Who Is James Sixsmith? The Ex-Hockey Player Behind Take Profit Trader

TraderVerdict is reader-supported. Some links in our reviews are affiliate links. We only recommend products we've personally tested.

James Sixsmith lost close to $150,000 learning to trade the E-mini S&P before any of it worked. He was a professional ice-hockey player first — eight seasons in Scandinavia, a stretch in the AA and AAA minor leagues on roughly $28,000 a year — and he came to the screens the way most retail traders do: undercapitalised, self-taught, and wrong about how hard it would be. That history is the most useful thing to know about the man who now runs Take Profit Trader.

From the rink to the order book

Sixsmith played college hockey at the College of the Holy Cross, then spent most of his playing career abroad, largely with Norway's Lørenskog. When the hockey ended, the trading started — and the early years were expensive. He has been open about the size of the hole he dug learning the ES and NQ, the two futures contracts that are still the staple of the prop-firm world he now sells into.

What he did next is the part that matters for traders evaluating his firm. In 2017 he founded Trade Context, an education business built around teaching the mechanics he had to learn the hard way. Take Profit Trader grew out of that: a funded-trader program from someone who had already spent years on the other side of the screen, teaching, before he started selling evaluations.

Why a named founder is a data point, not a footnote

Here is the uncomfortable thing about the prop-firm industry: most of the firms taking your evaluation fee will not tell you who owns them. Offshore holding companies, anonymous "teams," support addresses that resolve to a mailbox. Our scoring methodology has a whole variable for this — financial transparency — because a firm that hides its principals is a firm you cannot hold accountable when a payout goes sideways.

Take Profit Trader is the opposite. The founder is named, public, verifiable, and has a documented trading and education history that predates the firm. That does not make the evaluation easier or the payouts guaranteed. But it removes one of the biggest unknowns in the category, and it is a real reason TPT does not carry the ownership-opacity penalty that drags down a long list of its competitors.

So is Take Profit Trader actually good?

A credible founder earns a firm the benefit of the doubt, not a free pass. Under our methodology, Take Profit Trader scores

— solidly in the middle of the field, not at the top of it. The named, hands-on founder and the frequent, fee-free payouts are genuine strengths. What holds the score back is structural, and worth understanding before you buy:

• The funded account changes the drawdown rule on you. The evaluation uses an end-of-day trailing drawdown — forgiving, the kind that ignores intraday spikes. The funded PRO account switches to an intraday trailing drawdown, which is the single most common reason traders blow a funded account in the first week. Pass the test under one rule, trade live under a harder one.
• The standard split is mid-pack, not headline. The PRO tier is an 80/20 split; the 90% number you may have seen is the PRO+ upgrade, not the default.
• Watch the reputation signals. TPT carries a healthier review profile than most, but it is not spotless — third-party watchdog ratings and a thread of community complaints are part of the honest picture, and we weight them.

Who it's for

Take Profit Trader fits a futures trader who values a transparent, founder-led firm with fast, low-friction payouts and who is disciplined enough to handle the funded-stage intraday drawdown — and who treats the evaluation's gentler end-of-day rule as the exception, not the norm. If your edge depends on riding intraday heat, read the funded rules twice before you pay. The full breakdown, every scored variable, and the live verdict are on the Take Profit Trader review; how we arrive at the number is on our methodology page.