A funded trading account is an account at a proprietary trading firm that you trade after passing that firm's evaluation, using the firm's simulated capital rather than your own, and keeping a published share of the gains. The important word in that sentence is simulated. You are not given money to trade; you are given permission to trade inside a set of rules, and the firm pays you a share of what the rules let you make.
Who owns the capital, and what you actually bought
You pay for an evaluation, not for capital. The firm sets a profit target and a loss limit, you trade a simulated account until you hit one of them, and if you hit the target first the firm funds a simulated account in your name. What you bought is the right to be measured. That is why the fee, the reset fee and the rules matter far more than the size of the account: a $150,000 account inside a rule you cannot trade is worth less than a $50,000 account inside one you can.
The rule that ends it is the drawdown, not the target
Every firm publishes a loss limit and they do not all work the same way. A trailing drawdown follows your account's high water mark upward, and at several firms it follows unrealised profit too, so a trade that runs up and comes back can breach a level that never appeared on a closed balance. OneUp Trader publishes that its trailing drawdown increases at a defined distance as the account balance increases. An end-of-day drawdown moves once, at the close, on realised profit only, which is what Take Profit Trader and Tradeify publish. Two firms advertising the same split can be entirely different products because of this.
What the split is worth once you read the market
Across the eight firms in this index that publish a profit split, the lowest, the median and the highest are all 90%. A number that identical is not a differentiator, and a comparison built on it is comparing nothing. What does differ is the treatment of the first payout: Bulenox publishes that the first $10,000 in payouts is 100% yours, and OneUp Trader publishes that funded traders receive 100% of their withdrawals up to $10,000. Since most funded traders who are paid at all are paid a small number of times, those terms move more money than the percentage does.
Questions people ask about funded trading account
Is a funded trading account real money?
The capital is simulated at every firm in this index. You trade a simulated account against the firm's rules, and the firm pays you real money as a share of the simulated gains if you meet its payout conditions. That distinction is why these are evaluation products rather than brokerage accounts, and it is also the basis on which they are offered in the United States.
How much does a funded trading account cost?
The two entry prices this site could verify verbatim are TradeDay, advertising accounts from $45, and Uprofit, publishing evaluations from $130. Treat both as the bottom of a range on the date shown rather than the price of the size you want, and look up the reset fee before you pay, because failing and restarting is the ordinary path and the reset is the charge most traders pay most often.
What happens if I fail?
You lose the fee and, at most firms, you can pay a reset to try again on the same account size. Nothing on this site says how likely passing is: the published figures in this industry do not support a claim either way, and we would have no way to verify one.