How did leaving a 9-5 job lead to $1.2 million in trading funding?

How did Jordan Jackson go from a 9-to-5 job to $1.2 million in trading funding?

Jordan Jackson, a builder who relocated between New Zealand and Australia, says he passed four separate $300,000 Apex evaluation accounts within one month in early 2025, reaching a combined $1.2 million in funded trading capital after roughly a year studying with Ambitious Investing, according to the BWE Podcast.

He frames it as the outcome of a specific, repeatable process rather than a lucky break: joining a trading course, forward-testing a strategy for months before risking money, working through cheaper evaluation accounts first, journaling every trade, and then, in his account, spending roughly a month working directly with Rihari on fundamental analysis immediately before the results accelerated. He describes leaving his construction job as the practical marker of that shift, telling the podcast about walking past a building site near his new apartment and realising he was now signing into an office lobby instead of climbing scaffolding.

The $1.2 million figure is a funding total, meaning it describes the combined size of evaluation accounts Jordan Jackson was cleared to trade, not a lump sum paid to him. Rihari's platform presents this as Jordan Jackson's personal account of his own trading journey, not as a business, licensing, or typical-results claim for anyone who joins Ambitious Investing.

What was Jordan Jackson doing before he started trading?

Jordan Jackson was working as a qualified builder in Australia when he decided to try trading, a trade he says he chose after watching his father work with his hands and deciding he wanted a skill he could use to build for his own family one day.

Before that, he describes a background in rugby league through his school years in New Zealand and briefly in Australia, ending after a serious shoulder injury cut his playing career short. He then worked for several years in a warehouse role connected to commercial kitchen equipment before returning to New Zealand and completing a building apprenticeship, which he says took just under three and a half years. He spent about six years working as a builder in Australia in total.

A personal highlight he mentions from that trade is building a house for his parents in New Zealand alongside his father, a project he completed around the middle of 2024, partway through his first year of learning to trade. He describes that project as the reason he originally chose to become a builder in the first place: wanting the ability to build something for his own family.

How did Jordan Jackson's evaluation accounts progress from Infinity to TopStep to Apex?

Jordan Jackson says his funded-account journey moved through three different evaluation providers over roughly a year, starting with instant-funding accounts he never converted into payouts, moving into futures evaluations he used as a form of paid practice, and finishing with the $300,000 Apex accounts that produced the $1.2 million total.

He describes going through about four Infinity instant-funding accounts early on, at roughly $800 each, and says he never met the 30-day trading requirement attached to them because he was still two weeks into learning the strategy. He then shifted to TopStep, which he describes using deliberately as a substitute for a demo account, because putting real evaluation money behind it changed how seriously he treated each trade. Over about six to seven months he says he passed five separate $50,000 TopStep accounts, trading mostly gold. At the start of 2025 he moved into Apex evaluation accounts, where the $300,000 account size and the sequence of passes that followed produced the $1.2 million figure.

| Evaluation provider | Jordan Jackson's stated use | Account size mentioned | Outcome he describes | |---|---|---|---| | Infinity (instant funding) | First evaluation accounts he tried, early in his trading | Roughly $800 per account | Went through about four; says he never met the 30-day requirement | | TopStep | Used deliberately as a paid substitute for demo trading, mostly on gold | $50,000 per account | Passed five accounts over roughly six to seven months | | Apex | Current accounts, started early 2025 | $300,000 per account | Passed four accounts within one month, reaching $1.2 million combined funding |

He also mentions one personal live account of $1,000 that he opened during this period and lost, which he describes candidly as money given back to the market rather than as a setback that changed his approach.

What changed after Jordan Jackson started working with Rihari on fundamentals?

Jordan Jackson says the clearest turning point in his trading was adding fundamental analysis to the technical, structure-based strategy he already had, something he began working on directly with Rihari roughly a month before the podcast was recorded. He credits that combination with the run of passed Apex accounts that followed.

Rihari says the shift is best summarised as "fundamentals give the direction, technicals give the entries," meaning macro drivers such as central bank positioning are used to judge the probable direction of a currency or metal over time, while chart structure is used to time the specific entry within that move. Jordan Jackson says that before this, he was aware of economic news releases but did not study them in depth, and that understanding the reasoning behind central bank decisions helped him understand why the market was ranging or reversing rather than only reacting to it after the fact.

The video also describes a practical routine change: Rihari began posting trade alerts and analysis that Jordan Jackson could follow on his own charting platform, and the pair began doing daily New York session analysis together, which Jordan Jackson says pushed him to prepare more consistently earlier in the day rather than only checking charts shortly before a session opened.

What does the $1.2 million funding figure actually represent?

