 32%. The trailing drawdown, which nearly every published review of this firm is about, appears in 5%.
Weighing your options? Phidias Express to Live is the alternative we build. First, an honest account of what happens at Take Profit Trader.
Is Take Profit Trader legit?
Yes, on every objective marker. Take Profit Trader is operated by TAKEPROFITTRADER LLC, its founder and CEO James Sixsmith identifies himself by name on the company’s own about page, and it has held a claimed Trustpilot profile since May 2022 carrying 10,226 reviews at 4.3. It publishes its own pass rate, replies publicly to critics, and pays out: and among the one-star reviewers themselves, an identifiable minority describe having been paid, sometimes for months, before whatever prompted the complaint.
Our verdict (William G.)
We compete with Take Profit Trader, so read this knowing that. What we found reading the reviews does not match what the internet says about this firm. The number one grievance is waiting: for support, for an account to reactivate, for an explanation of why something was closed. The number two is account closure, almost always experienced as unexplained. The trailing drawdown barely registers, even though it is the subject of most published writing about Take Profit Trader. Both findings point at different things to check before you buy.
What the rating looks like up close
A 4.3 average is strong. The shape underneath it is unusual: 80% five-star, then almost nothing in the middle, then 12% at one star. Four and three star reviews together account for 7%.
That is a polarised distribution rather than a mediocre one, and it is common in prop trading, where the product either works for someone or ends abruptly. Twelve percent of 10,226 is roughly 1,200 one-star reviews, which is a large enough body of complaint to be worth reading rather than dismissing.
How we read them, so you can judge the method. On 12 August 2026 we pulled the most recent review pages and kept the 81 reviews that were verifiably rated one star, reading the rating from each individual review card rather than trusting Trustpilot’s star filter, which does not reliably filter. We then classified each review by theme, counting reviews rather than keyword occurrences. The figures below come from that classification, recounted in September 2026.
The limits. This is a sample of 81 out of roughly 1,200, weighted toward recent months, and the classification is ours. Treat the proportions as indicative of what people complain about, not as a precise census.
Reviews can raise more than one theme, so the column does not total 100%.
What traders consistently praise
Eight reviews in ten are five stars. Our sample on that side is thinner, 23 distinct positive reviews, and we say so because it limits what can be drawn from it. Three themes still emerge.
The daily payouts. Traders describe the ability to withdraw whenever they want, without caps or windows, as the reason they stay. One says explicitly that he accepts a smaller profit split in exchange for the access.
Rules that are clear. Several positive reviewers volunteer that the rules are plain and carry no hidden clauses, and one adds that they are not constantly changing. The same reviewer describes the task as conquering the intraday drawdown and then building the account, which is an accurate summary of the funded stage.
Named support agents. This is the most frequent theme in our positive sample, level with payouts, and it cuts directly against the number one grievance in the negative ones: traders thank agents by first name. The same function produces both extremes. Separately, and documented by the help centre rather than by reviews: the automated account-to-wallet step moves money in seconds, on Tradovate PRO accounts only.
It is worth saying plainly: a firm with 8,000 five-star reviews and a public, named CEO is not a scam. The interesting question is not whether it pays, but what makes the other twelve percent so unhappy.
Support is the single most common complaint
Half the one-star reviews we read are about response times, and the pattern inside them is consistent enough to describe precisely.
There is no phone line. Contact runs through live chat and email, and several reviewers describe waiting multiple business days for a first reply. One describes a question sent on Friday still unanswered by the following Tuesday evening.
The chat routes through a bot. Reviewers describe opening live chat, being connected to an automated assistant, requesting a human, and being told to submit the enquiry for an email response that then does not arrive. One PRO+ trader reports trying to reach a person more than ten times over three or four days.
Repetition across departments. A recurring frustration is being passed between teams and asked to supply the same screenshots and details again at each step.
The other side of this, and it is real. Take Profit Trader replies publicly to 47% of the one-star reviews we sampled, by name, usually within a few days. That is a high response rate for any company, and it is visible to anyone reading the page.
The honest reading is that public reputation is answered faster than private tickets. If you need something resolved, several reviewers found that posting was more effective than waiting.
Activation and reactivation delays
More than four in ten of the one-star reviews touch the platform, and the most concrete version of this is not slippage or outages. It is waiting for an account you have already paid for.
Reviewers describe paying for a PRO reset and then waiting days or weeks for the account to become tradeable, with support explaining only that there are delays. One reports a two-week wait for a PRO+ development account to be activated. Another describes accounts held before moving to live for weeks, with the delay attributed to the broker.
This matters more than it looks, because of a rule documented elsewhere in this cocoon: a funded account must be traded at least one day per calendar week to stay active. A trader waiting on reactivation is not trading, and the two clocks are not obviously reconciled anywhere in Take Profit Trader’s documentation.
A second timing quirk sits in the same family. If you pass on a Friday and your promo covers the activation fee, the credit is issued the next business day, because activation credits are not issued at weekends.
Account closures, and which documented rule explains each one
Closures account for 32% of the one-star reviews, third behind support and the platform, but the most serious. They are also the most serious complaints and the ones most worth understanding before you buy. Reading them against Take Profit Trader’s published rules, most map onto a specific policy.
