The honest answer is about $100.
That number is real, and it is also the most misleading sentence on this page unless you read the rest of it. Because $100 is what it costs to start. It is not what it costs to keep going, and it is not the number you need if you'd rather trade your own money instead of somebody else's.
There are two roads into this. They cost completely different amounts, they fail in completely different ways, and almost nobody explains the second one honestly. So let's do the math out loud.
On a funded account, the money you put at risk is the evaluation fee (roughly $100 at a time), not the account size. On your own account, the number that matters isn't the margin your broker requires. It's the drawdown you have to survive without flinching.
Road one: you pass an evaluation at a proprietary trading firm, and from then on you trade the firm's capital. You pay a fee to take the test. If you blow the account, you lose the fee and nothing else.
Road two: you open a futures account at a broker with your own money, post margin, and trade. Nobody sets rules for you. Nobody takes a cut. Nobody hands you $50,000 to work with, either.
Neither road is the "right" one. Road one asks how little you can risk to find out whether a system works for you. Road two asks how much freedom you're willing to pay for.
A funded account works like a driving test with a fee. You buy an evaluation, you trade a simulated account under a set of rules (a profit target, a maximum drawdown, usually a daily loss limit), and if you finish inside the rules, the firm funds you and pays you a share of what you make.
The fees are small compared to the account sizes:
Those tiers set how many contracts you're allowed to trade. A 50k account is one micro contract, a 100k allows up to two, a 250k up to five, and that cap is what decides which sizing levels are even available to you. More size means more of everything, including the losses.
We support Apex Trader Funding, Lucid Trading, My Funded Futures and Tradeify, which means the system is built to run inside their rules. You buy the evaluation from the firm yourself and pay the firm directly. Others (Topstep, Take Profit Trader, Earn2Trade, Bulenox) run the same basic model with different rulebooks. The mechanics, rule by rule, are in how funded accounts work, on the funded capital page, and in the wider guide to prop firm trading.
So the entry ticket is $100. That part of the pitch is true. Here's the part that usually goes missing.
A funded account is not a permanent possession. It has a drawdown limit, and when that limit is hit the account is gone. Not suspended. Gone. You buy another evaluation and start again.
This is not a failure of the system. It's the cost structure of the model. A rule-based system that treats losing trades as routine (the Algomyth engine targets three times what it risks, so break-even sits at a 25% win rate) will occasionally string together enough red days to trip a trailing drawdown while still being profitable overall. The account dies. The edge doesn't.
How often? That depends on the firm's drawdown rule and on where in the sequence you happen to start, so there is no single number to publish and we are not going to invent one. What we do publish is the size of the hole the system can dig: the worst drawdown of the whole backtest period was $5,273 on a mid-size account. Budget the evaluation fee as something you pay more than once.
The evaluation fee isn't a one-time purchase. It's a running cost, like commissions.
Put both halves of that period together, because one without the other is propaganda.
On the profit side, the Algomyth engine backtest averages $18,814 a year net on a mid-size account. Net is not a courtesy: commissions of about $1.90 per contract round turn and a tick of slippage, roughly $2.40 a trade on the micro Nasdaq, are charged inside the simulation before it prints anything. Evaluation fees sit outside that figure, because they depend on the firm you choose and on how often an account trips its limit.
Two things need saying immediately. First, that is an average across four and three-quarter years, not a forecast for any single one: some stretches were far better and some were far worse, and the average hides both. Second, all of it is simulated. No real money was at risk, and no account was actually bought or lost. The numbers come from running the strategy over historical data, day by day.
The point isn't the arithmetic. It's that the fee is small relative to a good outcome and large relative to your wallet if the outcome doesn't arrive. Budget for three or four evaluations, not one. What the system is actually doing in that window is described in how it works.
Hypothetical performance. Every figure above comes from a backtest over historical data, not from a live account. Simulated results are prepared with hindsight, carry no financial risk, and cannot fully reflect real execution, slippage or liquidity. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Now the road nobody prices honestly. To trade micro index futures in your own name you need a futures account at a broker, and you need to post margin.
