Most prop firms charge you once, up front, for a challenge. You pay the fee, try to hit a target under their rules, and if you miss it the money is gone and you start again with a new ticket. A desk works differently. Instead of a one-time fee, you pay a small amount every day the desk is open, and that daily amount is what we call the prop funding rate.
How it’s priced
We price the daily fee on your room, which is the most the desk can lose, worked out as your account size times your max loss. If you open a $100,000 account with an 8% max loss, your room is $8,000, and the fee is a percentage of that $8,000. That means a large account with a tight max loss and a small account with a wide one can end up paying the same fee, because the most either of them can lose is the same. The percentage itself shifts a little as the desk gets older, and every desk pays at least a small minimum each day, so a very small desk is never free to run.
How it’s charged
We take the fee from your balance every hour rather than once a day, so you only ever pay for the time a desk was actually open. If you close a desk in the middle of the afternoon, the charges stop at that hour. When a desk reaches the end of its term, trading stops but the fee keeps running through one last payout window, since that window is still part of the desk’s life.
What you need to open a desk
Before you open a desk, your balance has to cover a few days of fees for every desk you have open, including the new one. We hold that amount rather than charge it, and if a desk ends early you’re charged only for the hours it ran, with the rest staying in your balance for you to use or withdraw.
Fees and payout credit
Every fee you pay also earns you payout credit, which is the most you can take out in payouts at any point. The longer a desk stays open, the more credit each fee earns, so someone who keeps a desk alive and profitable for a couple of months can take out noticeably more than someone who only lasted a week. The details are on the Desks page.
Where the fees go
Fees go to the fee treasury, a multisig that’s kept separate from the payout vault Over pays traders from. See Payout vault & fee treasury.
Rates
We’ll publish the full rate table soon.