Guide · The industry
Proprietary trading firms: how the modern model actually works.
Two very different things share the name. One is an institutional desk trading its own book. The other is the retail evaluation industry you can join this afternoon for a few dollars. Here is how each works, how the money moves, and how to judge a firm before you pay it.
Institutional prop desks vs retail prop firms.
An institutional proprietary trading firm hires traders, pays them a base, allocates real firm capital and enforces risk limits internally. Entry is a job application. Nothing is for sale.
A retail prop firm sells access instead. You pay for an evaluation, trade a simulated account priced off live markets, and if you hit the profit target inside the drawdown rules you are given a funded account and paid a share of the simulated profit. The firm's real obligation is the reward, not a capital transfer — which is exactly why settlement history matters more than any advertised account size.
How the money moves.
- Traders pay evaluation fees; most do not pass, and those fees are the base revenue line.
- Firms that hedge mirror the live positions of consistently profitable traders, so the desk earns alongside them.
- Drawdown floors and profit targets cap the reward liability of each account.
- Payout batching — ours is every Monday — keeps treasury predictable rather than ad hoc.
Seven checks before you pay any prop firm.
- Published proof of payment you can verify yourself, not screenshots.
- Drawdown measured on equity or balance — and whether the maximum trails your peak.
- Whether a consistency rule can retroactively void a passing account.
- Time limits on the evaluation, and what happens when you hit one.
- Whether news trading, EAs and weekend holds are allowed in the terms, not just the marketing.
- The full cost path: entry fee, any activation or phase-two fee, and any subscription that re-bills.
- How rewards are paid, in what currency, and on what schedule.
Where MixFunded sits.
We run four routes: 1-Step, 2-Step, Instant Funded and Pay After Passing. There is no consistency rule and no time limit; news trading, EAs, weekend and overnight holds are allowed. Profit split is 80/20 in your favour.
Rewards settle every Monday in USDT on the TRC-20 network and every transaction is added to the public reward ledger with its transaction ID, so anyone can verify the payment on the TRON explorer.