The Desk is a real trading career platform, not a one-shot challenge, not a lottery. The answers below explain how Rating qualifies you for funded capital, how Meritix governs your daily share, how Rooms work, and how the whole career path fits together.
A career trading platform where traders trade self-directed, compete in small Rooms (20-40 trader Floors matched to your Rating), build a Desk Rating, and unlock funded capital that grows automatically every month. Built by Arizet Labs on the risk and execution infrastructure powering several existing prop firms.
It includes funded-account mechanics, but it's structured as a career platform, not a one-shot challenge factory. Public Rating progression, daily Room competition, sustained funded relationships, and capital that grows +10% of tier floor every month. Closer to "trader development institution" than "evaluation seller."
Traditional challenges sell an evaluation attempt. Pass: you get a funded account. Fail: you buy another attempt. The Desk sells continuous platform access. Your Rating persists. Your record persists. You don't reset to zero after a bad month. The cycle simply closes and a new one opens.
Instant funding sells immediate account access at a fixed price. The Desk sells progression: Rating qualifies you for a tier, membership claims your seat, and the funded capital comes with the seat, growing 10% of tier floor every month it sustains. Career trajectory, not single transaction.
Arizet Labs, the team behind A-Trader, the Payout Protection engine, and the risk infrastructure used by multiple prop firms today. The Desk is the first consumer-facing brand from Arizet built specifically for retail career traders.
Yes, partially. Self-directed trading contributes a small daily Rating nudge based on your Meritix quality. Floors (Rooms) move Rating much faster because they provide comparative evidence under pressure against Rating-matched peers. Most meaningful tier progression requires Floor participation.
To unlock higher tiers: effectively yes. Floors give The Desk the comparative evidence Rating depends on. The good news: small Rooms (20-40 traders, Rating-matched) make every Floor entry meaningful, and 80% of every pool goes to top placements. You're competing for both Rating and real money.
Floors give us comparative evidence: same clock, same field, common rules. A win on a Floor proves trading under pressure against other Rating-matched traders, not just trading in private. That's the comparative data the Desk Rating depends on.
Tier-dependent. Junior qualifies with a handful of placed Floors plus Rating ≥ 1500. Pro and higher require sustained Floor participation across rolling periods (Daily-or-larger placements, Cup top-10% finishes, etc.). Anti-grind rule: first 4 Floors per cycle count at full weight; subsequent Floors count at 25%. Quality beats volume.
Six time windows, all accessible to every member: Snap (1 hour, $5-$10 entry), Session (4 hours, $10-$20), Daily (1 day, $15-$30), Sprint (3 days, $20-$40), Cup (1 week, $30-$60), Major (1 month, $40-$100). Each runs as small Rooms of 20-40 Rating-matched traders. Pool size and Rating impact scale with Room length.
Yes, every Floor has a transparent entry fee. Fees go into the prize pool: 80% to top placements, 20% to platform as disclosed rake. Same math every Floor, every time. Entry ranges from $5 (entry-level Snap) to $100 (top Major). Your Desk tier determines which entry levels you can join.
About 1 in 5 (20%) at random play in a 30-trader Room with top 6 winners. Skilled traders place far more often. 1st place wins ~10x their entry. A small competitive Room, not a thousand-person lottery.
The long-term career score measuring trader progression across trading behavior, consistency, and competition. ELO-style scale 1000-3000+, attached to your trader profile (userId, not account). Persists across funded accounts as you climb the ladder.
Floor placements (largest single contributor), self-directed trading quality, consistency over time, discipline metrics, the strength of fields you compete against, and active progression. Each factor has a weight; the dedicated Rating page covers details.
Yes. A real career score reflects both improvement and deterioration. Poor Floor performance, low-quality trading streaks, and integrity flags all reduce Rating. This is what keeps the scale meaningful.
No. Rating contribution is capped per cycle to prevent volume gaming. Beyond a threshold of Floor participation per cycle, additional Floor results count at reduced weight. The system rewards meaningful performance, not endless entries.
