It’s a Saturday afternoon in your apartment in Sharjah or Riyadh or Doha. The window is open a crack. The fan is on the low setting because the AC is doing the rest. You’re on your phone, half watching a friend’s Story, half thinking about lunch. Then a Reel cuts in — somebody at three monitors, somebody else’s screenshot of a five-figure week — and you do what most people do. You scroll past. But this time the question sticks around for a second longer than usual. Could I do that? And then, a half-beat later, the answer your brain already had ready: no, not really, because… And there it is. The reason. The same one a lot of smart people have been carrying around for years. This piece is about that reason. Or, more honestly, the five reasons most people give for not even trying. Four of them — once you look at the numbers — turn out to be a bit smaller than they feel. One of them is real, and we’ll save it for the end.
Reason 1 — “I’d lose money I can’t afford to lose”
This is the big one. It’s usually the first reason out of anyone’s mouth when the topic of trading comes up, and it’s the most honest of the five — because the version of trading most people have seen does involve people losing money they can’t afford to lose.
There’s a number worth knowing here, and it comes from the UK’s financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, not from a prop firm marketing page. Every CFD broker regulated in the UK is required by law to publish a single sentence on their homepage, in a visible box, that reads something like: “82% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.” That percentage shifts a little from broker to broker — 73%, 78%, 85% — but the order of magnitude is steady. The historical reality is that most people who deposit their own money with a retail broker and start clicking buttons end up with less of it than they started.
So the reason isn’t wrong. It’s just attached to the wrong version of trading.
A prop firm — short for proprietary trading firm — is a different animal. The idea, in plain English: instead of you depositing your own savings and trading them, you pay a small one-time fee to take a test on a simulated account. If you pass the test, the firm gives you access to a real trading account that’s funded with the firm’s money. You keep most of the profit. If you lose, the worst that can happen is the firm closes the account — they take that risk, not you. We covered the basics in week one in case you want the 90-second version first.
The small-number version of that is this. Monetro’s smallest challenge is $29. If you fail it, the only thing you’ve spent is $29 and the time you took attempting it. You haven’t deposited $5,000 of your own savings and watched it drain. The structural risk to your personal money is the fee — not your account balance. That changes the shape of “I’d lose money I can’t afford to lose” quite a lot, because the number on the line stopped being your savings and started being the price of a meal out with your partner.
So reason one isn’t wrong. It’s just based on the version of trading you grew up watching — the personal-deposit, retail-broker, your-own-money version. The funded version exists for exactly this objection.
Reason 2 — “It’s all a scam”
This one earns its place too. The funded-trading category has had real scams in it. MyForexFunds was shut down by the US and Canadian authorities in 2023, with traders waiting on payouts they never got. Several smaller firms have closed quietly between then and now. “It’s all a scam” isn’t paranoia — it’s a fair read on a category that’s had a rough decade for trust.
But “some firms in this category are scams” is not the same sentence as “the whole category is a scam.” So the practical question is: how do you tell which firms are which.
The honest test has three parts.
One — do they actually pay traders. A real firm publishes payout proof. Trustpilot reviews, screenshots, named traders, dated transfers. Public, frequent, recent. The 10-year-old firms like FTMO have a long public payout record — over a billion in trader payouts cumulatively, with hundreds of reviews a month. Newer firms like Monetro publish per-trader receipts as the proof builds — we’re still early, so our number is small, but every payout is documented. When you can’t find a single recent, named, dated payout from a firm — that’s a flag.
Two — are the rules pass-able. A scam firm writes rules nobody can satisfy, so they collect the challenge fee and never have to pay anyone. A legitimate firm writes rules that a disciplined trader can clear. The specific things to read: how the drawdown (the rule that says how much you’re allowed to be down before the account is closed) is calculated, whether news trading is allowed, whether there’s a hidden consistency rule (a clause that lets the firm refuse your payout if your profits came from a small number of trades). We’ll dedicate full weeks to each of these later — for now, just know that if a rule isn’t on the public site, it’s a flag.
Three — how they make money, and whether they’ll tell you. Most firms in this category make money from people who don’t pass their challenges. That’s not a scam — it’s the engine that lets a firm hand a real $50,000 account to somebody who paid $299. It only becomes a scam when the rules are written so nobody can pass. The honest version of the question is: does the firm talk about its own economics in public? If yes, that’s a strong signal. If they go quiet whenever the topic comes up, that’s a softer one.
So reason two is half right. Some firms are scams. The whole category isn’t. The work is figuring out which is which, and there are public tests that do most of that work for you.
Reason 3 — “It takes time I don’t have”
This one is closer to true than people give it credit for, and the honest answer takes some unpacking.
