No sudden Daily or Max Drawdown wipeouts.
Drawdown becomes a Meritix quality signal, not a career-ending event. And each cycle resets monthly, one bad month doesn't disqualify you, just like at institutional firms.
The Desk is intentionally simple. Traders can trade to build a record, compete in Floors to rise faster, and earn greater access to funded capital as their Rating improves.
Trade anytime on The Desk to build history. Enter live trading rooms and league Floors to compete publicly, pursue prize pools, and accelerate your Rating.
Your Desk Rating reflects repeatable performance, discipline, and competitive proof over time. Floors carry more progression weight, and qualifying Floor participation is required to unlock or upgrade funded capital.
Funded access begins at Junior. Capital can scale through Pro, Elite, Master, and Legend. Meritix reviews funded trading through cycles, protecting sustainability while rewarding professional-quality performance.
Traditional prop programs often turn Daily or Max Drawdown into an instant account-ending event. The Desk takes a more professional approach: drawdown becomes a major quality signal inside Meritix, not a one-click career reset.
The promise is not “risk does not matter.” The promise is “risk is handled professionally, continuously, and transparently, without deleting the trader’s entire career after one bad stretch.”
Membership opens the ladder. Rating, trading quality, and qualifying Floor participation unlock the capital. The trader does not buy a funded account, the trader earns eligibility through The Desk.
Join the platform, compete in entry-level Floors, start building your Rating, and learn how the Desk works. No funded capital yet. This is where you earn your way in.
The funded path opens. Your capital grows 10% every month you sustain your Rating, automatically, with no additional fee, up to the tier ceiling.
The headline retail prop size, but earned through progression, not a one-shot challenge. $100K grows $10K/month to $200K in 10 months while your Rating sustains the tier.
A capital tier that moves beyond most direct-funded offers anywhere in the industry. Scales to half a million as your Rating holds.
The institutional-feeling milestone. $1M floor, $2M ceiling, earned through sustained Meritix quality across multiple cycles.
The rarest class. $5M floor, $10M ceiling, long-term record, elite Rating, elite Meritix quality. No equivalent exists at any prop firm in the industry.
A-Trader is Arizet's pro-grade trading platform, the same execution and risk infrastructure already running underneath multiple prop firms today. Desk members get the full platformplus access to the entire A-Trader apps marketplace: production-grade tools across discovery, risk, analytics, and behavior, all unlocked through your tier.
Across the prop trading industry. CFD/FX and futures alike, the same patterns repeat: fixed account sizes, hard breach rules, capped profit splits, and "scaling" plans that take a year of perfect trading to unlock 25% more capital. The Desk does it differently.
| Feature | The Desk | FTMO | Topstep | Apex | FundedNext |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry cost | $49/mo Junior tier | $250 one-time $25K challenge | $49/mo + $149 activation $50K Combine | $197 + $99 $50K eval | $200 one-time $25K Stellar |
| Capital ceiling | $10M Legend tier | $2M via scaling, ~2 years | $150K per account, no scaling | $150K but 20 parallel accts | $4M scales, slowly |
| Capital growth | +10%/month automatic with rating | +25% every 4 months 4 payouts + 10% profit | None fixed allocation | None fixed per tier | +25% periodically consistency-gated |
| Drawdown breach | Never just changes Meritix share | 5% daily / 10% max breach = account closed | Trailing MLL breach = account closed | Trailing $2K, $3K breach = account closed | 3% daily / 6% max breach = account closed |
| Profit split | Up to 100% by Meritix score | 80% → 90% via scaling plan | 90% flat after activation | 100% but 6-payout max per acct | 80-90% tier-dependent |
| Quality bonus | Yes. Meritix skill earns more share | No flat split for everyone | No flat split for everyone | No flat split for everyone | No flat split for everyone |
| Public Rating | Yes ELO-style career score | No | No | No | No |
| Floors / competitions | Built-in multi-cadence leaderboards | No | No | No | No |
Industry data as of April 2026. Fees and rules vary by promotion, plan, and region; figures shown are standard published rates excluding promotional discounts. The Desk's monthly subscription includes platform access, Floors participation, Meritix scoring, and automatic capital scaling at no additional cost.
The Desk is not another challenge and not simply another instant-funded account. It is a sustained capital career with progression, public proof, and a funded model designed to last.
The difference is simple: traditional prop firms sell a challenge, instant-funded firms sell account access, and The Desk builds a trader through competition, progression, and earned capital.
A challenge asks: “Can you survive our rules?”
The Desk asks: “Can you become someone worthy of more capital?”
The Desk can make a larger capital promise because the funded stage is not built on blunt flat splits alone. It is built on Meritix, the Desk's trading-quality and profit-share framework.
Meritix scores 23 signals across 5 score families: risk & sizing, engagement & consistency, performance quality, concentration, and three patent-pending behavioral signals. Each metric is normalized, weighted, and combined into a single composite Quality Score (0-1000, like a credit score for trading) that updates daily inside a cycle.
The relationship is direct: higher Quality Score → higher share. The exact Quality-Score-to-share mapping for each cycle is published in advance and locked at cycle open. The mechanism is reproducible and visible to the trader as they trade.
Grounded in historical funded trader data: traders in the top quality band were roughly 4× more likely to earn a payout than traders in the bottom band. Quality predicts outcomes, and on The Desk, it determines payouts too.
Meritix evaluates 23 trading-quality signals across 5 families, risk & sizing, engagement, performance, concentration, and proprietary behavioral signals. Your composite Quality Score determines your profit share. Here’s what a typical cycle looks like for a $10,000 funded month:
| Quality Score | Profit share | Trader keeps | Profile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1000 | 100% | $10,000 | Theoretical top, perfect quality |
| 800 | ~80% | ~$8,000 | Top decile of funded traders |
| 650 | ~65% | ~$6,500 | Top quartile |
| 520 | ~52% | ~$5,200 | Median funded trader |
| 330 | ~33% | ~$3,300 | Bottom decile |
| < 400 | . | Recovery Mode | Quality erosion; cycle pauses, account does not close |
Discipline rewarded. Concentration penalized. Stop-pulling penalized hardest. Numbers shown are typical for a typical cycle. Your daily share moves with your Quality Score, better trading raises it, worse trading lowers it. The exact rate is shown in your dashboard each day.
Meritix is dynamic. Profit share is not a permanently fixed split. The Meritix Explained page covers the 23 metrics, the 5 quality families, Compound Risk Index, cycle mechanics, Recovery Mode, and the published methodology.
Five focused pages cover how The Desk works, the Rating system, the Meritix quality engine, full pricing, and every question traders ask.
Trading sessions, Floor competition, Ratings, tiers, capital unlocks, and the monthly funded cycle.
Open page →The long-term career score that opens tier eligibility lanes. ELO-style scale, attached to your trader profile.
Open page →The quality engine. Profit share, monthly cycle reset, automatic capital growth, payout protection.
Open page →Open, Junior, Pro, Elite, Master, Legend, Founder Access, and what each tier unlocks.
Open page →How capital unlocks, how cycles reset, no-wipeout drawdowns, and what to expect month to month.
Open page →Founder Access reserves early status inside The Desk: permanent recognition, launch priority, and the chance to enter before the ladder becomes crowded.
Pre-launch only · Full Founder benefits, timing, and access terms available on the dedicated Founder page.
Trade. Compete. Build your Rating. Unlock more capital. Stay in the game through drawdowns. Let Meritix reward the quality of your funded trading.