Desk Rating is your long-term career score. it unlocks higher tiers and triggers the +10% monthly capital growth. Meritix Quality Score (Q) is the cycle-level number that determines your daily profit share inside funded cycles. Rating unlocks the tier and grows the capital. Meritix governs the share inside each cycle.
No. Meritix Score resets at the start of each new monthly cycle. This is how real institutional trading firms operate: each month is its own evaluation window. A bad month lowers that month's payout, but doesn't follow you into the next cycle.
One bad month doesn't permanently damage your career. Retail prop firms typically use trailing drawdowns that never reset, or breach rules that close the account on a single bad day. The Desk treats each calendar month as a clean slate, the same way an institutional desk treats a trader's monthly P&L review.
Your Rating (the long-term career score) and your tier capital persist. What resets each cycle is your Meritix Score for that month's payout. The career compounds; the monthly judgment doesn't.
At Junior tier ($49/mo), once your Rating reaches 1500 and you've placed in 3+ qualifying Floors. Until then, Open tier (free) lets you trade self-directed and build Rating through Room competition.
Rating qualifies you for a tier. Membership claims your seat at that tier. The funded capital comes with the seat. You're not paying for capital separately, you're paying to be a member of the tier you've qualified for, and the capital is part of what being a member means.
It means your Rating sits at or above the tier threshold (Junior 1500, Pro 1800, Elite 2200, Master 2700, Legend 3300 by invitation) AND you've met the tier's additional Floor-placement gates. Once both conditions are clear, you can subscribe to that tier and start trading the funded capital that comes with it.
The rarest capital tier on The Desk: $5M floor growing to a $10M ceiling. Not purchasable at any price. Reached only through sustained Master-tier excellence (12+ Master cycles, multiple Major top finishes) and committee review. No other prop firm in the industry offers anything comparable.
Yes. automatically every month, while your Rating sustains the tier threshold. Capital grows by 10% of the tier's floor, flat: Junior +$2,500/mo, Pro +$10K/mo, Elite +$25K/mo, Master +$100K/mo. Every tier reaches its ceiling in exactly 10 months of sustained Rating: Junior $25K → $50K, Pro $100K → $200K, Elite $250K → $500K, Master $1M → $2M. No requalification, no extra fee. Unique to The Desk.
Monthly growth pauses when your Rating falls below the tier's sustain threshold (50 points below the unlock threshold, small buffer). Capital doesn't shrink, it stops growing until Rating recovers. When Rating returns above the sustain threshold, growth resumes from your current capital toward the tier ceiling. No automatic demotion.
Capital growth pauses at the ceiling (e.g. $50K Junior, $200K Pro). To grow further, your Rating must qualify you for the next tier, and you'll upgrade your membership. The next tier's floor then becomes your new starting capital, with its own +10%/month growth toward the next ceiling.
The Desk runs on A-Trader, Arizet's pro-grade trading platform, which also unlocks the A-Trader apps marketplace (14 production-grade tools). A-Trader is the only supported platform. Instruments are CFDs across forex, indices, commodities, metals, and crypto. Full list published in trader onboarding.
No sudden Daily Drawdown wipeout. Daily drawdown matters heavily inside Meritix, it's a major sub-metric in the Risk family, which carries significant weight inside your composite Q. Severe daily losses reduce Q sharply, which lowers your daily share rate. But they don't end the account immediately.
No sudden Max Drawdown career wipeout. Severe cycle equity-drawdown (≥15% in a cycle) activates Recovery Mode, tier promotion freezes and your share rate drops, but the funded account continues. Career profile and Rating are always preserved.
It matters more intelligently, not less. The Risk family is a major-weight component inside Meritix Q, capturing drawdown depth, recovery slope, and path smoothness. Drawdown affects your daily share rate continuously throughout a cycle. It just doesn't end the relationship abruptly.
A state that activates after severe funded-cycle stress. The trader continues to trade. Tier promotion freezes; the +10% monthly capital growth pauses. Your daily share rate drops sharply while Q is low. The dashboard shows: "Recovery Mode, trade quality matters more than P&L right now." Entry triggers: cycle equity-drawdown ≥ 15%, sustained Q < 400 across 2 cycles, or single 24-hour realized loss ≥ 7%.
