Key terms at a glance

• Account sizes: $50,000, $100,000 and $150,000 only. The $10,000, $25,000 and $250,000 accounts were discontinued in the 2026 rebuild, per the firm’s current product range.
• Cost: monthly subscription, listed at $131–$500 and discounted 55% to $59–$225 at the time of writing (26 August 2026), depending on size, route, platform and drawdown type. No activation fee on any plan, which is unusual in futures prop.
• Profit target: $3,000 on the $50,000 account, $6,000 on the $100,000, $9,000 on the $150,000 — measured as total net profit across the evaluation.
• Max trailing drawdown: $2,000 / $3,000 / $4,500 respectively, calculated intraday from unrealised balances or from the end-of-day closing balance, and freezing permanently once it reaches the starting account balance.
• Daily loss limit: none, on any account type. The firm states it has “just one rule” — do not hit the maximum drawdown.
• Profit split — Quick Pay: 50/50 on the first $4,000 of current profit per account, 80/20 above it, 90/10 once in Funded Live.
• Profit split — Fast Pass: flat 80/20 in Funded Sim, 90/10 in Funded Live, but each request is capped at $1,500 on the $50,000 account and $1,875 on the $100,000.
• Consistency rule: 30% on Quick Pay and 45% on Fast Pass during evaluation. Removed entirely on Quick Pay funded accounts; retained at 45% on Fast Pass funded accounts.
• Payouts: $250 minimum, next business day via Riseworks; free US wire, $15 international wire, $2.50 plus gas on layer-1 crypto, free on layer-2. Minimum one funded day on Quick Pay, five on Fast Pass.
• Published pass rate: 36% of evaluations between January and June 2026, disclosed on the firm’s own homepage.

The rule that decides whether TradeDay is worth taking

Everything TradeDay advertises — day-one payouts, no buffer, no consistency rule, a 90/10 split — is true of some stage of the programme. The difficulty is that no single stage carries all of them at once, and the stage that carries the best split is the one almost no marketing page describes.

A trader who passes the evaluation is placed in a Funded Sim account. That account is paused, automatically, the moment it reaches $10,000 in gross profit. The firm’s own knowledge base is unambiguous about what happens to anything earned beyond it:

“Please note that any profits above the $10,000 gross profit level that are in the account will be forfeited and will not be eligible for payouts, transfer to the Funded Live account, or for any extension offered in the Funded Sim account.”

— TradeDay, Quick Pay Funded Sim: Path to live trading, last modified 19 June 2026

The mechanics are precise. On the day the threshold is reached, access is suspended during the 4:30pm CT end-of-day run and the account is reviewed overnight by the trading team. “Gross profit” is defined as realised profits after commission plus every withdrawal already taken, so payouts do not buy headroom — they consume it. Each account is assessed independently at $10,000 regardless of what any other funded account is doing.

In most cases the trader is then moved to Funded Live, which is the intended outcome and a materially better deal. But the instruction is explicit — stop trading at the threshold and wait — and a trader who does not watch the number pays for it directly.

What Funded Live actually is

This is where TradeDay separates itself from the futures prop field, and it is worth being precise about, because the sector uses “funded” to mean several incompatible things. TradeDay’s terms define a Funded LIVE Account as “a futures or options account trading account of the User funded by TradeDay”. In practice, per the firm’s knowledge base, it is a sub-account of TradeDay’s master account at its broker, over which the trader is granted power of authority. Orders reach the exchange. Fills are real.

That is a genuine distinction from firms where the entire relationship is a simulation — the pattern this publication found at BluSky, where everything before brokerage is simulated, and the discretionary upgrade documented in the Phidias review. It also carries costs the pricing page never mentions:

• Professional market data at $156 per month, per exchange. Because the trader is trading the firm’s money, the CME classifies them as a professional. Personal data feeds held elsewhere cannot be substituted. On evaluations and Funded Sim accounts, level 1 data is free.
• Roughly five days to set up, because the broker and clearing firm run KYC and AML checks.
• A slippage risk-management policy that can reduce position limits. It applies only to live accounts, since the simulated environment has no slippage to manage.
• A three-month cooling-off period for any trader who loses a Funded Live account, during which they cannot take TradeDay evaluations at all.
• Returning Funded Live traders are placed back into Funded Sim, not straight back to live.
• On the Fast Pass route, the Funded Live account starts at a $0 balance — the cushion built up in Funded Sim does not travel with the trader.

None of this makes the live stage a bad outcome. It makes it a different product, sold at the same subscription price, and a trader budgeting $59 a month should know that clearing the funnel adds a recurring $156 per exchange on top.

