Leeloo Trading vs ROMER

What Leeloo Trading sells

Leeloo Trading is the trading name of Natural Trading, LLC, of Billings, Montana. It describes itself as an education platform that runs performance-based trading and contests, and every account a trader holds there is a practice or performance account on CME futures, connected through Rithmic.

Its main product is the Foundation practice account, billed every 30 days. The 50K version, which Leeloo calls Launch, costs $280 per 30 days on its sign-up page. Its target is $3,000, its maximum drawdown $2,500, and it allows 8 contracts or 80 micros. There’s no daily loss limit, and you must trade on at least 10 U.S. trading days (minimum days). The drawdown is strict. It “trails your OPEN equity, intra-trade (NOT closed profit)”, and “It will NEVER stop trailing the highest UNREALIZED profit point of your account throughout the ENTIRE Practice Account” (drawdown). Our page on how trailing drawdowns work shows what an open-equity trail does to an account.

Around it sit other products: a bundle of three practice accounts for 30 days ($635 at 50K, only one of which can qualify), the 14-day Leeloo Express ($119 for $100K, refunded if you qualify), and Turbo accounts ($127 a month at 50K) with no activation fee, whose Performance Account lasts 90 days and caps total payouts at $4,000.

Qualifying leads to a Performance Account, which carries its own fee, and here the site contradicts itself. The home page says “The monthly subscription is $88 per month per Performance Account”, while a help article quotes “A monthly PA fee of $109 per month per account and a one-time PA fee of $250 per account.” Several help articles also carry a notice that “this program is being phased out”, covering the Foundation program, the bundle and the one-time fee, while the home page still sells them.

No bots, no HFT

Leeloo’s rule on automation is about as plain as a prop firm writes one. Its Performance Account overview says “No BOTS or automatic trading. ONLY the Trader can trade the account without automatic bots or any bots or algos.” The algo trading article defines what’s out: “Any system that places or manages trades without your manual input is not allowed on Practice or Performance Accounts.” Alerts, signals and indicators are fine as long as you place the trade yourself. The Investor Performance Account rules add the penalty: “Use of automated systems, bots, or third-party trade execution is prohibited and your account will be closed.”

Speed gets the same treatment. “Do not high frequency trade,” says the overview, and the Investor rules list “High-frequency or excessive trading activity that does not reflect a structured strategy” among banned behaviour. The terms go further: “Trading activity is reviewed to identify behaviors that would not translate to real market conditions, including but not limited to toxic flow, latency arbitrage, and price feed exploitation. Accounts using these practices will result in account closure and users will be banned permanently.” Our page on latency arbitrage covers how other firms treat it.

Leeloo’s 80 reachable support articles, home page, product pages and terms say nothing we could find about VPS use. With bots banned, the question matters less: every order on a Leeloo account has to come from your own hand.

Performance Accounts are simulated

Leeloo is direct about this: “For the avoidance of any confusion, please remember that a Leeloo Performance Account™ is a fully simulated account with real market quotes from liquidity providers.” Leeloo alone decides whether any of that trading reaches a real market: “At Leeloo’s discretion, the trading data may be sent off to a firm where trades can be copied at Leeloo’s own discretion using aggregated orders using proprietary risk management techniques.” The terms say a Performance Account “may represent simulated accounts or copied accounts”, and the home page lists, as a step, “the potential for your account to be copied via proprietary software at Leeloo’s discretion.” We found no live account for the trader described on the site.

The payout wording reflects that. Leeloo’s contest article gives “100% of the first $12,500 in profits, then 90% thereafter”, and then adds: “this is NOT a profit split” and “this is just what a trader can receive of their simulated profits for company risk mitigation.”

Getting paid takes patience. The first payout needs at least 30 active trading days on the Performance Account and a balance above a threshold, $52,600 on the 50K. A 30% rule applies for the life of the account: “no single trading day can account for more than 30% of your total profit in the payout period.” Each of the first four payouts on a 50K must be between $1,000 and $1,500. Requests go by email, only on the last Saturday of the month between 2 AM and 5 PM EST, and you can’t trade while one is under review (payout requests).

One more contradiction affects anyone who holds positions. The article on holding through the close says “Holding positions on any Performance Account is not allowed. Traders must have all positions closed 15 minutes before market close.” The Investor rules say “In an Investor Performance Account, Traders may hold up to 3 micros through the close.”

What ROMER offers instead

ROMER is built for algorithmic and high-frequency traders, so what Leeloo bans is the point of our program: automated trading of any speed is allowed at each stage. We ban spoofing and other manipulation, and the exchange’s message limits apply. Hand trading is allowed at every stage too, with one difference from an algo. An algo runs on our machines in the exchange’s data centre, while an order you place by hand starts on your own computer and crosses the network to reach our hardware, so it doesn’t get colocated speed.

At Leeloo, the account you’re paid from stays simulated. At ROMER, simulation is where an algo proves itself. First comes a minimum of 3 trading days to reach the profit target within the loss limits. Then comes Verification, a second pass on no fewer than 10 trading days the algo hasn’t seen. After those two stages, the algos that perform best move on to our capital in the real market, and the trader’s share is 80% of the real profit. We don’t promise funding to every algo that passes.

Our three tiers are planned and may change: Starter ($25K) at $149 a month, Pro ($50K) at $249 and Elite ($100K) at $399, none with an activation fee, and the monthly fee covers running the algo on our equipment at the exchange. Each has a profit target of 6%, a maximum loss of 4% that trails, and a daily loss limit of 2%, which makes us stricter than Leeloo, where there’s no daily limit at all. Leeloo’s 50K Foundation account lists at $280 per 30 days before the Performance Account fee, and it pays 100% of the first $12,500 of simulated profit and 90% after that.

Who each one is for

Leeloo is for hand traders who are comfortable with a drawdown that trails open equity, want sizes up to 300K with no daily loss limit, and accept being paid from simulated accounts under strict review rules. Check the close-of-day rule and the Performance Account fee with Leeloo before you buy, since its pages disagree on both.

ROMER is for anyone with an algo, since Leeloo closes accounts that use one. Hand traders who want a route to real capital can use it too, knowing that a hand-placed order won’t be as fast as code running at the exchange.