The $1.2 million figure Jordan Jackson cites is the sum of four $300,000 Apex evaluation account sizes he says he passed within a single month, not a cash amount deposited into his bank account or a claim about lifetime trading profit.

Passing a prop-firm evaluation account typically means a trader met that firm's profit target and risk rules on a simulated or semi-live account, after which the firm allows the trader to manage a funded account up to that size, with profits split between trader and firm according to that firm's separate rules. Jordan Jackson does not state Apex's specific payout percentage or rules on the podcast, and none of those commercial terms are treated as verified fact here; the $1.2 million describes the size of capital he was cleared to trade across those four accounts.

Separately, Jordan Jackson says two of his Apex accounts had reached what the firm calls a "safety net" status, a buffer level of profit required before funds can be withdrawn, and that those two accounts had built up a combined profit approaching five figures at the time of recording. He also describes opening a $100,000 live account around the same period and says he was up roughly 50% within the first two weeks after an early run of losing days, and separately mentions a 41% monthly return on a live account he was trading alongside the team. These are figures he states about his own accounts in the video; they are not statements about Ambitious Investing's other students or about what any new trader should expect.

How did Jordan Jackson manage risk and psychology on his live account?

Jordan Jackson says the hardest psychological adjustment was moving from funded evaluation accounts to a live account funded with his own money, describing the first two days of losses on that account as a distinctly different experience from losing on a funded account.

He says he responded by waiting specifically for the New York trading session rather than forcing trades, and describes recovering the early losses within the following two days by holding two setups overnight instead of closing them early. His broader risk approach, as described in the video, involves scaling out of a position in stages, taking partial profit at key levels, and then trailing his stop-loss to a new high or low as the trade develops, so that a trade is at breakeven or in profit for most of its duration rather than left fully exposed.

He also credits ongoing trade journaling, which he says he began seriously partway through 2024, with building the confidence behind these decisions: logging entry and exit times, win or loss outcome, whether a stop was moved to breakeven, and his emotional state going into and coming out of each trade.

What steps does Jordan Jackson say helped him progress fastest?

Jordan Jackson lays out a fairly specific sequence when asked what helped him move from a beginner to a funded trader, combining structured practice, cheaper evaluation accounts, mentorship, and consistent review of his own trades.

1. He joined the Ambitious Investing course in March 2024 and learned a smart-money-concept strategy built around market structure and trading ranges.
2. He spent roughly two months forward-testing that strategy by marking up trades on AUD/USD charts before risking money, which he describes as data collection rather than live trading.
3. He worked through Infinity instant-funding evaluations first, even though he says he never met their 30-day requirement, before moving to TopStep, which he used deliberately as monetised practice.
4. He passed five $50,000 TopStep accounts on gold over roughly six to seven months, describing this stretch as the bulk of his practical funded-style experience.
5. He took roughly a month away from trading mid-2024 while building a house for his parents, then briefly traded with a different mentor's service before returning to Ambitious Investing.
6. He began consistently journaling trades, recording entries, exits, stop management and emotional state for every position.
7. Starting early 2025, he began working directly with Rihari on fundamental analysis alongside his existing technical strategy.
8. Within that same period he passed four $300,000 Apex accounts in one month, reaching $1.2 million in combined funded capital, and opened a personal live account shortly after.

Jordan Jackson's advice to beginners in the video follows the same logic: he tells the podcast that a beginner's first $1,000 should go toward education rather than straight into a funded or live account, and that traders should expect their own timeline to look different from anyone else's rather than comparing progress directly.

What does the evidence say about retail trading outcomes generally?

Jordan Jackson's results are his own account of his own trading, and they sit alongside separate, independently published data on how retail traders perform as a group, which paints a materially harder overall picture than any single trader's story.

ASIC Report 828: Risky business recorded that 68% of Australian retail CFD investors lost money in the 2024 financial year. That figure comes from Australia's corporate and financial services regulator and covers retail CFD trading broadly; it is not a statement about Ambitious Investing, Apex, or Jordan Jackson's own account performance, and it is not offset or contradicted by one trader's funded-account result.

Separately, the BIS 2025 Triennial Survey reported that average daily OTC foreign-exchange turnover reached US$9.6 trillion in April 2025. That figure is included here only for scale, to show the size of the market Jordan Jackson describes trading; it says nothing about the odds of any individual trader profiting within it.

Read together, these two facts do not confirm or deny Jordan Jackson's account, and they are not used here to promise that any reader will replicate his outcome. His story is presented as one person's account of leaving employment and working through funded-account evaluations over roughly a year, not as evidence of typical, likely, or guaranteed results for trading in general.