TradeDay is a US futures prop firm founded in 2020 that sells one-step evaluations through two programs, Quick Pay and Fast Pass. Overall, it suits intraday futures traders who can work within strict conduct rules on news, automation and multiple accounts. Its intraday trailing drawdown locks at the starting balance, and its profit split depends on each account’s own profit. Those terms matter more than the entry fee.
Who runs TradeDay and what it trades
The legal entity is Tradeday LLC, based in the United States. The firm covers futures only, with access to contracts listed on the CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX exchanges. That spans equity index, interest rate, energy and metals products, but no forex, CFDs or spot crypto.
Accounts run on Tradovate or Rithmic connections. Payouts go out by Rise, crypto or bank transfer. The firm says most withdrawal requests are processed within 24 hours and advertises $15M+ in verified payouts.
Quick Pay and Fast Pass
Both programs are single-step evaluations with a one-time fee. They differ mainly in the funded stage, which has its own payout rules.
Quick Pay comes in $25K, $50K, $100K and $150K sizes, requires a minimum of 5 trading days, and pays out from day one once funded. It is available in intraday and end-of-day (EOD) drawdown versions. For the $50K account, the profit target is $3,000 and the intraday trailing maximum loss is $2,000, with no separate daily loss limit.
Fast Pass is an EOD program offered in $25K and $50K sizes with a 3-day minimum. Its funded payouts work on winning-day cycles and per-request caps instead of on-demand withdrawals.
The fee is a one-time charge. TradeDay’s promotions have advertised no activation fee.
How the trailing drawdown works
TradeDay’s maximum drawdown trails upward with the account’s peak and stops trailing once it reaches the starting balance. After that it is locked permanently. This applies to evaluations and Funded Sim accounts.
A worked example, using a $50,000 balance with a simplified $1,000 trailing drawdown for illustration (the actual $50K Quick Pay drawdown is $2,000) and assuming an intraday trailing calculation that follows peak equity, including open profit:
- Start: balance $50,000, floor $49,000.
- A trade peaks at $50,600 in open profit, then closes at $50,200. The floor has moved to $49,600 because it tracked the intraday peak, not the closing balance.
- Equity later peaks at $51,000. The floor reaches $50,000, the starting balance, and locks there.
- From then on the account fails only if equity falls below $50,000, no matter how high it climbs.
The intraday version is the stricter of the two. A winning trade that reverses before you exit still drags the floor up. An EOD drawdown only updates from the end-of-day balance.
On Quick Pay, the intraday drawdown is calculated from gross profit, meaning current profit plus payouts already taken. Withdrawals do not reset the trailing calculation.
On Fast Pass, the first payout request automatically moves the trailing drawdown to the starting balance, if it has not already reached it, and locks it there.
Contract limits
Maximum position size scales with account size and applies on all plans:
| Account | Mini/standard contracts | Micros |
|---|---|---|
| $25K | 2 | 20 |
| $50K | 5 | 50 |
| $100K | 10 | 50 |
| $150K | 15 | 50 |
The micro cap stops at 50 from the $50K tier upward, so larger accounts gain mini capacity but not micro capacity. Micro Silver (SIL) is an exception: it counts toward the mini/standard limit, not the micro limit.
Trading “an excessive or unrealistic number of contracts in the day” is also prohibited, a judgment call on top of the hard caps.
Consistency rules
The Quick Pay evaluation carries a 30% consistency rule: no single trading day can account for more than 30% of total profits. With a $1,500 target, one $600 day would be 40% of $1,500. You would need total profit of at least $2,000 for that day to fall within 30%, which means trading past the target before passing.
TradeDay’s rules also contain a 45% version of the rule, in two wordings. One measures against total profits. The other measures against gross profits (current profit plus payouts), which matters in a funded account where money has already been withdrawn. TradeDay states that the two programs have different consistency rules. Confirm which percentage governs your program and stage before planning around it.
Payout rules
Quick Pay funded accounts
Payouts are on demand. The profit split is calculated on the current profit in each individual account, not across all your accounts:
- 50/50 while current profit is below $4,000.
