Multiple prop challenges?
Why get multiple prop accounts from the same company
by Deeyana Angelo
New age of remote prop trading
Following COVID-19 outbreak, the world has changed forever.
Mistrusting prop firms were forced into remote working options, which pushed the remote infrastructure to new highs.
This gave rise to an entirely new industry - online prop firms.
Prior to 2020, we only had a couple of options for those of us who wanted to do remote prop trading within the futures market.
But not, we have about 12 new established legitimate prop trading firms who are all based on a similar business model:
Offering online challenges for a monthly subscription for a chance to acquire a funded account.
Sometimes, these accounts offer more than 10x the amount of initial subscription fee.
For example: a drawdown of $7,500 for $675.
For those of us who know what we're doing with intraday trading, this is an insane opportunity.
These online prop firms are constantly criticised for 'encouraging gambling' with many unskilled traders callilng them scams.
Because if you misbehave and break the few rules the challenge has, you can pay for a 'reset' to start all over again.
But no one is forcing people to trade like lunatics and to keep pressing the reset button. If you are one of these people then please DON'T sign up for these challenges. You are better off going to see a psychologist because if you are constantly pressing RESET multiple times in a day or in a week, this is NOT trading.
But it IS a sign of a deeper addiction problem.
So quasi-traders need not apply.
Mistrusting prop firms were forced into remote working options, which pushed the remote infrastructure to new highs.
This gave rise to an entirely new industry - online prop firms.
Prior to 2020, we only had a couple of options for those of us who wanted to do remote prop trading within the futures market.
But not, we have about 12 new established legitimate prop trading firms who are all based on a similar business model:
Offering online challenges for a monthly subscription for a chance to acquire a funded account.
Sometimes, these accounts offer more than 10x the amount of initial subscription fee.
For example: a drawdown of $7,500 for $675.
For those of us who know what we're doing with intraday trading, this is an insane opportunity.
These online prop firms are constantly criticised for 'encouraging gambling' with many unskilled traders callilng them scams.
Because if you misbehave and break the few rules the challenge has, you can pay for a 'reset' to start all over again.
But no one is forcing people to trade like lunatics and to keep pressing the reset button. If you are one of these people then please DON'T sign up for these challenges. You are better off going to see a psychologist because if you are constantly pressing RESET multiple times in a day or in a week, this is NOT trading.
But it IS a sign of a deeper addiction problem.
So quasi-traders need not apply.
Multiple accounts?!
I am only talking about those of you who have experienced reasonably consistent returns week after week, month after month, but you're still effectively making peanuts.
Because you just don't have a way of SCALING UP your existing capital SAFELY.
And THAT is where the online prop firms come into their full use and value.
However the nature of these firms is that they have so-called 'gated withdrawals'.
This means for the first 2 months, they have a minimum amount of days and a minimum withdrawal amounts. This is why multiple accounts from the same company are useful.
Most of the gated withdrawal rules state that you need to have the initial drawdown offered covered with profits made.
Example: A $300k account (nominal sum!) offers a max DD of $7,500.
Once you've made $7,500 anything over this amount becomes eligible for withdrawal. But the minimum WITHDRAWAL amount must be $1,000 and no more than $3,000.
So if you have 3 accounts from the same company, this means your initial MINIMUM withdrawal amount will be $3,000 instead of $1,000.
Your MAXIMUM withdrawal will be $9,000, rather than $3,000.
Think of this initial 3 month period as your TRIAL PERIOD at a new job. Typically after the 4th month, there are no max or min withdrawal amounts because by then, you will have proven yourself to the firm that you are indeed a skilled capable trader who can navigate most market conditions like a genuine pro trader.
Welcome to the big leagues.
Because you just don't have a way of SCALING UP your existing capital SAFELY.
And THAT is where the online prop firms come into their full use and value.
However the nature of these firms is that they have so-called 'gated withdrawals'.
This means for the first 2 months, they have a minimum amount of days and a minimum withdrawal amounts. This is why multiple accounts from the same company are useful.
Most of the gated withdrawal rules state that you need to have the initial drawdown offered covered with profits made.
Example: A $300k account (nominal sum!) offers a max DD of $7,500.
Once you've made $7,500 anything over this amount becomes eligible for withdrawal. But the minimum WITHDRAWAL amount must be $1,000 and no more than $3,000.
