Run a prop trading business without building the platform
Sell evaluation challenges to traders, fund the ones who pass, and share the profit. Bruno Challenge gives you the trader portal, the rule engine, the risk controls and the operator dashboard. You set the rules and the prices, and you keep every entry fee.
How a challenge business makes money
A trader pays you an entry fee to attempt a challenge. They trade a simulated account to a profit target without breaking your loss limits. Most do not pass. Those who do are given a funded account, and you split their profits.
Entry fees
Paid up front, every attempt. Your main and most predictable revenue line. You set the price for each account size.
Resets and retries
A trader who fails can pay to try again. Priced per plan, and a meaningful share of revenue for most operators.
Profit share to funded traders
Paid only when a funded trader makes money. You set the split. Everything before this point is upside.
The two challenge types
Both are supported. Most operators launch with one and add the other once they see how their traders behave.
One-step
One phase. The trader hits a profit target without breaking your loss limits, and gets funded.
- Easier to market, converts better
- More traders reach funding, so more of your capital is committed
- Usually paired with a tighter daily loss limit and a consistency rule
Two-step
Two phases. A higher target first, a lower one second. Both must be passed before funding.
- Fewer traders reach funding, so your exposure is lower
- The market standard — experienced traders expect it
- Supports a refundable entry fee returned with the first payout
Every variable you control
Set once per plan. Change them and you have a different product — a stricter challenge, a cheaper one, or one aimed at a different kind of trader.
| Variable | What it does | Common in the market |
|---|---|---|
| Account size | The balance the trader trades with | $10k – $200k |
| Entry fee | What the trader pays you to attempt it | Scales with account size |
| Profit target | What they must make to pass the phase | 10% then 5% |
| Maximum daily loss | Largest loss allowed in a single day before they fail | 5% · 3% one-step |
| Maximum overall loss | Largest total loss before they fail | 10% |
| Drawdown type | Whether the loss limit is fixed to the starting balance, or trails peak equity as they profit | Trailing is stricter |
| Minimum trading days | Days they must trade before they can pass — stops a single lucky trade winning a funded account | 4 |
| Consistency rule | Caps how much of total profit can come from the best single day | 50%, one-step |
| Profit split | The funded trader's share of what they make | up to 90% |
| Payout cycle | How often a funded trader can take money out | Set per plan |
| Reset price | What a failed trader pays to start again | Discount on entry fee |
| Time limit | How long they have to pass | Unlimited |
The right-hand column is what the largest firm in this market publishes for its own products. It is a starting point, not a constraint — every one of these is yours to set.
The two settings that decide your risk
Drawdown type and maximum daily loss together determine how much a trader can lose before the engine stops them. A trailing drawdown with a 3% daily limit is a materially safer product than a static drawdown at 5% — and it is one field each. We will walk through the combinations with you before you publish anything.
What your traders see
Your branding, your account sizes, your prices. The trader chooses a challenge type and an account size, pays, and receives a live trading account funded at the advertised balance.
From purchase to payout
Where the risk rules are enforced
This is the difference between a prop platform and a prop dashboard, and it is your money at stake either way.
A dashboard reading the account
Most prop tools sit beside a trading platform and check accounts on a schedule. A trader who breaks a limit between checks keeps trading until the next one. Whatever they lose in that window, you carry.
Rules inside the engine
Bruno Challenge enforces limits in the same engine that executes the order. A trader who breaks a limit has their positions closed and their next order refused by the engine itself. There is no window.
What that looks like in practice
On a funded account pushed deliberately past its daily loss limit: the engine closed every open position and blocked the next order immediately, and the platform failed the challenge and wrote the reason and exact breach time into the record — four minutes end to end, with nobody involved. We will show you this on a call rather than describe it.
The risk parameters the engine enforces
Set per trading group, applied by Bruno OMS on every order. These are engine settings, not application settings — nothing in the trader portal or the operator dashboard can override them.
| Parameter | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Maximum daily loss | Percentage of the day's starting equity a trader may lose before the account breaches. |
| Maximum overall loss | Percentage of the initial balance a trader may lose in total. |
| Trailing overall loss | On or off. When on, the overall loss limit follows peak equity upward, so profit locks in as the trader earns it. |
| Action on breach | Notify only, or notify and liquidate. Liquidation closes every open position on the account. |
| Block trading after liquidation | On or off. When on, the engine refuses every subsequent order on that account. |
| Cancel pending orders on liquidation | On or off. Clears resting orders so nothing fires after the breach. |
| New orders per second | Rate cap per account. Stops a script or a runaway strategy overwhelming the book. |
| Close orders per second | Rate cap on closing activity. |
| Modify orders per second | Rate cap on order amendments. |
| Equity update threshold | How large an equity move must be before risk is re-evaluated. |
| Equity update interval | Minimum time between risk re-evaluations, so tick noise does not trigger false breaches. |
What the engine tracks on every account
Held by the engine itself, not reconstructed afterwards from trade history. This is what makes a breach verdict defensible when a trader disputes it.