- 80/20 when current profit is above $4,000 and the payout leaves more than $4,000 in the account.
- Mixed 80/20 and 50/50 when a withdrawal takes current profit below $4,000. The portion above the threshold is split 80/20 and the portion below it 50/50.
There is also a review threshold at $10,000 of gross profit per account. When an account reaches it, you must stop trading. Access pauses at 4:30 pm CT for a review, and profit above the threshold is removed. TradeDay describes this as a review point, not a $10,000 cap on cumulative payouts.
Fast Pass funded accounts
Fast Pass pays 80/20 and works in five-day cycles. To request a payout, the account needs 5 winning days at or above a per-size minimum:
- $25K: $100 or more per day
- $50K: $150 or more per day
- $100K: $200 or more per day
- $150K: $250 or more per day
The account must also be above its starting balance and show net profit since the previous request. Each request is limited to 50% of the account balance and to a per-tier cap: $750 (25K), $1,500 (50K), $1,875 (100K) and $2,250 (150K). Fast Pass is currently sold only at $25K and $50K.
After requesting, you must pause trading until the money arrives. The next five-day cycle starts with the session after the request, not the session in which payment lands. Fast Pass traders move to Funded Live on the fifth payout request, or earlier at TradeDay’s discretion.
Funded Live
Funded Live withdrawals are split 90/10. Before withdrawing, you must clear a required buffer and keep a protected slippage buffer in the account. TradeDay has not published the buffer amounts.
Funded Live traders may not trade within 2% of a CME price limit. Doing so costs the funded account.
If a funded account is lost while showing a positive balance, TradeDay returns the remaining profits after the profit share. The exceptions are profits from Tier 1 news trades, prohibited practices, repeated guideline abuse, and profits earned in a simulated account. Because Funded Sim profits are excluded, this protection effectively applies to live profits.
After receiving a Funded Live offer, you have 30 days to submit the required documents or the offer is withdrawn. No additional accounts can be bought while a Funded Live account is active, and a 3-month cooling-off period applies before you can apply for new evaluations.
Trading hours, news and overnight positions
TradeDay is a day-trading firm in practice. All positions are auto-liquidated at 3:50 pm CT every day. For products that close at a different time, you must be flat with no working orders 10 minutes before that product’s close. The firm says not to rely on automatic liquidation.
Tier 1 news is restricted. Positions are auto-closed 2 minutes before a Tier 1 release, and trading reopens 2 minutes after. An accidental trade in that window does not fail the account. Traders who repeatedly ignore the rule lose the account, and news-window profits are excluded from returned profits.
Automation, copy trading and multiple accounts
Account limits: up to 10 evaluation accounts at once, up to 5 active Funded Sim accounts, and up to 5 Funded Live accounts. Each person gets one username, and only one user per household is allowed.
Copy trading is allowed across 2 to 10 evaluation and Funded Sim accounts in any combination, within the 5 Funded Sim limit. Up to 5 Funded Live accounts can copy each other. Copying trades from your own external accounts into TradeDay is permitted. Funded Live positions must be kept separate from evaluation and Funded Sim positions: holding open positions in both groups at the same time is prohibited even without a copier.
Automation: expert advisors and algorithms are allowed only if they are your own code. Bots bought from a third party are forbidden. If several users are found placing the same trades, all of those accounts are closed and the users suspended. High-frequency scalping systems are prohibited, and so is any strategy producing more than 200 trades in a day.
Connections: a VPS is not allowed. VPNs and other IP-masking tools must be switched off when required, and for security checks you may be asked to complete one comparable trading day from your registered location.
Prohibited trading practices
Beyond the automation rules, TradeDay bans:
- Hedging by going long in one account and short in another in the same product.
- Entering trades in gapped or illiquid markets to catch isolated or stray fills.
- Exploiting platform errors, such as price display faults or delayed updates.
- Deliberately duplicating limit or stop orders at the same instrument, side and price, at once or within a short window, to gain an execution edge.
