About DamnPropFirms

Built by a funded futures trader. No corporate team. No paid placements. No fake gurus.

I’m Kyle Kozlowski, the founder of Damn Prop Firms and the trader behind Damn Good Trading on YouTube. This site is run entirely by me — not a content team, not an SEO agency, not a network of writers I’ve never met. Every review, every comparison, every country guide, every payout claim on this site comes from someone who actually trades the firms being discussed.

Here’s the credibility math that matters: over $560,000 in lifetime prop firm payouts since 2023, over $5,000,000 in funded account capital across multiple firms, 2+ Topstep TV appearances including the broadcast where I went live from Krakow, Poland showing the audience a $40,000+ profit trade longing NQ on my Topstep Live Funded account at a time when fewer than 0.5% of all Topstep traders had reached the Live Funded tier.

That’s not marketing copy. That’s the operational reality the rest of this site is built on.

From Lamborghinis to Live Funded Accounts

Before I traded futures full-time, I sold Lamborghinis and Bentleys for two years at Perillo in Chicago, one of the highest-end exotic car dealerships in the Midwest. The job paid well. I was good at it. But I knew within the first year that selling someone else’s product to people richer than me wasn’t the life I wanted to build.

I started trading in 2020 with penny stocks — small accounts, big mistakes, the same bruising introduction most retail traders go through. Almost immediately I moved into options trading, which felt more structured but came with its own brutal lesson: theta decay. Every options position I held was bleeding value every day the underlying didn’t move, and being right about direction but wrong about timing meant losing anyway.

In 2023 I found futures, and the experience was different from day one. No theta. No time decay. No watching premium evaporate while waiting for a thesis to play out. Just price, leverage, and execution. I’d finally found the market structure that fit how I actually think about trading. Within months I was running funded accounts at multiple prop firms, and three years later futures has been the most sustainable, scalable form of trading I’ve ever done.

The leap from selling Lamborghinis to trading futures full-time wasn’t a clean transition. It was a calculated bet on myself with real consequences if it didn’t work. The reason I built Damn Prop Firms is because I want to give other traders the resource I wish I’d had when I was making that bet — actual transparency, actual data, actual experience from someone who was there.

Why I Started Live Day Trading on YouTube

This is the part that actually matters for understanding why this site exists.

While I was on Topstep TV sharing my trading process with the broader Topstep community, I kept getting requests from viewers asking me to start live day trading on my own channel. I resisted at first. Then I looked around at what most “trading YouTubers” were actually doing — hiding their entries, hiding their exits, posting screenshots after the fact, never showing the actual trades happening in real time — and I thought it was shady. Some of these accounts have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and have never once shown a trade live.

So in 2023 I committed to live day trading every weekday on YouTube with full transparency: every entry, every exit, every loss, every margin call, every emotional decision. Damn Good Trading on YouTube goes live at 10:15 AM EST every weekday, 45 minutes after the NY open. I’ve been streaming for almost 3 years now.

The reason I keep doing it: real traders need to see the human side of this work. Yes I have winning days where I make $5K, $10K, $20K+ in a session. I also have days where I get emotional in a trade and close out too early, or hold a loser too long, or take a revenge trade after a stop-out. That’s not a brand failure — that’s the actual job. Pretending trading is clean and mechanical is the dishonest version. Showing the real version, including the bad days, is what makes the good days credible.

If you want to verify any claim on this site — that I trade these firms, that the payouts are real, that the strategies work — go watch a few weeks of the YouTube streams. You’ll see exactly the trader behind the reviews you’re reading.

What Damn Prop Firms Actually Is

Damn Prop Firms is a futures prop firm review and discount hub built around three core ideas:

1. Real reviews from real trading. I only recommend firms I’ve personally traded, received payouts from, or rigorously tested. No paid placements, no firms paying for top rankings, no review-for-money arrangements.
2. The biggest discounts available. Through direct affiliate partnerships with the firms I cover, the DGT discount code typically unlocks the largest discounts available — often up to 90% off evaluation fees during major sales periods.
3. Tools traders actually need. Calculators, comparison tools, country-specific guides, the DGT Auto-Apply Chrome extension, and a free Discord community of over 3,000 active funded traders.

The site covers more than 20 futures prop firms with dedicated review pages, comparison pages, and ranking pages. We also publish country-specific guides for traders in 50+ countries covering local tax considerations, banking realities, and firm acceptance — built from research and from connections with traders in those markets.

How I Evaluate Prop Firms

Most “review sites” recycle marketing copy from the firms themselves. That’s not what happens here. When I evaluate a prop firm, I focus on the rules and operational realities that actually decide whether traders get paid:

• Payout reliability. Have they paid me consistently? Do other funded traders in my Discord report consistent payouts? Are payout requests denied for sketchy reasons?
• Drawdown structure. Trailing drawdown vs end-of-day drawdown vs static drawdown — these create completely different trading experiences and the difference matters more than most reviews acknowledge.
• Consistency rules. Daily profit consistency caps, win-day requirements, and similar rules create real strategy drag that most reviews gloss over.
• Scaling rules. How easily can you scale from one funded account to multiple? What’s the ceiling on capital? Are there artificial caps on lifetime payouts?
• Platform stability. Does Rithmic, Tradovate, ProjectX, or whatever the firm uses actually work reliably during high-volatility opens?
• Country acceptance and payment processor support. Verified payment paths matter more than ToS claims that don’t reflect reality.
• Reset and activation fees. Some firms have aggressive reset fee structures that make failure dramatically more expensive than the headline price suggests.
• Customer service responsiveness. When something goes wrong, do they respond within 24 hours or 24 days?

