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.
The one thing to remember
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.
Two roads, and only one of them needs savings
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.
Road one: the evaluation fee is the whole outlay
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:
- A 50k evaluation: roughly $100.
- A 100k: roughly $250.
- A 250k: roughly $400.
Those tiers set how many contracts you're allowed to trade. A 50k account is one micro contract, the size the entire published backtest was run at. A 100k allows up to two, a 250k up to five. 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.
Accounts get consumed. Plan for it
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 loses more often than it wins (the one sold here wins 46.2% of the time in backtest) 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? In the last seven months of the published backtest, about seven accounts were consumed. At roughly $100 an evaluation, that's ≈$700 spent on re-entry fees over seven months.
The evaluation fee isn't a one-time purchase. It's a running cost, like commissions.
The arithmetic on that stretch
Put both halves of that period together, because one without the other is propaganda.
Over those same seven months, the system produced $43,322 gross in backtest, or roughly $41,000 net after commissions. Against that, ≈$700 in evaluation fees. That's about 1.7% of the net result going to buying accounts back.
Two things need saying immediately. First, that stretch was roughly double the historical monthly average of the same backtest: ≈$2,900 net per month across 88 months, versus about $5,900 a month in that window. It was a good run, not a typical one. 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 ratio. 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.
Road two: your own account
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:
- Initial and maintenance margin is what the exchange requires to hold a position, including overnight. On a micro index contract it has run in the low four figures per contract in recent years. The exchange resets it when volatility changes, sometimes sharply and with little notice.
- Day-trade margin is a much smaller number your broker offers if you promise to be flat before the close. Some brokers advertise as little as a few hundred dollars, or less, per micro contract. It is a broker courtesy, not an exchange rule, and it disappears the moment you hold past the session.
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.
Day-trade margin is not the number that matters
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 maximum drawdown of $4,379 on a single contract over 88 months. 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.
The two roads side by side
| 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 |
The costs neither road escapes
Whichever road you take, four line items show up:
- The system itself. A one-time license for the strategy. Prices are on the pricing page, not buried in a funnel.
- The platform. NinjaTrader 8 is free to download, chart and simulate with. Live trading needs a paid tier or higher per-trade rates. The full breakdown is in NinjaTrader 8 explained.
- Commissions. Roughly $1 per micro contract, which is why the published backtest reports $274,406 gross and ≈$260,700 net, about 5% shaved off by costs.
- A machine that stays on. Your own computer, awake and connected at 8:30 AM ET, or a small virtual private server for a few dollars a month so you never have to think about it.
Put your own numbers in and see what comes out
Account size, contracts, evaluation fees. The calculator does the arithmetic; the performance page shows where every input came from.
So what is the actual number?
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.
Frequently asked questions
Can I really start with $100?
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.
What happens to my money if a funded account blows up?
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.
Is a bigger account tier better?
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 backtest was run on one contract in a 50k account, so a larger tier is a decision to take more risk, not a decision to take a better version of the same risk.
Do I need $25,000 like the pattern day trader rule says?
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.
Can I run the same system on several funded accounts at once?
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.
In short: the funded road costs about $100 at a time and is designed so that the worst case is losing that fee. Your own account costs roughly $10,000 to $15,000 for one micro contract, because you have to fund the drawdown, not the margin. Pick the road that matches the money you can afford to be wrong with, and price in the losses before you price in the profits.