Scaling in at different prices, normal partial fills and platform-generated exits are permitted.
Inactivity and account administration
TradeDay charges no inactivity fee and sets no minimum trading requirement once funded. Two separate inactivity rules still apply, though:
- Tradovate archiving. If you do not log into a Tradovate account for more than one calendar month, Tradovate archives it automatically. The account is removed from the platform, cannot be restored by TradeDay, and is treated as failed. Continuing requires a reset or a new purchase.
- TradeDay offboarding. Any account dormant for 30 days may be offboarded.
Strengths and trade-offs
Where TradeDay is strong
- On-demand Quick Pay payouts from day one, without a winning-day cycle.
- A trailing drawdown that locks at the starting balance.
- A 90/10 Funded Live split, and the return of live profits if a funded account is lost with a positive balance.
- Up to 10 evaluations with copy trading, including from your own external accounts.
- Tradovate and Rithmic connections and three withdrawal methods.
Where it costs you
- A 50/50 split below $4,000 of current profit, counted account by account, so spreading profit across several accounts does not combine toward it.
- A Quick Pay intraday drawdown that follows open profit and is not reset by payouts.
- A 30% evaluation consistency rule that can push you past the profit target before you pass.
- Capped Fast Pass payouts on five-day cycles, with trading paused while a request is pending.
- No overnight holding, a news blackout, a VPS ban, own-code-only automation, and a $10,000 gross-profit review that pauses a successful account.
How we checked TradeDay
We visited tradeday.com on 13 November 2026, connecting from Tallinn, Estonia. The site opened normally and landed us on www.tradeday.com. We read the home page down to the footer, then opened About Us and the Terms and Conditions. The footer gives the address as Tradeday LLC, 2nd Floor, 412 S. Wells Chicago, Illinois 60607. The terms call the company TradeDay LLC, an Illinois limited liability company. A live chat window was on the page, but we did not use it.
All the prices we saw were on the home page. The Quick Pay Intraday Evaluation was listed at USD 99 for 25k, USD 124 for 50k, USD 248 for 100k and USD 398 for 150k. Each of those prices had a lower figure beside it, such as $39 next to the 25k price and $49 next to the 50k price, alongside the words “one-time fee”. That looks like a promotion, but we cannot say which amount checkout would actually charge. Clicking “Get Funded” took us to a registration page on members.tradeday.com headed “LET’S GET STARTED”. That page showed no prices, so you have to create an account before you reach payment. We stopped there. The terms set a reset at $99 and say all fees are final and non-refundable.
We found no licence number anywhere on the site. The footer says plainly that TradeDay LLC is not registered with the SEC or CFTC as a broker-dealer, investment advisor, futures commission merchant, or commodity trading advisor. With no licence claimed, there was no register record for us to look up, so we ran no register check.
On Trustpilot, which we read on 13 November 2026, TradeDay scored 4.6/5 from 1,453 reviews. The profile is claimed by the company, and the company had replied to 8 of the 8 newest reviews. The domain dates from 1997-01-10, and its first Wayback Machine capture is from 1998-01-20. The site itself says the firm was established in 2020, so those early pages may belong to an earlier owner. We could not verify the advertised $15M+ in payouts or the 24-hour processing time, because we did not buy an evaluation or request a payout.
Who TradeDay may suit
The rules fit an intraday futures trader who is flat before 3:50 pm CT and works around Tier 1 news. Quick Pay suits someone who values immediate payouts and can keep more than $4,000 per account to reach the 80/20 tier. Fast Pass suits a trader who wants a cheaper EOD entry and steady small winning days, and who can accept fixed payout caps.
The firm fits poorly with swing traders, anyone running purchased algorithms or VPS-hosted systems, and households where more than one person trades.
Alternatives
| Provider | Score | Fee | Split | Payouts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7.3/10 | $11 | up to 100% | On demand | Review | |
| 6.9/10 | $660 | 80% | 15 days or 30 calendar days | Review | |
| 7.1/10 | $449 | up to 95% (80% during live phase) | every 14 days | Review |