Forex prop trading without promises: rules, drawdown and payouts

No. On your own account you risk your deposit and you dispose of it yourself. In a challenge you risk the fee, you trade under someone else's rules and you receive a share of the profit rather than all of it. The restrictions are tighter too: two drawdown limits, minimum days, and often bans on news trading and hedging.

You will meet the claim that prop trading does not exist in forex, and it conflates two different things. Classic 1980s prop is an employee on a desk team trading the firm's capital. Modern online programmes sell an evaluation against a set of rules, and in forex there are plenty of them. The argument worth having is not about the word but about whose money is on the account and what the payout is paid from.

Because the split applies to profit after trading costs, and tax applies to your share. In the model example: $10,000 of result minus $800 of costs gives $9,200; eighty per cent of that is $7,360; minus 13% tax leaves $6,403. Put in your own turnover and rate — the order of subtraction will not change.

No. The fee is lost when a limit is breached, and that is an outcome rather than a malfunction. Some firms return the fee after the first payout — check that condition in the rules before paying, because not everyone promises it and not always unconditionally.

Only the price of the challenge — no deposit is paid. But what you should count is not the price of one attempt but the cost of passing: at a probability of about 10% it takes nine attempts on average, and eight of them are paid for at the reset price. The total comes out roughly five and a half times higher than the advertised one.

There is no ban on taking part in a challenge: you are buying an evaluation service from a foreign company. The questions arise not with the legality of participation but with the taxation of the payout and with the status of the firm itself in its own jurisdiction. The details are on the pages about taxes and about prop trading in Russia and the CIS.

A broker gives access to the market and lives off spread and commission: the deposit and the loss are yours. A prop firm sells an evaluation, opens the account in its own name and shares the profit with you. You cannot hold a broker responsible for a losing trade; you can hold a prop firm responsible for refusing a payout when its terms were not broken.

During the evaluation the account is usually closed when the time limit or the minimum-activity requirement, if there is one, runs out. On a funded account some programmes close it after a long period of inactivity. That condition sits in the rules next to minimum trading days and can be read in advance.

Technically yes, and many people do it to average out the probability. But some firms flatly ban linked accounts and hedging between them, and a breach closes every account at once. The section to check is the one on multiple accounts and trade copying.

It depends on the programme: some allow them without restriction, some ban specific classes (latency arbitrage, tick scalping, copying other people's trades), and some require that the advisor be written by you. The wording “strategies that exploit execution conditions are prohibited” is common and is interpreted by the firm, so it is worth clarifying in writing before paying.