The headline version of “trading takes a lot of time” comes from people imagining day trading — six monitors, ten hours a day, the version from movies. That version exists, but it isn’t the only version, and it isn’t the one most people on a funded path are doing.
The realistic time picture for a beginner taking a challenge looks more like this. Two to four months of unhurried demo practice on a free account before you ever pay a fee — maybe an hour a day, often less. Then a challenge attempt that takes between three weeks and three months depending on how slowly you trade. Most challenges allow unlimited time to pass — there’s no clock counting down. Monetro requires a minimum of five trading days per phase, but no maximum. FTMO removed their 30-day time limit in 2023; their challenges are unlimited too. You can take six months. You can take a year.
So the actual time commitment in the first 12 months is something like: an hour an evening on weekdays, a couple of hours on a weekend session, and the patience to not rush. For someone with a full-time job and a family, that’s the same time slot you’d otherwise spend on Netflix or PUBG. It’s a real ask — we’re not pretending it’s nothing — but it’s not “quit your job and stare at six monitors.”
If you want to see what an actual challenge page looks like — rules, fees, time requirements — ours is at monetro.com and you don’t need to sign up to read it.
The honest version of reason three is: yes, this takes time, but the time fits inside a normal life if you let it. The people who blow up are usually the ones trying to compress it.
Reason 4 — “The maths doesn’t make sense for normal people”
This is the reason that gets given by people who’ve thought about it the longest, which makes it the most interesting one to unpack. The argument is: even if I pass a challenge, the profit on a small funded account is too small to matter, and the profit on a big funded account is too risky to chase.
Let’s do the small-number version honestly. A $50,000 funded account that earns 4% in a calendar month — a respectable, not-spectacular result for a disciplined trader — produces $2,000 of profit. Your share at Monetro’s 80% split is $1,600. That number, in dirhams, is roughly AED 5,900. It’s not retire-your-parents money. It is, however, more than most second jobs pay for the same hours, and it doesn’t require a commute. So as a side income, on a side time budget — the math holds up. The people who run the numbers and decide it doesn’t are often comparing the side-income version to the Reel version, which is a comparison that ends badly every time.
There’s also the entry-cost side of the math. The cheapest Monetro entry is $29 (Endurance $5K). Across the category — FTMO’s cheapest is €89 on promo, FundedNext’s is $32.99, the others sit between — the entry to test whether trading fits your life is a price most working adults can absorb without it being a real financial decision. If the answer turns out to be no, you’ve spent roughly the price of a pizza night learning that. If the answer turns out to be yes, the small first account is the proving ground for the larger ones.
So reason four isn’t wrong about the high-leverage version of the math. It’s wrong about the side-income version. The math that doesn’t make sense is the “quit your job and trade $200,000” version. The math that does make sense is the slow-build, side-income, small-first-account version. Most beginners imagine the first one and dismiss the second one without ever doing it on paper.
Reason 5 — “I’m just not the kind of person who does this”
This is the reason that’s actually right. Or, more honestly — this is the reason that’s right for some people and wrong for others, and it’s the only one of the five that’s worth taking seriously on its own terms.
Trading rewards a particular set of habits. Patience under losses. The discipline to not size up after three winners. The willingness to keep a journal, review your own bad trades, and not blame the market when you broke your own rules. Some people have those habits already from sports or chess or a craft. Some people don’t, and learning them at thirty in front of a screen isn’t going to happen.
The kind way to put it is this: the people who last in trading aren’t necessarily the smartest people in the room. They’re the ones who like the work. They enjoy the slow review of a losing week. They find the puzzle interesting. They aren’t trying to escape something — they’re walking towards something. If when you read this you felt the opposite, that staring at charts for an evening sounds like a chore — that’s a real signal. Take it seriously.
We don’t know what your relationship with this kind of work will be. Nobody does, including you, until you try. The thing that does answer the question is sitting in front of a chart for ten hours over two weeks on a free demo and asking yourself honestly whether the work feels good or feels like a tax.
If after that the answer is no, the answer is no — and that’s the right one. Reason five was right in your case. You didn’t waste anything finding out.
If the answer is yes, the path is small and slow. Start with the smallest, lowest-friction account on whatever firm you’re picking. For us, that’s Endurance $5K at $29. Right now, with the code NEW40, the first challenge is 40% off — about $17 for the smallest model. We’re opening 25 Founding Trader slots across 5 waves, and the entry there is a free first reset and a direct line to the founder. Use coupon NEW40 at monetro.com to enjoy 40% off any selected account.
And if you’ve read all of this and you’re still not sure — that’s normal. Spend a week thinking about it. Tell me what you needed and didn’t get at hello@monetro.com. I read everything that lands there.
— Faraz, Monetro
Start your first challenge with NEW40 — 40% off →
