Why StepsToFund exists.

Prop firm challenges have a failure rate north of 88 percent. Most traders are told the reason is willpower. It isn’t. It’s that almost all the education in this space is written by the firms selling the accounts, and a firm has no reason to tell you when its own product is a bad fit for you.

StepsToFund is built to be a source without that conflict. No prop firm behind it. No course to sell. Just the rules, the math, and which accounts actually pay, laid out in the order you should learn them.

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02 The gap

The gap this site fills

There are two kinds of prop trading content online, and both have a built-in problem.

Card 1

Firm-owned content

Optimized to make challenges sound passable and one firm’s rules sound friendlier than they are. Comparisons quietly drop the competitors that would win. Rule definitions stay vague because vagueness sells more accounts.

Card 2

Guru courses

Sold by people who, in many cases, no longer trade. Each one claims to be the secret the others hid. None of them publish a pass rate.

StepsToFund takes a third route: read the rules as they’re actually written, test them, explain the psychology without selling anything on the back of it, then let you decide on facts instead of marketing.

03 Principles

How every article here works

Five rules shape everything published on this site.

Neutrality

No firm is ranked above another for any reason beyond the data. Same criteria for everyone: rule clarity, payout speed, support quality, pass rate evidence. When a firm changes its rules, the article changes. An outdated review doesn’t stay live just because it ranks.

Math before narrative

Every rule is checked against the firm’s own documentation, and every number carries a source and a date. When a firm says “10 percent max drawdown,” you’ll see whether that means daily, peak to valley, or a rolling window, and how that one definition decides who passes and who fails.

No upsell

Every guide is complete as published. No locked “advanced” tier, no email gate on the core material, nothing to buy at the end.

Reader feedback

Traders point out what’s unclear or wrong, and what rule changes they caught before the firms announced them. That feedback drives each update.

Sourced and dated

Every claim about a firm’s rules links to that firm’s own documentation so you can verify it yourself, and every article shows when it was last updated and why, on the page, not buried in metadata.

04 Methodology

How firm rules get verified

01

Straight from the source

Official PDFs and live rule pages, screenshotted and version-tracked so it’s clear exactly what changed and when.
02

Run through the math

Rules tested against real challenge parameters to find the pass and fail thresholds and the edge cases marketing pages skip, like how weekend P&L is treated or how a daily loss limit resets across time zones.
03

Cross-checked

Each reading is checked against what traders report in communities like r/PropTrading, so a single misread doesn’t become a published claim.
04

Re-audited quarterly

Every quarter each firm’s rules are re-downloaded and any change is logged publicly.

05 Data sources

Where the numbers come from

Pass rate and payout figures come from a mix of opt-in trader reports and publicly shared firm data, currently drawn from [n = …] reported challenges. Sample sizes are disclosed, and when a firm’s numbers are too thin to be reliable, that’s stated rather than hidden behind a confident-looking percentage. When the data can’t support a claim, the claim doesn’t get made.

The psychology material is built on established work, Mark Douglas on discipline, Kahneman and Tversky on misjudged risk, Jared Tendler on performance under pressure, applied to the specific conditions a prop challenge creates rather than repeated as generic motivation.

06 Disclosure

How this site makes money

StepsToFund earns affiliate commissions when a trader funds an account through some of its links. That’s what pays for the research and the tools.

The part that matters

Commission has no influence on the rankings. Firms with larger affiliate payouts have been ranked below ones that pay less, because the trader outcomes didn’t justify a higher placement. Firms that offer nothing still get covered, because leaving them out would make the comparison dishonest. No paid placement, and no writing down a competitor to make a partner look better.

07 Corrections

When something’s wrong

Sometimes a fact here will be wrong, usually because a firm changed a rule quietly. When that happens it gets corrected, timestamped, and the old version stays archived rather than disappearing.

Report an error at [corrections@stepstofund.com] and you’ll get a reply within [48 hours].

08 Who

Who’s behind this

StepsToFund is run by one person, not a faceless “team.” It’s a research and education project, not a trading desk. You can read who I am, why I started it, and what I do and don’t claim on the author page →.

09 Your data

Your data

No trader data is sold, no emails are shared with firms or marketers, and the guides aren’t gated behind a signup. Full detail is in the [Privacy Policy].

We don’t