The two tiers

Two tiers are open. Larger ones ship when the market you trade is deep enough to support them.

#What you pay and what you get

The challenge capital is the same as the seat. That is deliberate. You are evaluated at the size you will actually trade, so a pass means something about the seat rather than about a scaled-down rehearsal.

It is also fixed by tier rather than being a snapshot of whatever your practice balance happened to be that day. Snapshotting a drifting balance meant every challenge started from a different number, so a drawdown limit and a profit target were not comparable between two traders or between two runs by the same trader.

#The four bars you have to clear

All four, at the same time. There is no partial credit.

In money: +4% of $500 is +$20. +5% of $1,500 is +$75.

The last row is the one that behaves differently from the other four, so it is worth a sentence on its own. It is a bar to clear, not a rule to breach: going over it does not end your run and does not fail you, exactly like being short of scored calls. You keep trading and it falls as your other days earn. It falls by making profit on another day and never by losing on one, because a losing day shrinks the total and pushes the share up. A day here is the same day your loss cap resets on, and a day's figure counts positions that closed in it, so an open position contributes nothing until it settles. Until a run is in profit overall there is nothing to concentrate and this row is met.

How a challenge is graded explains what counts as a scored call, how the forecast score is calculated, and how drawdown is measured. Read it before you assume any of these mean what they mean at another firm, because two of them do not.

#The limits you trade under

The same limits apply during the challenge and on the funded seat. That is the point: a funded trader must not be able to do the thing the evaluation forbade.

The risk rails explains what each one is for and exactly when it refuses you.

#The profit split, if you pass

Same on both tiers. Getting paid covers when you can take it.

#Why these numbers and not others

Nothing above is arbitrary. Each number falls out of another one, and it is worth seeing which, because it tells you what would have to change for the deal to change.

#The first-loss cover is the maximum you can lose

$500 x 25% = $125. $1,500 x 20% = $300.

That is not a coincidence, it is the definition. Your seat's drawdown floor sits at its starting size minus its maximum drawdown, and the software refuses any trade that could take you below it. So the very worst a seat can lose is exactly the cover Fortell reserved for it, and Fortell's own money absorbs all of it.

This is what turns "backer capital is untouched" from a promise into arithmetic. An earlier version of Fortell reserved $50 against a Standard seat, and the code records what that cost: backers ate $75 for every seat that blew up.

#The daily loss limit is 6% of the seat, on both tiers

6% of $500 is $30. 6% of $1,500 is $90. One rule, expressed in whichever unit each layer can work in. During the challenge you see dollars. On the funded seat the software works in a percentage of what the seat was worth when the day opened.

#The size limits scale with the seat, not with the price

• One round can be at most 4% of the seat. $20 of $500, $60 of $1,500.

• Everything open at once can be at most 20% of the seat. $100 of $500, $300 of $1,500.

• So one round is never more than a fifth of your total open exposure.

A Standard trader can therefore hold at most five full-size rounds at the same time, and if every one of them went to zero simultaneously the loss would be $100, which is 80% of the first-loss cover. The limits bound the swings the cover has to absorb, rather than trusting you not to concentrate.

#The entry fee against the cover it commits

$75 commits $125 of Fortell's own cash. $150 commits $300.

75 / 125  = 60%
150 / 300 = 50%

Those are the pass rates at which Fortell breaks even, if every single funded trader blew their entire maximum drawdown. The margin against them is real but it is not enormous, which is why the measured pass rate below is published with its conditions rather than as a headline.

#How hard is this, actually

Fortell models it rather than guessing, and publishes the result with the conditions that produced it, because a bare percentage from this model is not usable.

A trader with no edge at all, playing the rules as well as they can be played, passes Standard 11.67% of the time and Pro 3.84%. That is 25,000 simulated 14-day challenges behind each figure, measured on 2026-08-08 against the rails that ship, on 1d buckets. It is the rate under those rules on that clock and nothing wider: when a rail moves, the figure is measured again rather than carried forward.

Read both as bands, not as points: this figure resolves to 1.35 points. Neither percentage is calculated. Each is the best play a search over trading strategies found, and a search is a draw: run it again from different starting points and it lands somewhere else. That spread is the resolution above, and it is published because we once reported a 0.70 point move in this number as a rule change when 0.68 of it was the search. A difference bigger than the resolution is something real. A difference smaller than it is our instrument, and it is evidence for nothing in either direction, including for the idea that a rule which moved this number by nothing was worth nothing.

Read that as a ceiling, not an estimate. It assumes a trader who knows the rules, sizes to them, and stops the instant every criterion is met, which the grader makes permanent from day 7 onward. A trader who keeps going after qualifying does worse. A trader who trades blind without sizing to the published limits passes 1.20% on Standard and 0.35% on Pro, and that figure is a floor rather than an estimate, because it ignores the maximum buy size the product tells you.

The honest reading is that both of those brackets sit comfortably under the 60% and 50% break-even rates above, and that the gap is the margin the business runs on. Given real forecasting skill the criteria separate: at two cents of edge per call, Standard passes 24.77% of the time and Pro 10.88%; at five cents, 99.10% and 79.49%.

Read the edge figures against the venue's own spread, which is about four and a half cents. Two cents of edge does not cover the cost of crossing a book that wide, which is why the two-cent column is only a little better than luck; five cents does, and the curve jumps. An edge figure quoted without the spread it was measured against is not comparable.

This figure has been published wrongly seven times in this project's history, each time stated confidently. It is now generated from a single measured run rather than typed, and a build gate refuses to ship the site if the number on the page and the number in the record disagree. Do not quote it without its conditions, and do not compare it to a figure measured under different rules.

#The window is 14 days, and a pass can come earlier

Your challenge runs 14 days. If you meet all five criteria and 7 days have elapsed, you pass then rather than waiting out the clock. A pass, once recorded, is permanent.

A breach works the other way and is immediate. Blowing the drawdown limit or the daily loss limit ends the challenge the moment it is detected, not at the end of the window. That is covered in How a challenge is graded.