Margin is not a fee and not a purchase. It's a good-faith deposit the exchange requires you to have sitting in the account while a position is open. There are two flavors, and confusing them is how people get hurt:
A system that never holds overnight, with no position carried into the next session, lives entirely inside day-trade margin. That's exactly why it can be run in a small account. And it's exactly why a small account is a trap.
Suppose your broker lets you trade one micro contract on $500 of day-trade margin. Can you open an account with $500 and start? Technically yes. Practically no, and here is the arithmetic that says so.
The published backtest has a worst drawdown of $5,273 over the period from January 2022 to September 2026. That is the deepest hole the equity curve dug before making a new high, in simulation, on historical data. A live account will eventually see something at least that bad, and there is no law saying it can't see worse. The worst drawdown in any track record is simply the worst one so far.
So your account has to hold the margin and absorb a drawdown of that size without dropping below margin, without triggering a margin call, and without you panicking and switching the system off at the bottom. A working rule: size the account at two to three times the worst historical drawdown, on top of margin. On one micro contract that puts you somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000. And it should be money that can go to zero without changing how you live.
That's the honest gap between the two roads. Not $100 versus $500. It's $100 versus roughly $10,000.
| Funded account | Your own account | |
|---|---|---|
| Cash out of pocket to begin | ≈$100 for a 50k evaluation | ≈$10,000 to $15,000 to trade one micro comfortably |
| Most you can lose in one shot | The fee. ≈$100 | Whatever's in the account |
| Recurring cost when it goes wrong | Another ≈$100 evaluation | Nothing new. You just have less money |
| Who keeps the profit | Split with the firm, on the firm's payout schedule | All of it |
| Rules imposed on you | Profit target, trailing drawdown, daily loss limit, often consistency rules | Only the exchange's margin and your broker's |
| How you scale up | Buy a bigger tier, or run several accounts at once | Add capital, add contracts |
| Where it usually breaks | A rule you didn't read ends an account that was profitable | You size too big for the account and a normal drawdown becomes fatal |
| Best suited to | Finding out whether a system works for you, cheaply | Someone who already knows, and wants the whole result |
Whichever road you take, four line items show up:
Account size, contracts, evaluation fees. The calculator does the arithmetic; the performance page shows where every input came from.
To try the funded road: about $100 for the evaluation, plus the license and the platform, plus the willingness to spend another $100 when an account is lost, because one will be. Budget three or four evaluations across the first months and you have a realistic picture rather than an optimistic one.
To trade your own account: around $10,000 to $15,000 for a single micro contract, sized off the drawdown rather than the margin, and it has to be money you can lose without it mattering. If that sentence made you uncomfortable, the funded road exists precisely for you.
What you should not do is start on the second road with the first road's budget. A $2,000 account trading one micro on day-trade margin isn't aggressive. It's an account that gets closed by a drawdown the system was always going to have. How that drawdown behaves, month by month, is on the risk page.
You can start an evaluation with roughly that, for a 50k account. What you cannot do is assume $100 is the total cost. Accounts get consumed by drawdowns and have to be re-bought, so the realistic entry budget is a few hundred dollars spread over your first months, plus the platform and the system license.
Nothing, because none of your money was in it. The capital in a funded account belongs to the prop firm, and the only thing you lose when it hits its drawdown limit is the evaluation fee you already paid. That asymmetry is the entire reason the funded route exists for people testing a system.
Not automatically. A 250k account costs around $400 and lets you trade up to five contracts, which multiplies profits and drawdowns by the same factor. The published 50k report was run on one contract, so a larger tier is a decision to take more risk, not a decision to take a better version of the same risk.
No. The $25,000 minimum equity rule applies to pattern day trading in stock and options margin accounts, not to futures. Futures have their own margin framework set by the exchange and the broker. That said, the fact that a small futures account is legal doesn't make it survivable. Size it off the drawdown, not the rulebook.
Yes, and it's what most people do once a system has earned their trust. Each account is a separate evaluation you pay for and pass, and each firm caps how many accounts one person can hold and how they may be traded together. Read the rules before you buy the second one, not after.
Everything we write comes back to one idea: verify, then decide. The live terminal exists for exactly that.
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