Introduction to challenges

Proprietary trading, also known as "prop trading", involves using capital provided by prop trading firms rather than the trader's private funds. In this case, traders benefit from earning profit from their trading activities without risking their own funds.

To evaluate traders' skills and capabilities, prop trading firms conduct challenges that involve specific trading objectives and performance metrics that traders must meet to qualify for access to trade using the firm’s capital. Upon successful challenge completion, a trader is provided with a funded account with a certain balance on it. Profits earned from trading on this account are usually divided between the trader and the prop trading firm.

In the Back Office, you can create and configure trading challenges by navigating to Investment platform in the main menu, expanding the desired platform instance (such as MT4, MT5, or cTrader), and clicking Prop trading.

Prop trading in the main menu

Key points

• Trading challenges are supported for MetaTrader 4/5 and cTrader.

• Challenges can be of two types: trial challenges intended for training purposes and real challenges – for live trading.

• For trial challenges, demo accounts are used, while for real challenges – live accounts.

• Trial challenges incur no charge for clients, while real challenges require a participation fee, which can be refunded upon successful completion.

• Challenges may include one or more steps for comprehensive evaluation.

• Key metrics used for evaluation include:

  • Duration (days) – the number of days within which a client must achieve the challenge objectives.

  • Min trade days – the minimum number of active trading days.

  • Max Daily Loss – the maximum allowed loss per day.

  • Profit Target – the profit amount that must be achieved within the challenge duration. The profit target is compared to the sum of Realized PnL and Floating PnL on the account participating in a challenge. Once the sum of these values equals the profit target, it is considered successfully achieved.