Prop Firm or Your Own Broker Account? I Run Both. Here's the Split.

Last year I spent about $600 on eval fees and kept a couple grand at a broker on the side. Friends in both camps think I'm doing it wrong. The prop-only guys call personal accounts "paying full price for risk". The own-account guys call evals "renting permission to trade with a curfew". They're both right, which is the point.

The honest comparison table

That last row decides more accounts than any spread comparison ever will. On evals, people overtrade to hit targets before the clock runs out. On personal accounts, people cut winners early because it's "real". Pick the poison that fits your flaws — I genuinely mean that. I trade calmer knowing a breach costs a fee, not my savings. Others feel the exact opposite.

The math nobody runs before buying their fourth eval

An eval is a franchise agreement. The firm hands you a big store and a thick rulebook, and takes a cut of sales. Your own account is a market stall: tiny, yours, nobody can revoke it. The franchise wins on revenue as long as you can live with the rulebook. And the rulebook is where they make their money — most buyers breach, which is why the fee model exists at all. Nobody in this industry is your friend; the broker charges you spread either way. Know whose business model you're feeding and feed it on purpose.

• $2K in savings: one $32–$200 eval beats depositing $2K and trading micro lots. If you breach, tuition was cheap. Start here.
• Passed and getting payouts: keep churning evals for size, but park a slice of each payout in a personal account. That's profit becoming property.
• Strategy that props hate (news spikes, weekend gaps, 3-week holds): stop forcing it through eval rules. That's what the personal account is FOR.

The split I actually run

Roughly 80/20. Evals carry the size and the upside; the personal account holds the trades that don't fit prop rules plus a growing slice of payouts. Every payout, something moves from rented capital to owned capital. Boring by design.

One warning from experience: don't run the same fast strategy on both at once while you're learning the rules. I fat-fingered a news trade on the wrong terminal once — fine on my own account, would've nuked the eval. Label your terminals. Loudly.

So which one first?

Small capital: eval first, cheapest tier, treat it as tuition — our verified cheapest list is the honest starting point. Decent capital and a rule-breaking strategy: personal account first, evals when you want size. Everyone else: both, 80/20, adjust as payouts come in. And reread any firm's rules before you buy — they change them more often than they announce them.