The trailing drawdown ignores your withdrawals

The drawdown is the binding constraint now that the daily loss limit is gone, and its most expensive property is the least advertised: on Quick Pay accounts the trailing maximum drawdown is calculated from gross profits, defined as current profit plus payouts already taken. Withdrawing money lowers the balance but does not lower the drawdown line.

TradeDay publishes the worked example itself in its Quick Pay Funded Sim payout policy. On a $50,000 account the drawdown line starts at $48,000. A $500 winning day lifts the line to $48,500. Take the $500 out and the balance returns to $50,000 — but the line stays at $48,500. The trader now has $1,500 of room where they began with $2,000. Repeat that on the “day-one payouts, no buffer” cadence the firm markets and the cushion erodes with every withdrawal, until the trailing line reaches the starting balance and finally freezes.

This is the arithmetic behind an otherwise puzzling warning in the same knowledge base: traders making “frequent or large withdrawals that leave the account vulnerable to hitting the drawdown” risk being judged to have mismanaged the account, with termination as the stated consequence. The firm is warning against the behaviour its own payout marketing encourages.

A second trap sits in the end-of-day variant. The drawdown level updates only at the close, which sounds forgiving, but the breach test is real-time: equity must never fall below the active level at any point during the session, and an open position cannot take the account below it. Traders choosing EOD in the belief that intraday excursions are ignored have misread the rule — the same enforcement that catches traders at Redline Futures Funding, where the drawdown floor tracks open profit.

What the payout record shows — and what it does not

TradeDay does not publish a cumulative firm-wide payout figure. There is no equivalent of the third-party transaction ledger that E8 Markets exposes, and no audited disclosure of totals paid. It does publish something most competitors will not: a pass rate. The homepage discloses that 36% of evaluations were passed between January and June 2026 — a figure that is unusually high for the sector and, being self-reported and unaudited, cannot be independently checked.

The firm publishes no equivalent figure for how many funded traders reach Funded Live, which is the number that matters most given how the programme is structured. For scale, Topstep discloses that across January to December 2025, 16.8% of its Trading Combines were completed successfully and just 0.71% of individual participants trading an Express Funded account were called up to a Live Funded account. TradeDay’s $10,000 trigger looks more mechanical than Topstep’s 30-winning-day ladder, but without a published call-up rate that remains an inference rather than a finding.

On third-party sentiment, the Trustpilot profile carried 1,421 reviews at 4.6 out of 5 as of 26 August 2026, with 85% at five stars and 6% at one. The recent distribution is more mixed than the headline suggests. Khalid Bakkali, reviewing from France on 23 August 2026 at three stars, wrote:

“Overall, a very good experience with TradeDay, especially thanks to their responsive and helpful support. The main downside is the dashboard, which isn’t very user-friendly.”

— Khalid Bakkali, Trustpilot, 23 August 2026

A two-star review posted on 26 August 2026 by Matthew Kelly, a customer of two years, described service quality declining over that period. Neither is a payout complaint, which is the material point: the negative reviews in the recent window concern tooling and support rather than money not arriving.

The larger evidentiary problem persists. PropTradingVibes reports three payouts taken without incident, all processed within 24 hours through Riseworks, describing “no delays, no weird compliance flags” — but mostly under the pre-2.0 programme, before the May 2026 rebuild changed the account line-up, the fees, the split bands and the payout routes. That is evidence about a company’s willingness to pay, not about the mechanics currently in force.

The rules that still fail traders

Fast Pass is not a faster version of Quick Pay. It is a different funded product. The three-day evaluation is genuinely quicker, but the funded account that follows carries a 45% consistency rule, five minimum days and five profitable days of $150 or more before any payout, a hard cap of $1,500 per request on the $50,000 account, and a position limit of just two contracts scaling one per $2,000 of end-of-day profit — against five contracts from day one on Quick Pay. The speed is paid for on the back end.

Metals are restricted. Since 11 February 2026, gold (GC), silver (SI), copper (HG) and platinum (PL) have been barred on all account types, with micro gold (MGC) and micro silver (SIL) capped at four lots regardless of account size. The permitted products list otherwise covers CME Group contracts only — CME, CBOT, COMEX and NYMEX — across equity indices, FX, treasuries, energy and agriculture. Traders arriving from an equities or crypto prop firm should read it before subscribing.

The 200-trade daily ceiling. TradeDay bans automated systems designed to scalp at extremely high frequency and states plainly that it does not allow strategies producing more than 200 trades in a day. Third-party bots, order splitting, hedging between accounts, trading through a VPN or VPS, and bracketing data releases to exploit the absence of slippage in the simulated environment are all prohibited, with profits from any of them confiscated.

The 2% price-limit rule. Funded traders are not permitted to trade within 2% of a price limit; a breach costs the funded account outright. This is one of only two hard rules the firm applies to funded traders, and it is easy to trip in limit-prone agricultural and energy contracts.