Equity
- Initial balance and the exact time it was set
- Last end-of-day equity, the basis for the daily limit
- Intraday high and low equity, each with a timestamp
- Highest and lowest equity since the account opened
Risk state
- Whether trading is currently blocked
- Liquidation state — none, triggered, completed or failed
- Breach type — daily, overall or trailing
- Exact time of the breach, to the millisecond
Every one of these is readable through the operator platform and the API, so your risk desk and your auditors see the same record the engine acted on.
What you get
For your traders
- Branded portal to browse, buy and track challenges
- One-stage and two-stage evaluations
- Live progress against targets and limits
- TradingView Advanced Charts, embedded
- Full isolation — no trader can see another's challenge
For your team
- Create, price, publish and withdraw challenge products
- Full lifecycle view with breach reason and timestamp
- Live equity and risk state per account
- Payout queue with approve, reject and hold
- Eighteen separate permissions so roles are scoped properly
What you need to bring
We provide the platform. These four are yours, and they are worth planning before you sign anything.
| Requirement | What it means |
|---|---|
| A licence or a clear regulatory position | Where you are licensed determines how you may market challenges and to whom. Have this settled or in progress. |
| Traders | A challenge business runs on volume. Either an existing client base or a marketing engine to build one — this is the single biggest determinant of whether the programme works. |
| Capital behind funded accounts | When a trader passes, the funded account is backed by you. Decide your exposure per account and in total before launch. |
| Compliance clearance for payouts | Paying real money to funded traders needs clearance in their jurisdiction. Start this early — it is the most common thing that delays a launch. |
Items two and three are usually already solved — you have the traders and the balance sheet. The work concentrates on rule design and on making sure challenge activity is reported separately from client money. Challenge accounts are automatically excluded from your retail account caps, from net deposit reporting and from customer balance reporting, so prop capital never appears as client money.
Technical summary
| Rule enforcement | Inside the order management engine. A breached account is blocked at the order gate. |
| Configurable rules | Account size, profit target per stage, maximum daily loss, maximum overall loss, trailing loss on peak equity, minimum trading days, consistency rule, profit split, payout cycle, reset price. |
| Liquidation | Six configurable strategies, selectable per challenge group. |
| Breach detection | Reads the recorded breach event rather than an account status flag, so an account whose liquidation did not complete cleanly is still correctly failed. Reconciles every five minutes. |
| Liquidity | Native FIX connectivity to liquidity providers. No third-party bridge and no per-volume bridge fee. |
| Existing infrastructure | Challenge accounts sit alongside your existing retail book. MT4 and MT5 infrastructure is retained and live retail order flow is not interrupted. |
| Rule sets | Each distinct set of limits is enforced by its own trading group. One included, additional sets priced below. |
| Operator platform | Fifty-four endpoints across five admin surfaces, eighteen discrete permissions. |
| Settlement currency | US dollars. |
What it costs
| Accounts active in the month | Challenge Add-On | Prop Firm Launch |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 500 | $3,000 / mo | $5,500 / mo |
| Up to 2,000 | $6,000 / mo | $8,500 / mo |
| Up to 5,000 | $10,000 / mo | $12,500 / mo |
| Above 5,000 | By agreement | By agreement |
| Which one applies | Challenge Add-On if you already run Bruno Core. Prop Firm Launch if you are building from nothing — it includes the Bruno Core trading platform underneath. |
| Additional FIX connection | $2,000 / mo per connection. |
| Active account | An account that was live during the calendar month. Accounts created but never used are not billed. |
| Annual commitment | Optional, and attracts a discount. Never required. |
How we get you live
- Scoping callYour traders, your jurisdiction, the rules you want to sell and the account sizes you want to offer.
- Rule designWe turn that into challenge plans and the trading groups that enforce them. This is where the ladder and the tier count get fixed.
- Environment and integrationYour environment is provisioned, liquidity is connected, and your team gets access.
- Joint validationWe run a real challenge together end to end — bought, evaluated, passed and failed — on your configuration before anything is offered to a trader.
- LaunchYou publish your first plans and start selling.