If a firm scores poorly on these criteria, they don’t get a top ranking on this site regardless of whether I have an affiliate relationship with them. The whole point is that the rankings reflect what actually works for traders, not what makes the most commission.

Trusted Prop Firm Partnerships

Every firm listed on Damn Prop Firms is one I personally trust, have traded with, or have rigorously vetted through community feedback. Current trusted partners include:

• Topstep — The most reputable and oldest futures prop firm in the world, where I’ve appeared on Topstep TV multiple times and where I reached the Live Funded tier in 2023.
• Apex Trader Funding — Best for scaling. Apex’s multi-account structure makes it the operational backbone for most serious funded futures traders, including me.
• Take Profit Trader — Daily withdrawals, no consistency rule in funded accounts, no payout caps. The cleanest payout structure I’ve seen.
• Tradeify — The #1 instant funding prop firm. Daily payouts and no consistency rule make it strong for traders who don’t want to grind through evaluations.
• Lucid Trading — One of my newer recommendations and one I now use heavily after Topstep restructured plans.
• FundedNext — Uncapped payouts with strong international acceptance.
• TradeDay — Get funded in 5 days with daily withdrawals.
• Alpha Futures — Strong rule structure for disciplined traders.
• Bulenox — Solid all-around firm with growing funded trader community.
• Phidias Prop Firm — Newer firm with competitive evaluation structures.

I update this list as my own trading experience and the broader community feedback evolve. If a firm changes its rules in ways that hurt traders, or starts denying legitimate payouts, or gets flagged by my Discord community for bad behavior, they come off the trusted list — affiliate relationship or not.

What Damn Prop Firms Doesn’t Do

Equally important to what we do is what we don’t:

• I don’t sell trading courses, signal services, or “mentor packages.” Every dollar of revenue comes from affiliate commissions when traders sign up for prop firms through my links — not from selling shortcuts to traders.
• I don’t accept paid placements or “sponsored top rankings.” Multiple firms have offered to pay for higher placement on the rankings page. I’ve turned all of them down. The rankings reflect actual evaluation criteria, not who paid most.
• I don’t fake payout screenshots. When you see a payout claim on this site, it’s verifiable through my YouTube streams or Topstep TV appearances or community-confirmed payout cycles.
• I don’t hide my entries and exits during livestreams. The whole point of Damn Good Trading on YouTube is that the trades happen in front of you in real time, including the bad ones.
• I don’t claim to be a registered investment advisor or financial professional. I’m not. I’m a trader who shares experience. For tax, regulatory, or legal advice, work with a licensed professional in your jurisdiction.
• I don’t promise traders they’ll succeed. Most prop firm traders don’t reach consistent profitability. That’s the honest reality, and pretending otherwise would defeat the whole purpose of building a trustworthy resource.

The DGT Code and What It Actually Means

The DGT discount code that runs across this site stands for Damn Good Trading — the brand I built around the simple personal goal of becoming a damn good trader. When I started learning futures, I’d tell myself “I want to be a damn good trader” the way other people might tell themselves they want to be a damn good chef or a damn good engineer. The phrase stuck, the YouTube channel got named after it, the Discord got named after it, and the discount code became DGT because by then it was the natural shorthand.

Through direct partnerships with the prop firms I cover, the DGT code typically unlocks the largest available discount on evaluation fees — often up to 90% off during major sales periods. Always enter DGT at checkout when buying any prop firm evaluation. The code never expires, applies across multiple participating firms, and is automatically applied at checkout when you use the DGT Auto-Apply Chrome extension.

The Damn Good Trading Community

This site is the formal review and resource hub. The community lives on YouTube and Discord:

• Damn Good Trading on YouTube — over 13,000 subscribers, live day trading every weekday at 10:15 AM EST, with full transparency on entries, exits, and the daily reality of trading futures professionally.
• DamnPropFirms Discord — a free community of thousands of active funded futures traders sharing real P&Ls, prop firm experiences, payout proofs, and early warnings on firms to avoid. This is where the actual operational intelligence about prop firms gets shared in real time, often before it appears anywhere else online.

The community is what makes the reviews on this site possible. When a firm changes rules or starts having payout issues, I usually hear about it from Discord members within hours. When a new firm launches, I usually get traders in my Discord testing it before I write anything. The site is the editorial layer; the community is the source of truth.

How to Use This Site

If you’re new to futures prop firm trading, here’s the natural path through the site:

1. Start with the Best Prop Firms ranking to see the current top-ranked firms and why each one earned its position.
2. Check the Best Prop Firms by Country hub if you’re trading from outside the US — country-specific acceptance, banking, and tax considerations matter more than most affiliate sites acknowledge.
3. Read 2-3 firm review pages for the firms that interest you most. Each review covers actual rule structure, payout history, and known operational issues.
4. Use the comparison tool to compare 2-3 firms side by side on the criteria that matter for your strategy.
5. When you’re ready to buy, click through any affiliate link on the site and use code DGT at checkout for the largest available discount.
6. Join the free Discord for ongoing community intelligence and to verify your firm experiences against what other funded traders are seeing.

If you’re an experienced funded trader already running multiple accounts, the live discounts page is probably the highest-value page on the site for you — it tracks current promo windows across all covered firms.

Performance Disclosure

The performance numbers on this page reflect my personal trading results since 2023. Personal results are not typical — most prop firm traders do not reach consistent profitability. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. See the Disclaimer for full risk and affiliate disclosures.

Damn Prop Firms is operated by Kozlo Inc d/b/a Damn Prop Firms, an Illinois corporation. Contact [email protected]. For legal notices, see the Terms of Use.