Michael Patak is the founder and CEO of Topstep, the firm that basically invented the funded futures prop trading model. If you’ve done a prop firm challenge on the futures side, you’re playing a game he designed.
| Full name | Michael Patak |
| Role | Founder & CEO, Topstep |
| Trading since | 1997 |
| Background | Nebraska native; former Dow futures floor trader, Chicago Board of Trade |
| Founded Topstep | 2012 (as TopstepTrader; rebranded Topstep in 2020) |
| Other ventures | Patak Trading Partners, LLC (his proprietary trading firm); GorillaGamer (2005–2007) |
| Most active on | X (@MichaelPatak) |
From a $90,000 loss to founding Topstep
Patak grew up in Nebraska and started trading in 1997, not long after college. He got into futures the same way a lot of people do — with too much size and not enough of a plan — and lost $90,000 of his own money early on. That loss is the part of the story he brings up the most, because it’s the reason Topstep exists at all.
Instead of quitting, he scaled back and started practicing on a trading simulator with the same real risk parameters he’d trade live with. It worked. He eventually became a floor trader in the Dow futures pit at the Chicago Board of Trade, trading his own account through Patak Trading Partners, the firm he’d already set up.
That’s where the idea for Topstep came from. Patak noticed the same pattern he’d gone through play out in other traders over and over: talented people who couldn’t get capital because no one would take a chance on them. He built a program to solve that — evaluate traders on a sim account first, then back the ones who prove they can handle real risk parameters with real money. He launched it in 2012 as TopstepTrader, right on the CBOT floor.
What Topstep became
Topstep was the first company to run funded trading accounts at scale, and it’s still the one most other futures prop firms get compared to. The company rebranded from TopstepTrader to Topstep in 2020 after a merger, and it now operates in more than 170 countries. Patak stayed CEO through all of it.
He still talks about the early days a lot — running the whole operation out of a small office in Chicago’s Old Town, not paying himself for a while because everything went back into the business. It’s a detail that shows up in almost every interview he does, and it’s clearly part of how he wants the Topstep story told: built by a trader who lost money first, not a startup founder who spotted a gap in a spreadsheet.
Where he’s active online
X (@MichaelPatak) is where you’ll actually find him. He posts and replies constantly — company updates, direct responses to trader complaints, quote-tweets of funded traders sharing their results, the occasional bit of Topstep history. When Topstep had a rough stretch with support and platform issues in late 2025, Patak addressed it himself on X rather than leaving it to a corporate account, admitting the growth had outpaced the experience and support traders were getting. That’s fairly consistent with how he uses the platform: personally, not through a PR filter.
He also shows up on podcasts aimed at the prop trading and futures community — The Day Trading Show is one example, along with other interviews where he talks through Topstep’s origin story and where the industry is headed. His LinkedIn profile exists and lists his background, but it’s not somewhere he posts often. There’s a TikTok account under his name too, though it’s a small following and light activity compared to X.
If you want to actually reach him or follow what he’s saying day to day, X is the place. Everything else is more of a static profile.