So if you have 3 accounts from the same company, this means your initial MINIMUM withdrawal amount will be $3,000 instead of $1,000.
Your MAXIMUM withdrawal will be $9,000, rather than $3,000.
Think of this initial 3 month period as your TRIAL PERIOD at a new job. Typically after the 4th month, there are no max or min withdrawal amounts because by then, you will have proven yourself to the firm that you are indeed a skilled capable trader who can navigate most market conditions like a genuine pro trader.
Welcome to the big leagues.
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Multiple prop challenges?
For a small group of traders, running multiple prop accounts in parallel is the single fastest way to scale a consistent edge — without putting personal capital at risk. For everyone else, it's the fastest way to set fire to subscription fees.
This page is about which group you're in.
New age of remote prop trading
The futures prop industry looked very different five years ago. Before 2020, a trader who wanted to trade real prop capital from home had maybe two credible options. The pandemic changed that. Once firms were forced to operate remotely, the infrastructure followed — and the modern online futures prop firm was born.
Today there are roughly a dozen online futures prop firms in operation, though realistically only three or four are credible — the rest are best treated with suspicion until they've proven they can keep paying out through a difficult market. The credible ones all operate on broadly the same model: pay a subscription, pass a rule-based evaluation, get handed a sim-based funded account that can pay out real money as a 'performance fee'. The economics are genuinely unusual. Tradeify's Select $50,000 account, for example, runs around $107 all-in with their standing discount codes — no activation fee, no hidden line items — and on the Select Flex track at the funded level the rules are end-of-day drawdown with no daily loss limit, which means no intraday stop-out from a single bad spike. For a trader who already knows how to manage intraday risk, that combination of nominal capital, subscription cost, and rule structure is structurally unavailable through any retail account.
These firms get accused of "encouraging gambling," and the criticism is partly fair — but only partly. The reason it's partly fair is that the reset button exists: if you blow the evaluation, you can pay a fee and start again. Traders who treat that reset button as a feature rather than a warning do lose money repeatedly, and they're loud about it online - apparently market makers are hunting their stops. Hmmm.
If you find yourself hitting reset multiple times in a week, this is not a trading problem. That's an addiction problem, and the right person to see is a therapist, not buy yet another evaluation. We do not recommend prop accounts to anyone who recognises themselves in that description.
This article is written for the other kind of trader: the one who's already showing reasonably consistent returns week after week and month after month, but is still effectively making peanuts because they have no way to scale their own capital safely. That gap is the exact problem online prop firms were built to solve.
Multiple accounts?!
Every reputable online prop firm has gated payouts for the first few days of a funded account. The exact rules vary by firm, but they all look something like this:
- Most firms require five non-consecutive profitable days with a minimum of around $200 of profit on each of those days before a payout becomes eligible. Some firms have consistency rules to stop 'sim-farmers' rinsing them out blind by trading bigger size right off the bat.
- There's a minimum payout of around $500 per request, per account.
- The maximum payout cap on your first request is usually capped at around $2,000, rising to a cap of around $4,000 on every subsequent payout as the trust between you as a trader and your prop firm partner grows.
- Most firms also require you to have covered the initial drawdown allowance with realised profits before any payout becomes eligible at all.
A worked example. Take a $50,000 nominal account with $2,000 of end-of-day drawdown. Once you've built up $2,000 of net profit, anything above that becomes withdrawable — but the first payout is capped at around $2,000 and floored at around $500. So even when you're trading well, your effective cash-out rate during the gated period is limited.
This is the specific problem that multiple accounts solve. If you hold three accounts with the same firm, your minimum payout scales from $500 to $1,500. Your first payout cap scales from $2,000 to $6,000, and your subsequent payout cap scales from $4,000 to $12,000. Same edge, same execution, three times the throughput.
Think of those first few weeks in a funded account as a probationary period at a new job. Most firms remove the payout cap somewhere around the fourth month, once you've demonstrated you can keep an account through several different market regimes. After that point you're trading without the minimum/maximum constraints — and that's the point at which scaling up early starts to compound into something serious.
That's the case for multiple accounts. Not for traders looking for more reset buttons — for traders looking for a clean way to scale an edge that is already working.