Yes. Q sustained above 500 across 2 consecutive cycles AND no new drawdown event ≥ 5% exits Recovery Mode. Disciplined recent trading restores your share rate to the normal curve. Your career path doesn't reset, the Recovery event leaves a marker in your audit trail, but you continue.
After 6 consecutive cycles in Recovery Mode without successful exit, the funded account closes. Rating, profile, and Open-tier access remain preserved. You can re-qualify for a new funded account through Open and Floor competition.
The dynamic funded-trading quality and payout-share framework used by The Desk. 23 metrics across 5 score families produce a composite Quality Score (0-1000, like a credit score for trading) that determines your profit share for the cycle. Includes three patent-pending behavioral signals that no other prop firm uses.
Three patent-pending behavioral metrics exclusive to Meritix. Tilt Index (MTI) measures behavioral drift after a meaningful losing trade. Edge Robustness (MERS) measures how much of your top winners we could remove and still see you profitable, catches lottery winners. Stress Response (MSRS) measures whether you trade more carefully or more aggressively as drawdown deepens. Together they form the proprietary behavioral family inside Meritix, foundational to the score.
A patent-pending detector that watches for multiple extraction patterns occurring simultaneously. If a trader shows two or more risk patterns (grid pyramiding, lottery wins, tilt drift, etc.) at the same time, the Compound Risk Index applies a multiplier to their Quality Score. This identifies the highest tail-risk traders and reduces their profit share accordingly, the firm pays for skill, not for survivors of a temporarily lucky strategy.
No. When you withdraw a payout, the drawdown reference point adjusts to reflect your new balance, so withdrawals never push you artificially closer to a breach. Withdrawing $1,000 doesn't bring you $1,000 closer to a Recovery Mode trigger. Many competitors treat withdrawals as drawdown, we don't.
No. Meritix is dynamic. Q recalculates daily, and your profit share moves with it. If you request a payout mid-cycle, you're paid at the current (yesterday's calculated) share. At month-end, Q resets, your Rating updates from the cycle's quality, and, if your Rating sustains the tier threshold, your funded capital scales +10% toward the tier ceiling automatically. There's no forced settlement of unwithdrawn profit at the final day's rate. The math is published and reproducible.
Because quality changes as trading changes: drawdown, concentration, sizing, news dependence, tilt drift, pattern combinations. Sub-metrics recompute daily on month-to-date trades. Bad days reduce Q; disciplined days improve it.
Yes. A perfect Quality Score (1000) corresponds to 100% profit share, the top of the curve. In practice, top-decile funded traders historically reach Quality Score in the high 800s, where daily share runs in the 70-90% range. Your exact share moves with your Quality Score each day, the current rate is shown in your dashboard before any payout request.
No. Meritix evaluates excessive dependence on concentrated event outcomes. Trading around economic releases is fine; building your entire month's P&L on three NFP prints triggers the Concentration family. Diversified strategies that include news trades score normally.
No. Short holding periods are perfectly valid. Meritix evaluates whether your scalping is repeatable, disciplined, and economically sound. Concentrated reliance on sub-60-second trades may trigger the Concentration family, but normal scalping strategies score fine.
It may push your Concentration family score down if the day represents an outsized share of monthly profit. A strong rest-of-month rebuilds the score. Final Quality Score reflects the whole cycle, not the worst day.
Yes. The cycle dashboard shows your sub-metric scores within each family, your family scores, your composite Quality Score, your Compound Risk flag count, and which metrics moved most this week. Every payout includes the same breakdown in the audit trail.
Yes. Every payout's Quality Score calculation is reviewable from the audit trail. The scoring formula is published; your daily Q is reproducible from your trade record. If you believe a metric was computed incorrectly (e.g. a trade was double-counted), opening an appeal triggers a review.
A monthly review period on The Desk, one calendar month. Cycles open on a published calendar. Inside a cycle, Q recomputes every day and your daily share rate is set. Cycle close is when Rating updates and your capital grows +10% of tier floor if your Rating sustains the threshold. Payouts themselves are on-demand at any time, not bunched at cycle close.
