Performance Challenges

The Challenge system lets you trade firm capital by demonstrating your skills in a simulated environment. Pass the challenge and receive a funded performance account.

Choose your path

There are three challenge types. Pick the one that matches your trading style:

	Your Own Style	Disciplined Traders	High Conviction
Goal	Trade your way with freedom.	Strict risk-management focus.	Bigger swings, wider room.
Profit target (one-step)	10%	10%	20%
Daily / weekly loss	2.5% / 5%	2% / 5%	5% / 10%
Max drawdown	10%	10%	15%
Min trading days	14	14	7
Risk:reward	None	1:3 required	None
Per-trade risk cap	None	Under 0.6% (one-step) / under 1% (two-step)	None
Consecutive-loss limit	None	4 — the 5th losing trade in a row fails	None

Two-step versions split the target across two phases (Your Own Style / Disciplined 8% + 5%; High Conviction 15% + 10%). See How the Rules Work for the full numbers and dollar examples.

Verification process

• One-Step — Reach the profit target in a single phase. You must trade a minimum number of qualifying trading days — 14 for Your Own Style and Disciplined Traders, 7 for High Conviction — but there is no maximum-days deadline or expiry. The faster route to funding.
• Two-Step — Pass two phases to prove consistency. Each phase has a lower target than the one-step route, and it comes with a 25% discount on the challenge fee.

There is no time limit

Minimum trading days are a floor (you can’t pass by getting lucky on one big day), not a countdown. A challenge account does not expire after a fixed number of calendar days.

Account size

Your challenge size sets the capital of the account you trade — and, if you pass, of your funded performance account. Available sizes:

$5k · $10k · $25k · $50k · $100k · $200k · $400k

Each challenge also bundles a terminal subscription (Basic, Advanced, or Institutional). Which tier is included scales with both the size and the challenge type — larger sizes and higher-conviction types bundle higher tiers — so a given dollar size doesn’t map to a single fixed tier.

Spot or Futures

The configurator lets you pick the account type the challenge simulates:

	Spot	Futures
Positions	Long-only	Long and short
Leverage	None (1×)	Yes
Default	—	Selected by default

Futures is selected by default. Spot is only offered when a Spot version of the type and verification you picked is available — if it isn’t, the choice stays on Futures. High Conviction is Futures-only; Your Own Style and Disciplined Traders come in both Spot and Futures. The account type only changes how you trade; the rule set (profit target, drawdown, daily/weekly loss) comes from the challenge product either way.

Note

The exchanges you can choose are also driven by the selected product. Only exchanges supported for that challenge appear in the Exchange dropdown.

How to start

1. From the Home page, click the big Challenges card (the one with the Start Challenge button). This opens the challenge configurator.
2. Configure your Type, Verification, Spot/Futures, and Capital Size.
3. Pick your Exchange (e.g. Binance, Bybit) for the simulation.
4. Click Continue to reach the Review step.
5. Choose a payment method, accept the terms, and click Start Challenge.

You pay before the account exists. Two payment methods are offered at checkout:

• Crypto — always available.
• Card — available where supported. Card payments are hidden for US customers and when temporarily disabled.

Your virtual challenge account is provisioned once the payment is confirmed, then you’re taken into the terminal to begin trading.

Learn the rules first

New to challenges? Read How the Rules Work for plain-English explanations and dollar examples of drawdown, daily loss, stop-loss, risk:reward, and how your funded account inherits its rules.

Finding your way around

Lost? Start here. After you log in, you always land on the Home page. Everything begins from one of two places:

1. The three big cards in the middle of the Home page:
   • Upgrade — view and buy subscription plans.
   • Launch Terminal — opens the trading terminal. This is where you actually trade.
   • Challenges — buy and start a new challenge.
2. Your profile — the small round circle in the top-right corner of the screen (it shows your photo or the first letter of your email). That circle is on every page, not just Home. Click it and a menu opens with:
   • Help & Guides — opens this help site in a new tab. There’s also a question-mark (?) icon next to your profile circle that does the same thing.
   • Account & Settings — your personal settings.
   • Challenges — the list of all your challenge accounts. This is where you check your challenge progress.
   • Subscription — your plan and billing.
   • Log Out — sign out.

So, in one line each:

I want to…	Click this
Buy a new challenge	Home → the Challenges card → Start Challenge
Trade on my challenge	Home → Launch Terminal, then pick the account (next section)
See how my challenge is doing	Profile circle (top right) → Challenges → View Analytics
Change my settings	Profile circle (top right) → Account & Settings

Trading on your challenge account, step by step

Buying a challenge does not automatically mean you’re trading on it. In the terminal you can have several accounts, and your trades go to whichever account is currently selected. Always check you’re on the right one:

1. From Home, click the Launch Terminal card. The trading terminal opens.
2. Look at the bar at the top of the screen. There is a dropdown button showing an account name — that is the account you are trading on right now.
3. Click that button. A list of all your accounts opens:
   • Your challenge account has a trophy 🏆 icon next to it.
   • Real exchange accounts (connected with API keys) have no trophy.
4. Click your challenge account in the list. Done — the chart, order form, balance, positions, and orders now all belong to your challenge account.
5. Double-check: the dropdown button at the top now shows your challenge account’s name with the trophy icon. If it shows a different name, you are trading on a different account.

The #1 beginner mistake

Placing trades while the wrong account is selected. The account in the top bar is the one your orders go to — glance at it before every trade.

