The evaluation fee is the price of entry to an assessment. It is not a deposit, not margin, and not an amount exposed to market movement. Nothing in the fee is placed into a trading position; the simulated account is credited with a notional starting balance that exists only inside the firm's platform. Because the money never enters a market, it cannot be lost through trading and cannot be withdrawn through trading either. It is paid to the firm and becomes the firm's revenue at the moment of purchase.
What the fee buys is access: a login to the simulated account, use of the trading platform and data feed for the assessment period, the rule-monitoring system that tracks drawdown and targets, and administrative handling of the result. Some firms bundle further items — dashboards, analytics, educational material, a second-stage account after a first stage is passed. The scope of what is included varies by firm and by account size, which is why the fee scales with the notional balance rather than with the cost of providing the service.
Refund arrangements are widely advertised but are conditional rather than automatic. The usual structure returns the fee alongside a participant's first payment under the profit-sharing agreement, and only if the evaluation has been completed and every condition of the subsequent stage met. A participant who breaches a rule at any point, or who never reaches the payout stage, does not receive the fee back. This is a contingent rebate attached to a specific outcome, not a refund in the consumer sense; the trigger is performance, not dissatisfaction or cancellation. Cooling-off rights, where they exist, generally lapse once the account credentials are issued.
A breach normally ends the evaluation immediately and closes the account. What follows is either nothing, or the option to buy a reset — a fresh attempt on the same account, usually priced below a new purchase — or a retry offered under stated conditions. Both are additional payments. The relevant background fact is that the majority of participants do not complete an evaluation and do not reach a payout stage, so the fee behaves as a sunk cost from the point of purchase. Comparing offers on the assumption that the fee returns produces a different ranking than comparing them on the assumption that it does not.