A funded account is an account you trade at a proprietary trading firm after passing that firm's evaluation, using the firm's simulated capital rather than your own money, and keeping a published share of the gains. The word doing the most work is simulated: you are not handed capital, you are given permission to trade inside a rule set, and the firm pays you a share of what those rules allow you to make.
What you own and what the firm owns
You own nothing in a funded account. The firm owns the account, sets the rules, decides when the rules have been broken and pays you a share of the gains under terms it publishes. What you bought with the evaluation fee was the right to be measured, and what you hold afterwards is a payout entitlement rather than an asset. This is why the payout terms and the loss limit matter more than the headline account size: a large account inside a rule you cannot trade produces nothing at all.
The loss limit is the account's real boundary
Every funded account carries a loss limit and firms publish two shapes of it. A trailing limit rises with your account's high water mark, so profit you make and give back can move the level permanently closer; OneUp Trader publishes that its trailing drawdown increases at a defined distance as the balance increases. An end-of-day limit moves once, at the close, on realised profit only, which is what Take Profit Trader and Tradeify publish. Bulenox publishes both and lets the trader choose between them.
The share you keep, and the part that is not the share
Across the eight firms in this index that publish a split, every one of them is 90%, so the split is a floor the market has already matched rather than a reason to pick one firm. The terms that genuinely differ are the first payout and the cadence. Bulenox publishes that the first $10,000 in payouts is 100% yours; Earn2Trade publishes weekly withdrawals from $100 upward; My Funded Futures, Tradeify and Funded Futures Family publish daily payouts on at least one plan.
Questions people ask about what is a funded account
Is the money in a funded account real?
The capital is simulated at every firm in this index. Payouts are real money, calculated as a share of the simulated gains under the firm's published terms.
Can a funded account be taken away?
Yes. Breaching the published loss limit ends it at every firm here, and firms also publish rules on minimum trading days, news trading, consistency and prohibited strategies that can end an account or void a payout. Those live in the firm's own rules document rather than in its headline.
Do I need my own capital to trade a funded account?
No, beyond the evaluation fee and any reset fees. That is the appeal and also the business model: the firm's revenue from fees is certain and your payout is not.