Every rule, in plain language.

The evaluation

You trade a simulated account with real, live market prices — crypto perpetuals and regulated event-market simulations at launch, CME micro futures next. To pass, you need to do exactly three things:

• Reach the profit target for your tier (6% of the account size).
• Never touch the trailing drawdown or daily loss limit.
• Trade on at least five separate days. No maximum — take as long as you want.

There is no consistency rule, no time limit, and no restricted strategies beyond the risk rules themselves.

Trailing drawdown — the end-of-day kind

Your drawdown floor trails your end-of-day high-water mark, not your intraday peak. If your account closes a day at $52,000 on a $50K Standard evaluation, your floor becomes $49,500 ($2,500 below). An open trade that spikes up and pulls back intraday does not drag the floor up with it. This is the single most trader-friendly drawdown design in the industry, and your remaining room is displayed live on every screen.

Daily loss limit

Realized plus open losses in a single session can't exceed your tier's limit. Cross it and the engine flattens your positions instantly and locks the account for the day — on an evaluation, that's a violation; we'd rather stop you at the limit than let a bad day become a blown account by morning.

What happens on a violation

The engine closes all positions at market, locks the account, and shows you the exact numbers — which rule, at what price, at what time, with the order and tick history attached. Reset from $9 and start again in seconds, or let the coach walk you through what changed between attempts.

The Qualified Account

Pass, complete identity verification, and you receive a Qualified Account: a simulated account with contractual performance-fee rights. Same live prices, same rules (the daily loss limit and trailing drawdown still apply), no profit target — just trade.

You earn 100% of your first $5,000 in net simulated profits and 90% thereafter. There are no monthly fees, no activation fees, no payout ladder, and no forced account closure.

Payouts, step by step

• Eligibility: $500 minimum balance above your starting balance, five qualifying trading days.
• Verification: identity (ID + liveness) is completed at purchase; payouts above $10,000 require source-of-funds documentation — this is standard financial compliance, and doing it early is why our payouts don't stall.
• Tax forms: W-9 (US) or W-8BEN (non-US) collected once, before your first payout. US recipients receive 1099s.
• Processing: requests are reviewed and paid within 48 hours, weekly at launch, moving to daily as the reserve matures.

What "simulated" means here — and everywhere

Nearly every retail prop firm, including the biggest names, keeps traders on simulated accounts even after "funding" — payouts come from business revenue, not from your trades reaching an exchange. Most bury that in paragraph 40 of the terms. We think the model is legitimate when it's honest and reserved-for, so we say it in large type: all accounts are simulated; payouts are contractual performance fees; the reserve that backs them is published.

Where the rules run

Our matching engine and rules engine are the same system — built on the lock-free infrastructure that powers the Ghost ST platform. Every order passes pre-trade checks (position size, order rate, account state) before it reaches the book, and every tick re-evaluates your drawdown and daily loss in real time, for every open account at once. That's why the meters in the app are never stale and enforcement is never a surprise.

Every order, fill, rule evaluation, and state change is written to an append-only audit log and retained. Disputes get settled with data, not support-ticket archaeology.

The Arena

Before or alongside your evaluation, you can enter the Ghost Arena — timed trading competitions on the same engine, with entry fees, fixed prize pools, and public leaderboards for both humans and bots. A free entry path is always available. It's the lowest-stakes way to test a strategy against the field before you put it through an evaluation.