All five are sold as normal. Each one is a way to take money from someone who does not yet know what they are looking at, and each one is a way of corrupting the earth a little further. We refuse to present firms that do them as legitimate sources of information.
rule a
No 2-step challenges
Regardless of skill, passing a challenge takes a degree of luck. A firm that requires you to gamble twice is being ungentlemanly, and we do not condone this behaviour.
The trick: firms push the 2-step and lower the price, and to the uninitiated it looks like a good deal — everyone believes in their own skill. But doubling your money twice is more than two times harder than doubling it once. Not worth a negligible discount.
rule b
No activation fees
Negative number one: many people do not have a spare $100 sitting around after passing a challenge. Negative number two: many people fumble the moment real money is on the line.
The trick: asking for an activation fee is, in our opinion, a form of scam — extract as much as possible from the user before they blow the account, which the majority do, at least the first few times.
rule c
No shady brokers
This speaks for itself. Some firms work with shady brokers to manipulate the highly profitable trader — the one who, through skill, luck and survivorship, got to a very profitable position.
The trick: that trader gets targeted with fake price action and various "glitches". It saves the firm tens or hundreds of thousands, and removes the 1% of survivors who would be taking the big payouts.
rule d
No intraday trailing drawdown
Some firms move your drawdown up as you make profit. Technically it's the same drawdown — but lose money along the way, as most traders do, and it effectively gets tightened every day.
The trick: make $100, lose $100, make $100, lose $100. You're up $100 overall — but you have now lost $200 of drawdown, and one more loss ends the account, where before you had $1,000. We consider this a blatant scam.
rule e
Fake max drawdown = scam
You're expected to double or triple your money with monthly fees piling on and the clock running. Hitting the daily drawdown is not something that will never happen — it's not good, but it happens, especially with the way prop firms are set up.
The trick: a firm that violates your account for hitting it is not corrupting the earth any further on our watch. We refuse to show them as a legitimate source of information — that's banishment from the list.
Among plans that already passed all five rules, we sort by two things weighted equally: how close the drawdown room is to the profit target (1:1 is the fairest fight), and price — cheaper is better.
Every firm here has a working homepage and a plans page on its own domain — we check both, and a firm we cannot verify is not listed, however good its terms look. Every figure was read from the plan page linked under it, on the date shown. Firms change terms without notice — if a number looks wrong, the source link is the place to check, and the Discord is the place to tell us.