Funded accounts work in three stages, and almost everything that decides the outcome sits in the second one. You pay for an evaluation, you trade a simulated account against a profit target and a loss limit until you hit one of them, and if you hit the target first the firm funds a simulated account and pays you a published share of the gains. The rules in the middle stage are the product.
Stage one: you buy a measurement, not capital
The fee buys the right to be measured against the firm's rules. Account sizes are usually tiered, and the price rises with the size, but the size is much less important than whether you can trade inside the rule attached to it. TradeDay advertises accounts from $45 and Uprofit publishes evaluations from $130; both are the bottom of a range on the date shown. The number worth finding before you pay is the reset fee, because restarting after a failed attempt is the ordinary path and the reset is what most traders buy repeatedly.
Stage two: the loss limit, which is where evaluations end
You must reach the profit target without breaching the loss limit, and firms publish two different shapes of limit. A trailing limit follows your high water mark upward as you make money, so gains you give back can move the level permanently closer; OneUp Trader publishes that its trailing drawdown increases at a defined distance as your balance increases, and Bulenox publishes that its trailing option follows your highest point including open positions in real time. An end-of-day limit moves once, at the close, on realised profit, which is what Take Profit Trader and Tradeify publish. Most firms also set a minimum number of trading days.
Stage three: the split, the cadence and the first payout
Once funded you keep a share of the gains, and that share is 90% at every firm in this index that publishes one. What varies is how often you can withdraw and what happens the first time. Earn2Trade publishes weekly withdrawals from $100 upward. My Funded Futures, Tradeify and Funded Futures Family publish daily payouts on at least one plan. Bulenox and OneUp Trader both publish that the first $10,000 comes to you in full before the split applies, which for most funded traders is worth more than the percentage that follows.
Questions people ask about how do funded accounts work
Do you get real money from a funded account?
You are paid real money as a share of gains made on a simulated account. The capital you trade is simulated at every firm in this index; the payout is not.
How long does it take to get funded?
It depends on the plan's minimum trading days and on how quickly you reach the target without breaching the limit. Several firms publish fast routes, and some publish how quickly their fastest traders were paid. This site does not carry those claims, because they describe somebody else's outcome rather than a term you are buying.
What ends a funded account?
Breaching the loss limit, in almost every case. Firms also publish rules about news trading, minimum trading days, consistency and prohibited strategies, and those are in the firm's own rules document rather than in its headline.