Orders placed on an evaluation account do not leave the firm's system. They are matched inside a simulated environment against a price feed the firm licenses from a data vendor or aggregates from liquidity providers. Nothing is routed to an exchange, no broker holds a position on the participant's behalf, and no counterparty takes the other side in a market. The trade exists as a record in the firm's platform and in the risk engine that measures the account against its rules.
Several consequences follow mechanically. A fill reflects the feed plus the firm's own execution model — the spread it applies, the slippage rule it simulates, the latency between the participant's click and the server's stamp — rather than the depth available in an order book. Size is not constrained by what a market could absorb, so the same order that would move a thin instrument fills instantly at a quoted price. This is why firms prohibit techniques that exploit the gap between the simulation and market reality: latency arbitrage, feed arbitrage between the firm's quotes and a faster external source, trading through announcements when the feed lags, and group coordination that hedges opposite positions across accounts. Those methods target the model, not price direction. It is also why a participant cannot be settled against a real position; there is no position to settle.
Firms differ in what a participant experiences, because they differ in two inputs: the platform and the feed. Platforms vary in order types, charting, execution stamping and how they handle stop orders during gaps. Feeds vary in source, aggregation method and how weekend or thin-hours pricing is constructed. The same strategy can produce different results on two firms simply because the quoted spread widens differently around scheduled news.
The stage that follows a passed evaluation is, at most firms, also simulated. The account continues to run on the same infrastructure with different rules. What the firm owes a participant is therefore defined by the contract — the stated split, the payout schedule, the conditions that void a claim — and not by the outcome of any position held in a market. The agreement, and the firm's ability to honour it, is the mechanism. Documentation on this point varies between firms and is one of the fields tracked over time.