A funded account, in the language used across this category, is the stage that follows a completed evaluation. In most arrangements it is a further simulated account, opened under a written agreement between the participant and the firm. The participant places orders in a trading platform connected to a demo or mirrored environment; the positions are recorded, priced against live market data, and scored. What the participant acquires is not control over the firm's assets but a contractual entitlement: a defined share of the profit that the simulated account records, paid out by the firm according to the terms it has set.
Because the entitlement is contractual, the agreement rather than the account's nominal size determines what the arrangement amounts to. The nominal size is an input to the calculation — drawdown limits, daily loss limits and profit targets are all measured against it — but it is not a balance the participant can withdraw. The documents that matter are the ones setting the profit share, the frequency and minimum size of payouts, the conditions that reset or terminate the account, the consistency and position-sizing rules applied at payout review, and the circumstances in which the firm may decline a request. Two accounts carrying the same nominal figure can differ substantially once those clauses are compared. Rules can also be revised, so the version of the terms in force at the time of a claim is the operative one.
In the major jurisdictions these arrangements are generally not treated as regulated financial services. No client-money segregation applies, no compensation scheme stands behind the firm, and supervisory authorities in several markets have issued statements distinguishing these products from investment services and warning that participants have limited recourse. Payment therefore depends on the firm remaining solvent and choosing to honour its own terms. Disputes are contractual, governed by whatever jurisdiction and arbitration clause the agreement names, which is frequently not the participant's own.
This is what makes a firm's documented history the substance of the comparison: how long it has operated, whether its published terms have changed and how, whether payouts have been processed consistently, and how it has behaved when accounts were breached or claims contested. Those observations, tracked over time, are more informative than the headline figures attached to any single offer.