You trade. Meritix recomputes your Q daily from cycle-to-date data, and sets today's share rate from it. Your dashboard shows current Q, today's share rate, and what a payout request today would pay against your current realized + open MTM profit. No surprises at end-of-cycle.
Every day, Meritix recomputes your Quality Score from your cycle-to-date trades. Today's share rate is set from that fresh Q, better trading raises it, worse trading lowers it. The current rate appears in your dashboard, and any payout you request today is paid at that rate against your current realized + open MTM profit. Predictable for you: your share follows your trading quality, day by day.
Any day. Payouts are on-demand, not batched at cycle close. Request at any time during the cycle, paid at yesterday's snapshot share rate against your current realized P&L plus open mark-to-market. The drawdown reference point adjusts to your new balance after the payout, so withdrawing never pushes you closer to a breach. No forced settlement of unwithdrawn profit at cycle close; what you don't withdraw carries forward.
Payment is initiated within 1-2 business days of an approved on-demand payout request. Wallet of record is set during onboarding. Crypto and bank-wire options are supported via Arizet's existing payout infrastructure.
At any snapshot, your payout-eligible profit is closed P&L + open mark-to-market − payouts already taken this cycle. Example: cycle running, your account shows +$8,500 realized + $1,500 open. Today's share rate is 65%. A payout request for the full eligible amount pays 65% × $10,000 = $6,500. The drawdown reference point shifts down by $6,500 in step with the withdrawal, so your buffer stays intact. Unwithdrawn profit carries forward.
No new payout-eligible profit until you trade back above your prior peak balance. The account continues to the next cycle. Capital does not shrink, only the +10% monthly growth pauses if your Rating sustains drops. Severe drawdown can trigger Recovery Mode (see Drawdown section).
Open tier (free permanently): account creation, Desk profile, self-directed trading on supported platforms, public Rating tracking, and access to enter all six Floor types at entry-level price points to start building your Rating. You won't have funded capital until you qualify for Junior or higher and subscribe.
Each paid tier comes with its funded capital and the +10% monthly capital growth that comes with it: Junior $25K→$50K ($49/mo), Pro $100K→$200K ($129/mo), Elite $250K→$500K ($249/mo), Master $1M→$2M ($499/mo). Plus full community access, mentor surface, and Rating-matched Room competition. Legend ($5M→$10M) is invitation only. Full breakdown on Pricing & Memberships.
Yes. Cancellation is straightforward and consumer-friendly. Because payouts are on-demand any day, there's no waiting for cycle close to extract profit. request any payout before cancelling and it processes normally. If you cancel while funded, your funded account remains accessible through cycle close to settle open positions; you can't open new positions without an active membership.
Yes. Up or down between tiers, at any time. Moving up: Rating must qualify you for the higher tier; subscribe, and the higher tier's capital floor becomes your new starting capital. Moving down: doesn't erase your Rating, you just hold the lower tier's capital amount.
Standard consumer-friendly refund policy. The Open tier is free, so most traders can experience the platform without committing. Paid tier refund terms are spelled out in the membership agreement.
Early-launch access and permanent early-cohort status inside The Desk. Founder Access reserves your place in the first generation of traders building The Desk before the ladder becomes crowded. Detailed terms on the Founder Access page.
Final benefits are published on the Founder Access page. Typical Founder cohort packages include permanent Founder badge, early platform access prior to public launch, eligibility for Founder-only opening events, and pre-launch lane positioning.
Yes. Founder Access is pre-launch only and capped at a published seat count. Once seats are sold, Founder Access closes, future traders join through standard membership tiers.
No. Founder Access reserves early status and launch benefits. Funded capital remains earned through Rating, Meritix quality, and qualifying Floor participation. Founder Access is not a way to buy funding.
Refund terms are specified on the Founder Access page. The page also covers what happens if the public launch is delayed past a stated date.
Reserve Founder Access to get on the list, or email us if there's a question above we haven't covered.