Just Google Blueberry Funded and two wildly different stories are vying for your attention. One is received via the firm’s own marketing: raw spreads as low as a fraction of a pip, profit splits as high as 90%, and an “elevating” scaling path which can take a trader’s simulated account value to as high as two million dollars. The other one is on Trustpilot’s review page, where an unbroken stream of one-star ratings details funded accounts getting closed days, if not hours, ahead of a scheduled payout. Both versions are, in their own way, accurate. Figuring out how they all fit together is the entire challenge of figuring out if Blueberry Funded should be on your shortlist.
This guide pulls apart both sides of that story. It will explain what Blueberry Funded is, how the evaluation models and instant funding accounts operate, what trading rules and restricted strategies actually mean in terms of your everyday trading, the real price of a challenge and the payout/scaling system, and what existing traders and independent reviewers are saying about the reliability of the firm. It also compares Blueberry Funded with the established brands in the industry, such as FTMO, FundedNext, FundingPips, etc., so you can grasp which areas it is competing with and where it still has a long way to go. None of this is financial advice and investing with a funded account is risky, whatever firm is providing it. By the end, however, you should have a good, up-to-date and balanced view of what you would really be signing up for.
What Is Blueberry Funded?
Also known as a proprietary trading firm, or prop firm, in the trading community, Blueberry Funded is a proprietary trading firm that allows traders to trade with virtual money after they show their abilities in a paid evaluation, or sometimes, right away with an instant funding account. Traders don’t risk their own money on the market instead, they’re given a demo-style account that replicates the live market and if they make money in that account and do not exceed the firm’s risk limits, then they’re given a funded account and start earning a portion of the profits that they generate.
The firm opened its doors in August 2024 and stands as one of the younger of the many firms competing in the space, but it hasn’t been a typical startup. Unlike most new prop firms, Blueberry Funded was not a completely new trading infrastructure construct, but instead leveraged the platform of the existing broker, Blueberry Markets, which has been in operation since 2016 in Australia. That connection is the crux of Blueberry Funded and why the company is talked about more than the dozens of prop firms that have debuted since 2023.
A prop trading firm usually incorporates offshore, as is common, since they do not provide regulated brokerage services, they provide simulated accounts and they have no need for the type of licenses that retail brokers would need. Around the time of launch, Marcus Fetherston, previously of PropTradeTech and EightCap broker, was appointed as General Manager, while Dean Hyde, founder of the parent brand Blueberry Markets, sits behind the brand. In the year since, Blueberry Funded has grown significantly. It has paid out approximately $2.3 million to traders in its inaugural year and its own live payout counter, a running total of monetary disbursements displayed on its website, had a total of over $7 million paid to more than 11,000 active traders halfway through 2026. While you can make what you will of the firm, that growth curve is genuine and accounts for the fact that Blueberry Funded is a more common prop firm query over the past year.
How Blueberry Markets Matters: The Broker Behind the Brand
The vast majority of prop firms that have launched since the boom of 2022-2024 are marketing and risk-management businesses over a trading infrastructure. They license some platform and they pass trades on to a third party liquidity provider and then they create some cool UI on top of that. While nothing was wrong with that model as such, it certainly has its downsides: in February 2024, the company behind MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, MetaQuotes, abruptly discontinued access to its platforms for True Forex Funds. The resignation would set off a wave of terminations throughout the industry and is believed to have contributed to the demise of over 80 prop firms that year.
When it comes to regulation and trading infrastructure, Blueberry Funded falls into a different category as Blueberry Markets already had its own trading infrastructure and regulatory status prior to the launch of the prop firm. Blueberry Markets is a full Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) from ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) No 406372 registered to Blueberry Australia Pty Ltd and also holds a licence from the Vanuatu Financial Services Commission (Vanuatu FSC) for its international entity. ASIC regulation is generally seen as a higher Tier 1 standard than that of many brokers who operate only overseas and requires them to store client funds in trust accounts and to submit regular reports, something many of their unregulated counterparts are not required to do.
