PROPFIRMFUN📘 Guides
1. Choosing a prop firm
Start with the structural question: quantitative firms employ traders directly (salary plus bonus, interview process); retail/funded firms sell evaluations to independent traders and pay a profit share to those who pass; futures firms are a specialised slice of retail focused on exchange-traded products.
Once you've picked a segment, prioritise in this order: drawdown structure (daily/max, fixed/trailing) — this decides whether your strategy survives at all; profit target and minimum trading days; any consistency rule; payout frequency and history; allowed instruments and news/weekend restrictions; platform support; and the cost of a re-attempt if you fail.
2. Approaching the evaluation
An evaluation is a constrained version of live trading, not a smaller one — the goal is proving a target return under the firm's specific rules. Before your first trade, write down the daily drawdown floor as a dollar figure, the minimum trading days, the profit target in dollars, and any consistency-rule cap. Treat your personal daily loss limit as half the firm's real limit, so a bad day doesn't end the account. Spread the profit target across more days with smaller size rather than swinging for it in three sessions — pacing beats pushing.
3. Risk management once funded
The risk management that gets you funded should get more conservative, not less, once real payouts are on the line. Re-derive position size from the firm's drawdown limit, not from the larger dollar balance of the account. Use real broker-level stops, not mental ones, and set a personal daily loss limit at half the firm's official one.
4. Drawdown rules in plain language
Two axes explain almost every "unfair" drawdown surprise: fixed vs. trailing (does the floor move up with profit?) and balance-based vs. equity-based (does it react to open positions, or only closed ones?). A trailing, equity-based drawdown is the tightest combination — an unrealised dip in an open position can trigger a breach you never actually locked in. See the dedicated drawdown rules page for worked examples.
5. Profit splits, scaling and payouts
The split is the most over-weighted headline metric. What it's calculated on (net profit over a payout period vs. on-demand), whether it steps up over time, and the firm's actual payout history all matter more than the number alone. Scaling plans that advertise "up to $4M" are usually a multi-month journey, not a starting point — treat the first tier as the realistic ceiling for the first six months.
6. Platforms
MT4/5 dominates retail forex prop firms with the deepest ecosystem of tools; cTrader offers a cleaner depth-of-market view; NinjaTrader, Tradovate and Quantower cover futures; TradingView is increasingly supported via broker integrations for charting-first traders.
7. Futures vs. forex prop firms
Futures trade on regulated exchanges with centralised clearing; forex firms typically trade against the firm's own broker stack. Futures drawdown tends to be fixed-dollar; forex leans percentage-based and often trailing. Futures carries explicit per-contract commissions; forex costs are usually baked into spread and swap.
8. Joining a quant firm
There's no evaluation to buy — there's an interview process. Expect mental-math and probability questions, coding under time pressure, and judgment-under-uncertainty problems. Preparation: drill mental arithmetic and probability puzzles to fluency, be fluent in one language you can think in (usually Python or C++), and have one end-to-end project that shows real judgment.
9. Common mistakes
- Optimising for the cheapest challenge fee instead of the right fit — failing twice costs more than picking correctly once.
- Treating "no time limit" as license to drift — set your own deadline.
- Underestimating a consistency rule that can invalidate a strategy built on a few big days.
- Reading the homepage instead of the rulebook — the terms of service is the actual contract.
- Maxing size on the first funded day — a blown account in week one is the most expensive mistake on the funded side.