A checklist before buying your first challenge

Before the checklist: two decisions

Two things should be settled before you look at a single firm, because they eliminate most of the field without any judgement.

• Which market you are trading. Forex and CFD firms and futures firms publish different rules in different units; a shortlist that spans both is not really a shortlist.
• What you can afford to lose entirely. Not the fee — the fee plus one reset plus an activation charge, on the assumption the first attempt fails.

With those fixed, the checklist below takes about fifteen minutes per plan and is entirely a reading exercise.

The plan itself

1. 011. What is the profit target, per stage, and in what unit?Two stages are two conditions. A currency target does not scale with account size; convert it to a percentage at the size you are buying.
2. 022. Is the maximum loss static or trailing?If the page does not say, you do not yet know what the main rule does. Go and find it before anything else.
3. 033. If it trails, where does it stop, and when is it measured?At the initial balance, plus a buffer, or never; intraday or end of day. These change the plan more than the number does.
4. 044. What is the daily loss, and against what basis?Start-of-day balance, start-of-day equity or initial balance. And does an open losing position count?
5. 055. What happens when the daily limit is breached?Account failed, session locked or positions flattened. Three very different outcomes.
6. 066. Is there a minimum number of trading days, or profitable days?They are different rules and set a floor on how fast you can pass.

The money

1. 017. Is the fee one-time or monthly, and is it refundable?A monthly fee turns a slow evaluation into an expensive one. A refundable one-time fee can make a dearer plan the cheapest route.
2. 028. Is there an activation fee at funding?Charged after you pass, which is when walking away costs most. Find the number before you start.
3. 039. What does a reset cost?Almost always cheaper than buying again, and worth knowing before your first breach rather than after it.

Add those three together with one reset assumed, and you have the realistic cost of an attempt. It is routinely double the advertised price. Fees, resets and activation works through the arithmetic.

Getting paid

1. 0110. What is the base profit split, not the ceiling?"Up to 90%" is a maximum. Find what applies on the first payout.
2. 0211. When can the first payout be requested, and how often after that?Two separate facts. A firm advertising daily payouts has told you the second and not the first.
3. 0312. Is there a consistency rule, and where does it apply?At payout, it can hold back a withdrawal from an account that already passed.

What to do with the questions you cannot answer

Some of these will have no published answer. That is a result, not a dead end.

A plan whose drawdown type is unpublished is a plan whose principal rule you cannot fully read. A plan whose payout eligibility is unpublished is one where the timing of your first withdrawal is unknown. Neither is automatically disqualifying — plenty of firms publish less than they could — but each should be counted, and three unanswered questions is a lot of guessing to do with your own money.

Read the documents in the right order

The pricing page is written to sell. The terms and the funded-account agreement are written to be enforced. Reading them in that order — sales first, contract second — is how people end up surprised.

1. 01Start with the funded-account termsThis is where payout conditions, consistency scope and funded-stage rules live, and where they most often differ from the evaluation.
2. 02Then the rules or objectives pageThe limits, in full, usually with the details the pricing table omits.
3. 03Then the pricing pageBy now you know what the numbers on it mean.
4. 04Finally the FAQUseful for edge cases: news windows, holding rules, platform charges.

How to read an official prop-firm rules page covers what to look for in each. Rex links to every page it has read from the source registry.

One last thing before you buy

Check that the plan you are about to buy is the plan you researched. Firms sell several plans with similar names, and the differences between them — drawdown model, fee type, activation charge — are exactly the fields on this checklist.

The most common version of this mistake is buying the intraday-drawdown variant of a plan after reading the end-of-day one, because they sit next to each other at the same price point and differ by one word.

Start from a filtered set rather than a homepage: browse the challenge explorer, or pick a starting point from the discovery pages.