What the little badges in the account list mean:

Badge / icon	Meaning
Trophy 🏆	This is a challenge (or funded) account.
Failed (red)	This challenge has failed. The account is frozen — you can look, but you can’t trade on it.
Spot	A spot account: long-only, no leverage.
Disconnected	(Real accounts only) the exchange is rejecting this account’s API key.

Handy extras inside the same dropdown:

• The small bar-chart icon next to a challenge account opens its performance analytics right there — no need to leave the terminal.
• The pencil icon lets you rename an account.
• At the bottom of the list: Add Challenge Account (buy a new challenge) and Add Exchange Account (connect a real exchange with API keys).

Each chart tab remembers its own account

If you use multiple chart tabs, every tab keeps its own selected account. Tab 1 can be on your real account while tab 2 is on your challenge. The dropdown always shows the account of the tab you’re currently looking at.

Tracking your progress (where the performance analytics are)

To check how your challenge is going — profit so far, how much loss allowance is left, trading days completed:

1. Click your profile circle in the top-right corner (any page).
2. Click Challenges in the menu. You land on the Challenges page.
3. You’ll see a card for every challenge account you own, grouped into Active, Passed, and Failed. Each card shows the exchange, current balance, and PnL (profit/loss in dollars and percent).
4. Click View Analytics on a card to open the full performance breakdown.

(Shortcut: the same breakdown opens from the bar-chart icon next to the account in the terminal’s account dropdown — see the previous section.)

The performance breakdown shows:

Metric	What it shows
Profit target	Current profit as a percentage of your target, and how much % remaining to hit it.
Drawdown	Remaining cushion before your balance floor.
Daily loss	Amount and percent of your daily allowance used, plus the amount remaining — with a countdown to the next daily reset (02:00 Europe/Zurich).
Trading days	Days completed vs. required.

Note

Failed challenge accounts are retained for a limited window before cleanup, so a recently failed challenge still appears in this list.

What happens at a breach

The moment you cross a terminal rule, the challenge fails — there is no grace period and no manual review. A Challenge Failure dialog appears in the terminal right away, showing:

• The terminal violation: rule type, your actual value vs. the limit, and the timestamp it occurred.
• Your final standing: final balance, starting balance, PnL %, and trading days completed.
• Any earlier warnings recorded during the challenge.

The account’s status changes to Failed. From the dialog you can review your trading journal, claim a free retry if you qualify (see below), or start a new challenge.

Pre-violation warning (optional add-on)

At checkout you can toggle on a pre-violation warning for roughly a 10% surcharge. When enabled, if you try to place a trade that would breach one of the pre-trade rules, you get a confirmation prompt first, warning you the trade will fail your challenge.

The rules it can warn on are the ones detectable before the trade is realized:

• Missing stop-loss
• Risk-per-trade too high
• Single-position size too large
• Total exposure too large
• Stop-loss wider than your remaining drawdown (the liquidation-threshold guard)

A warning, not a waiver

The pre-violation warning is a heads-up only. If you confirm and proceed, the order still executes and the rule still fails your challenge — the enforcement is not suppressed. Realized-loss rules (drawdown, daily/weekly loss, liquidation) and the risk:reward rule are never confirmable; breaching them is always immediately terminal.

Free retry

If a challenge fails, you may qualify for one free retry — a fresh challenge account with the same type, size, and rules, at no cost.

You’re eligible when both are true:

• Your realized profit reached at least 5% of your starting balance at some point during the challenge (measured on realized fills, not unrealized/high-water equity).
• The original challenge purchase was not discounted.

When you qualify, a Claim free retry button appears in the Challenge Failure dialog. Otherwise you’ll see a button to buy a new challenge instead.

One per purchase

Each purchase grants at most one free retry. Once a retry has been claimed (or once an account is itself a retry), that purchase’s free retry is used up — and a purchase made with any discount never grants one. The retry always creates an account of the same type and size as the original, with all previous history cleared, and ZoneX reserves the right to deny a retry for reckless or abusive trading behavior.

What the platform enforces

There is no manual “strategy review.” Enforcement is entirely programmatic — the challenge rules are checked at trade time and on realized losses. These are the breaches the engine actually detects and acts on:

Rule	When it triggers
Total drawdown exceeded	Balance falls through the trailing floor.
Daily loss exceeded	Loss for the day passes the daily limit.
Weekly loss exceeded	Loss for the week passes the weekly limit.
Risk-per-trade exceeded	A single trade risks more than allowed.
Risk:reward violated	A setup falls short of the required reward-to-risk (terminal on Disciplined / Funded accounts).
Stop-loss missing	A position is opened without a required stop-loss.
Max position size exceeded	A single position is larger than the cap.
Max exposure exceeded	Total open exposure passes the cap.
Consecutive losses exceeded	The 5th losing trade in a row (Disciplined Traders only — other types have no consecutive-loss rule).
Stop-loss wider than remaining drawdown	An order whose worst-case loss (distance to its stop) would push you through the daily or total drawdown floor fails the challenge at placement, even if price never moves against you.
Liquidation	A position is liquidated / auto-deleveraged on the exchange.

See How the Rules Work for the numbers and worked dollar examples behind each of these.

Editing a live trade can’t strip a rule

On Disciplined Traders and funded accounts, the per-trade risk cap and risk:reward rule also can’t be removed after you’ve entered: widening a stop past the per-trade cap, or deleting or loosening a take-profit below the required reward-to-risk, is rejected as a blocked edit rather than executed. It does not fail the account — the change just doesn’t go through. See Managing Positions.