What Is a Prediction-Market Prop Firm? A Plain-English Guide

Nobody takes your deposit. Nobody routes your orders. No statement turns up with your name on something you own.

A prediction-market prop firm sells an audition. Pay a fee, trade a published rule set, hit the profit target without breaking a rule, and you get a funded simulated account that pays you most of what it makes.

The rules are not fine print around a product. The rules are the product. Here they are, in the order they will matter to you.

None of this structure is new. Futures and FX programs have sold it for years: pay for an evaluation, trade a balance against a target and a loss limit, split the profit if you pass. A large one calls that balance Initial Simulated Capital.

Funded Prediction Trader (FPT) runs that model on prediction markets, and its FPT Scale evaluation is where the product numbers on this page come from. Treat it as one worked instance of the category, not the category itself.

Swap the instrument and you have this. Instead of index futures you trade event contracts that settle at $1 if the thing happens and $0 if it does not. The price in between is the crowd's odds.

You are buying the evaluation. FPT Scale runs it in one step, not two, and the funded account only exists if you pass.

You pay the evaluation fee and nothing else. A second run on the $50k costs a $99 reset — $69 on the $25k, $159 on the $100k, and less again on the monthly plan. There is no trading deposit, no margin call and nothing to top up. After that you spend time.

One trader may hold five active accounts, evaluation and funded combined. What five accounts do and do not add up to is taken apart separately.

FPT Scale accounts are simulated trading accounts. The payouts are real money and the rules are real constraints. The position is not held on the venue in your name.

This is the most important line on the page. Account size is not cash paid to you and not capital you deploy. Your target, max loss and drawdown are measured against it. In the $50k evaluation, $2,000 is the most you may hold open across all positions at once. Stay within the published loss limit to keep the evaluation active.

FPT checks orders against the live price and liquidity rather than filling you stale, and is not affiliated with either venue. Both are included; here is how they differ.

No separate daily loss limit is the line people screenshot. Read it whole: no fixed daily amount stops you out, but a max-loss rule and an end-of-day trailing drawdown still apply, and both are enforced against your live equity rather than only at the close. What ends the account is touching one of those two floors, at any moment of the day.

The floor starts below your balance, ratchets up as you profit, and never falls back. It moves only when you close a day higher, so a spike you give back raises nothing permanently — but it is tested continuously, so an intraday dip through it ends the account. On the $50k it locks near $50,100.

No single day may account for more than 40% of total profit, in the evaluation and again in every funded payout cycle. Suppose you reach $3,000 of profit and your best day made $1,500. That day is half the total, and half is over the line — which defers passing rather than failing the account. Keep trading and further profitable days bring the ratio down. One enormous night does not get you funded. Five ordinary ones do.

Every rule so far has a counterpart in the futures world. This one does not.

Limits are set in dollars, not contract counts, and your max open size covers everything you hold at once rather than each position on its own. Then a second limit lands on top, one futures never needed: any one market is capped at 5% of its 24-hour volume. What a market will let you open is the lower of the two — whatever is left of your max open size, or that market's 5% ceiling. Go over either and the order is blocked before it goes through, which is a guardrail rather than a breach.

For example, take one account into two markets on the same afternoon and watch which cap bites.

The split is 90/10 in your favour from the first payout. What you get is size you did not have to fund, on published rules, with your cost capped at the fee. The same model against a futures prop firm runs that row by row. How much it is worth to you turns on one question.

A payout cycle is five qualifying days, not a calendar month. A qualifying day has to clear a small profit floor that rises with account size — $150 on the $50k. Consistency applies inside the cycle too, and 90% of the profit is yours.

Approved payouts are sent within 48 hours of approval — that covers payment once a payout is approved, rather than the review itself. An evaluation can be restarted for a reset fee; funded accounts progress through approved payouts rather than a reset.

FPT Scale works best for a strategy that can produce repeatable profitable days in markets with enough liquidity to size into. Two shapes sit further from that centre, and both are a matter of structure rather than discipline.

An edge that resolves in one night cannot produce five profitable days, and that night on its own puts you over the 40% line — which defers passing until more profitable days bring the ratio down. This model pays for a modest edge found often, not for a trader who is spectacular once a quarter.

Long-tail markets are where mispricing survives longest, which is exactly why serious traders live there. Thin markets reach the volume limit soonest, because the book cannot absorb the size anyway. Say you find a clean mispricing in a market almost nobody trades — the rule sets your size long before your conviction does.

If neither describes you, the rest are parameter questions: which size, which venue, and how much of your process you want running inside a published rule set. The evaluation rules answer most of them, and the account builder puts the three sizes side by side — target, loss limit and max open size against each other. Start there and pick the one that fits how you already trade.