What a futures prop firm actually costs

There is no single answer, because "cheapest" depends on what you count. The price on a firm's page is almost always the evaluation alone — it ignores the funded account's activation fee, resets, data feeds and, on subscription plans, how many months you spend in evaluation.

That is exactly what our all-in cost calculator works out: it adds every one of those on a scenario you choose, and shows an invoice line by line rather than a single number. The table above sorts on the headline price; the calculator sorts on what you will actually pay.

End-of-day drawdown is recalculated once a day, at the close, on your end-of-session balance. Intraday trailing follows the highest equity reached during the session, including an unrealised peak you never banked. In practice: on intraday trailing, a trade that runs to +$800 before falling back to +$100 has moved your loss threshold $700 higher, permanently.

EOD is markedly easier to survive, and this comparison flags it in the Drawdown column. It is often paired with a dearer evaluation — which is precisely the kind of trade-off the calculator prices.

A consistency rule caps the share any single day may represent in your total profit. At 30%, with a $3,000 target, no day may contribute more than $900 of profit, or the pass is refused even though the target was met. The lower the percentage, the tighter the rule.

In practice it rules out "one big day and I am done", and forces you to spread gains across several sessions. Below 25% it becomes genuinely restrictive for anyone trading news or momentum. The comparison lets you filter it out entirely.

Four items almost always escape the advertised price:

• Funded-account activation, paid after you pass — sometimes monthly, sometimes one-off, sometimes simply not published.
• Resets, the cost of starting again after a failure. The median trader uses at least one.
• Real-time data feeds, billed separately by some firms.
• Time itself: on a subscription plan, every extra month in evaluation is another payment.

The activation fees page covers the most opaque of the four.

At most firms, yes: parallel accounts are allowed, often up to a cap (twenty accounts, for instance). What is generally forbidden is copying trades between accounts at different firms, or taking opposing positions on two accounts so that at least one passes.

The exact rules — and above all the sanctions — vary from firm to firm, and each firm guide states what that firm publishes on the point.

This is the question worth asking, and the answer is uncomfortable: a prop firm does not hold your capital and does not manage your savings. You pay a fee to sit an evaluation, then trade the firm's simulated capital. That is not an investment service in the regulatory sense, so the protections that come with one do not apply.

Concretely: no deposit protection, no financial ombudsman, and any dispute is a contractual matter between you and the company — wherever it happens to be incorporated. Read the payout terms before you buy, not after you pass, and treat the firm's own published rules as the whole of your protection.