Two things follow from this, and they point in opposite directions.
The first is reassuring: most closures are not arbitrary. They correspond to rules Take Profit Trader publishes, and the firm sends a timestamped report showing the trades that triggered a counter-position enforcement. The trader who was wrongly flagged for bot use got the decision reversed on appeal, which tells you appeals are real.
The second is not. The rules that catch people are the ones that do not feel like rules. Running a copier across your own accounts is normal practice at many firms and is permitted here, right up until a momentary opposing fill makes it a CME compliance matter. And the Sustainable Trading Policy explicitly reserves the right to intervene at the firm’s sole discretion, with or without prior notice, on trading that is aggressive rather than against any specific rule.
If you run more than one account, the counter-position rule is the one to understand before anything else. It is covered in full in our guide to the Take Profit Trader rules.
Payout complaints, in context
A quarter of the one-star reviews mention payouts, which sounds alarming for a firm whose entire pitch is payout access. Read closely, they split into three very different situations.
Payouts that arrived, then stopped when the account closed. The most common shape. A trader was paid repeatedly, sometimes for months, and the grievance is the closure rather than the payment.
Money the trader could not reach. Some describe profit they could not withdraw. In several cases this is the buffer zone working as documented rather than a refusal: profit below the buffer line cannot be withdrawn while the account is open.
Genuine processing complaints. A smaller group describes requests stuck in review or a payout reduced. These are the hardest to assess from outside, and we are not going to adjudicate them.
What we did not find is a pattern of refusal to pay profitable traders. Several reviewers describe the opposite: being paid, sometimes repeatedly, before something else went wrong.
The pass rate Take Profit Trader publishes itself
Most prop firms never publish one. Take Profit Trader does, in the disclaimer at the foot of its about page.
Between 1 January and 31 December 2025, 36.22% of all Trading Tests were successfully passed, with those traders reaching a PRO account within that period.
Take that seriously in both directions. Roughly one evaluation in three succeeds, which is high for a futures prop evaluation and considerably better than the failure rates the internet attributes to the category. It is also a number the firm chose to publish and define, with a stated window, which is more transparency than most competitors offer.
The counterweight is that a pass is not a payout. The Test is one of four stages, and the intraday drawdown that arrives with the funded account is a different test from the one those 36% passed.
Who runs Take Profit Trader
The company is TAKEPROFITTRADER LLC. Its founder and CEO is James Sixsmith, who introduces himself by name on the company’s about page and describes a career as a minor league professional hockey player before trading, including losing close to $150,000 early on.
Whether that story appeals to you is a matter of taste. What matters for a legitimacy assessment is narrower: there is a named individual attached to this business, in public, with a biography that can be checked. A meaningful number of futures prop firms cannot say the same, and anonymity is the single strongest predictor of trouble in this category.
The Trustpilot profile has been claimed since May 2022, which gives an independent minimum on how long the firm has been operating publicly.
Why some registrations are refused
A category of complaint that never reaches Trustpilot, because the person never became a customer: registration denial.
Take Profit Trader declines registrations for risk and compliance reasons, and names the common causes: operating from a restricted country, detection of a VPN or proxy, or other internal risk factors identified automatically.
The VPN rule catches people who are not using one. Take Profit Trader acknowledges this directly: certain network configurations, privacy tools, public wifi and some ISP setups can look like a VPN, and it suggests trying a different network such as mobile data.
The restricted country list is long and includes places that surprise people, among them South Africa, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia, Malta and Monaco alongside the more expected jurisdictions. The enforcement is strict: a single instance of placing a trade or even viewing market data from a restricted country results in restriction or blocking, and that includes access through a VPN or a remote connection.
What to check before you buy, based on the complaints
1. Assume support is asynchronous. No phone line, and replies measured in days rather than hours. If you need something answered before you can trade, ask before you need it.
2. Do not run a copier across accounts without reading the counter-position rule. This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the complaint set, and a momentary opposing fill is enough.
3. Budget time for resets. Reactivation is not instant, and several traders report days or weeks. Factor that against the weekly trading requirement on funded accounts.
4. Check your country and your network before paying. The restricted list is longer than most, and a VPN will block registration.
5. Know that maximum size, most of the time, attracts review. The Sustainable Trading Policy names it explicitly, and at least one reviewer describes exactly that outcome.
Who it works for, and who struggles
Works well for
Traders who want withdrawal access above all, and are self-sufficient enough not to need support often.
Discretionary traders on one account, manually executed.
People who trade every week anyway, so the activity requirement is invisible.
Struggles for
Anyone running copiers or multiple accounts, where the counter-position rule is unforgiving.
Traders who need fast human support, or who hit account problems often.
Aggressive size traders, who attract discretionary review rather than a clear rule.
6 hours 18 minutes.
Which complaint is most likely to be yours?
Four questions on how much support you expect to need, how your orders reach the market, how you size, and where you trade from. The check names the friction your setup is most exposed to, drawn from the themes that actually dominate the one-star reviews. No email.