An unresolved ambiguity. The firm’s list of profits that will not be returned if a funded account is lost with a positive balance includes “profits earned in a simulated account”. Read literally against a programme whose first funded stage is explicitly simulated, that clause is broader than the payout policy sitting alongside it. It is the one term in the documentation this review would want clarified in writing before committing.

How TradeDay compares on the path to live capital

Term	TradeDay ($50k)	Topstep ($50k)	Apex ($50k)
Evaluation cost	$59/month promotional, $131 list	$49/month	$99 one-time list price
Profit target	$3,000	$3,000	$3,000
Trailing drawdown	$2,000, intraday or EOD	$2,000, EOD	$2,000, intraday or EOD
Daily loss limit	None	None published	None published
Funded consistency rule	None on Quick Pay, 45% on Fast Pass	50% best day	50% best day
Split on first profits	50% below $4,000 (Quick Pay)	90%	100%, within a 6-payout ceiling
Minimum withdrawal	$250	5 winning days of $150+	5 qualifying days per payout
Route to live capital	Review at $10,000 gross profit; excess forfeited	30 winning days of $150+; 0.71% called up in 2025	None — simulated performance account
Cost once live	$156/month per exchange, professional data	Not published	Not applicable

Sources: firm-published terms as at 26 August 2026, plus this publication’s Topstep funded account review (7 August 2026) and Apex Trader Funding review (23 July 2026). On rule burden TradeDay is the most permissive of the three on Quick Pay; on early economics it is the most expensive, because the 50% band applies per account. Its route to real exchange capital is the most mechanical — a profit threshold rather than a day count — but it is also the only one of the three that forfeits profit at that threshold. Firms such as Purdia Capital, with its EOD drawdown and live-account path, transfer the balance rather than truncate it.

Regulatory posture

The contracting entity is TradeDay LLC, an Illinois limited liability company operating from 412 S. Wells Street in Chicago, founded in 2020 by James Thorpe and Steve Miley. The terms are governed by Illinois law. The firm states in its own terms and conditions that it “is not registered in any capacity with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the CFTC, or a self-regulatory association such as the National Futures Association or FINRA”, and repeats on its homepage that it is not a broker-dealer, investment adviser, futures commission merchant or commodity trading adviser.

TradeDay does not name the futures commission merchant that carries its master account, and this review could not establish it from public sources. That is the single most significant gap in the firm’s disclosure: the Funded Live proposition rests entirely on a clearing relationship whose counterparty is not identified. Traders on Funded Sim have no exchange exposure at all — TradeDay states it has “no control over the simulated environments; they are owned and managed by third-party brokers and platforms”, currently Tradovate and, since August 2026, Rithmic.

As with the rest of the sector, there is no segregated client money and no regulator to whom a declined payout can be appealed — the position the CFTC has started examining while ESMA has held back.

Frequently asked questions

What happens at $10,000 profit? The Funded Sim account is paused at the 4:30pm CT end-of-day run and reviewed overnight for promotion to Funded Live. Anything above $10,000 gross profit is forfeited and cannot be withdrawn or transferred. Gross profit includes withdrawals already taken, so payouts bring the threshold closer rather than pushing it away.

Is the funded account real money? Not at first. Funded Sim is simulated. Funded Live is a sub-account of TradeDay’s master account at its broker, trading live on the exchange, with the trader granted power of authority over it. The firm does not publish which broker or clearing firm holds that master account.

Is there really no consistency rule? Not on Quick Pay funded accounts. A 30% rule applies during Quick Pay evaluations and 45% during Fast Pass evaluations, and breaching it raises the profit target rather than failing the account. Fast Pass funded accounts, however, keep the 45% rule after funding.

What does it cost once I am live? $156 per month per exchange for professional market data, because the CME treats a trader using firm capital as a professional. Existing personal data subscriptions cannot be used. Level 1 data is free on evaluations and Funded Sim accounts.

Does taking a payout reset my drawdown? No. On Quick Pay accounts the trailing maximum drawdown is calculated from gross profits including withdrawals, so a payout reduces the balance without reducing the drawdown line, permanently narrowing the cushion until the line reaches the starting balance and freezes.

What can I trade? CME Group products only, listed on CME, CBOT, COMEX and NYMEX. Gold, silver, copper and platinum futures have been restricted on all account types since 11 February 2026, and micro gold and micro silver are capped at four lots.

This review is independent editorial analysis and is not financial, investment, or trading advice, and is not an endorsement or solicitation. The Industry Spread has no affiliate or referral relationship with the firms covered. Proprietary trading challenges carry a fee that is generally non-refundable, most participants do not reach a funded account, and funded capital is the firm’s capital, not the trader’s. Terms change frequently — always verify current rules directly with the firm before paying any fee.