40-second check
Which Take Profit Trader complaint is most likely to be yours?
Take Profit Trader review: frequently asked questions
Is Take Profit Trader legit?
Yes. It is operated by TAKEPROFITTRADER LLC, its founder and CEO James Sixsmith identifies himself publicly on the company’s about page, and it has held a claimed Trustpilot profile since May 2022 with 10,226 reviews at 4.3. It publishes its own evaluation pass rate, replies publicly to about half its one-star reviews, and the complaint record shows traders being paid rather than refused.
Is Take Profit Trader a scam?
No, and the complaint pattern is the clearest evidence. In the 81 one-star reviews we read, the dominant themes are support response times and platform delays, not refusal to pay. Several one-star reviewers describe having received payouts, sometimes for months, before whatever prompted the review, and the grievance is then the closure rather than a refusal to pay. A scam does not pay thousands of people first.
What do traders complain about most at Take Profit Trader?
Support and platform, by a distance. In our sample, 51% of one-star reviews concern slow or absent replies, and 43% concern the platform, data feed or activation delays. Account closures appear in 32%, payout issues in 25% and billing in 21%. The trailing drawdown, which most published reviews focus on, appears in only 5%.
Does Take Profit Trader change its rules after you get funded?
The rules genuinely differ between stages: the drawdown moves from end-of-day to intraday, and four additional rules apply to funded accounts. But this is published in advance, not changed retroactively. Notably, only one of the 81 one-star reviews we read makes this complaint, and none describes a retroactive change to the published rulebook, which is worth weighing against how often the accusation appears in third-party commentary.
What is Take Profit Trader’s pass rate?
36.22%, published by the firm itself. Its Trading Test Disclaimer states that between 1 January and 31 December 2025, 36.22% of all Trading Tests were successfully passed, with those traders attaining a PRO account within that window. Roughly one evaluation in three, which is high for the category, and unusually transparent given most competitors publish nothing.
Who owns Take Profit Trader?
The company is TAKEPROFITTRADER LLC, and James Sixsmith is its founder and CEO. He identifies himself by name on the company’s about page and describes a career as a minor league professional hockey player before moving into trading, including losing close to $150,000 in his early years. A publicly named principal is a meaningful trust signal in a category where many firms have none.
Why do Take Profit Trader accounts get closed?
Most closures in the complaint record map onto a published rule. The most common is the counter-position policy, which prohibits opposing exposure in the same or related products across accounts under your control and is tied to CME rules; a copier producing a momentary opposing fill is enough. Others involve the Sustainable Trading Policy, which names maximum position size on most trades as a higher-risk pattern and reserves intervention at the firm’s discretion, and the ban on bots. Appeals do succeed: one reviewer had a bot-related termination reversed after challenging it.
How good is Take Profit Trader’s customer support?
It is the firm’s weakest point according to its own customers. There is no phone line, contact runs through live chat and email, and reviewers report multi-day waits, chat that routes to a bot, and being asked to repeat information across departments. Against that, Take Profit Trader publicly replies to roughly 47% of one-star reviews, usually within days, so the public channel appears faster than the private one.
Why was my Take Profit Trader registration denied?
The three named causes are operating from a restricted country, detection of a VPN or proxy, and internal risk factors flagged during automated review. Take Profit Trader acknowledges false positives on the VPN check: public wifi, privacy tools and some ISP configurations can trigger it, and it suggests retrying from a different network such as mobile data. The restricted list is long and includes South Africa, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia, Malta and Monaco.
Is Take Profit Trader worth it?
It suits a self-sufficient discretionary trader on a single manually traded account who values withdrawal access above everything, since that policy is genuinely among the least restrictive in futures prop. It suits you badly if you run copiers or several accounts, need responsive human support, or trade maximum size regularly. The rules are demanding but published; the friction that generates complaints is operational.
Useful resources
Take Profit Trader on Trustpilot, the full review record.
Take Profit Trader about page, the published pass rate and the founder’s own account.
Registration Denial FAQ, why applications are refused.
Phidias Express to Live, the alternative we build.
About the author
William G. is a futures trader and prop firm analyst at Phidias Propfirm, which competes with Take Profit Trader. He reads competitors’ rulebooks against their own published documentation. For this review he read 81 verified one-star Trustpilot reviews in full on 12 August 2026, Rule and pricing figures come from the firm’s own site and help centre; the percentages in the table are our own classification of those 81 reviews.
Last reviewed: 2026.
More on Take Profit Trader
Take Profit Trader Explained 2026, the three accounts and what each stage really costs.
Take Profit Trader rules 2026, including the counter-position policy behind most closures.
Take Profit Trader payout rules 2026, the buffer and the 60-day rule.
Disclosure: Phidias Propfirm competes with Take Profit Trader. Risk disclosure: trading futures carries a substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Past results do not guarantee future performance. Trustpilot figures, the published pass rate, ownership details and rule specifications reflect information available on trustpilot.com, takeprofittrader.com and the Take Profit Trader help center in August 2026 and are subject to change. Review themes are drawn from a sample of 81 one-star reviews and are indicative rather than statistically representative. This article is informational and is not financial advice.