None of that regulation is in effect for Blueberry Funded’s evaluation accounts, which are specifically simulated accounts and not actual brokerage accounts, a point that Blueberry Funded admits to in its own terms, explaining that the environment constitutes a demonstration setup and that real capital is not allocated or investment services provided. But the broker relationship still matters in a practical sense. It indicates that Blueberry Funded is taking its pricing, spreads and execution from an existing, professionally managed trading operation, not from a shell company, and it indicates that there’s a proven company with more than 10 years of leadership behind the brand, not an anonymous shell. The tight spreads, which are often a fraction of a pip with Gold in particular, and consistency of execution during volatile sessions are cited by the reviewers who compare prop firms as Blueberry Funded’s most obvious structural edge over newer, more purely fintech-style firms, which can often be ripping you off by simply reselling a white-label platform over which they have little control. If you’re curious how that kind of institutional pricing actually trickles down to a retail account, our breakdown of how liquidity brokers work walks through the plumbing behind it.
The truth about how Funded Trading challenges work
If you’re new to this corner of trading, the mechanics are worth going over as they pretty much explain everything else in this article.
A prop trading challenge begins by selecting an account size, such as $25,000 or $100,000, and a one-time, non-refundable fee is paid according to the size of the account. You’re then provided with logins to a trading platform with that quantity of virtual money. Your task is to reach a certain profit level, typically 6% to 10% of the account size, while risking no more than a certain amount per day, known as the drawdown limit, and/or a certain amount, known as the maximum or overall drawdown limit, from the account’s starting balance or account high-water mark. Violate either limit, even for a short time, and the evaluation will be terminated. There is no partial credit and no free reset at most firms, including Blueberry Funded.
Pass that evaluation some companies will require one, some will require two. You’re transferred to a funded account and continue to trade simulated money, but a percentage of any profit you make goes to them, usually 80%, with the rest going to you. There are also other companies, Blueberry Funded being an example, that offer “instant funding” accounts, which involve paying a hefty up-front fee instead of going through the evaluation period, since it’s about immediate access rather than a proving period.
It’s important to be realistic about the prospects here. Independent analysis of prop firm results, such as one widely cited study by the Crypstudio team that analyzed over 300,000 accounts at ten prop firms, has shown that only about 14% of traders successfully complete their evaluation, and only 7% of all traders who purchase a challenge ever make it to a payout. For those individuals who do receive a payout, the average amount is about 4% of the size of the funded account. None of that makes prop trading a bad idea for a disciplined, already-profitable trader who wants to use more capital than he personally has. It certainly does not mean that the business model is not working because the vast majority of the challenge fees are not paid out in payouts that’s something to bear in mind before taking anything too seriously from any individual firm’s marketing, including that of Blueberry Funded.
Blueberry Funded’s Seven Challenge Types, Explained
The first thing that comes to mind with Blueberry Funded, as opposed to companies that provide a single evaluation model, is just how many methods there are to be funded. The firm has seven separate accounts in three categories.
Two-Phase and One-Phase Evaluations
The flagship is Prime 2-Step, which requires an 8% increase in stage only 6% in stage two, a 4% fixed drawdown each day, and a maximum of 10% based on the initial amount. What makes Prime unique in Blueberry Funded’s own product line is that it doesn’t have a fixed maximum risk per trade and (on the majority of versions) doesn’t have a consistency rule, which some firms require to make sure a trader isn’t taking the good luck of one day and playing it to the detriment of the rest of their day’s trades. That blend will also make it easier to be a swing trader who may be in a trade for a few days and does not want to get eliminated by one good day.
The normal Step 2 account has a more challenging setup: 10% target in phase one and 5% in phase two, maximum drawdown of 10%, daily drawdown of 5% and the same 1.5% limit per trade once funded. The two-phase structure is the same in synthetic, but synthetic is constructed on the basis of synthetic indexes, and not on classic forex and CFD pairs, which is attractive to traders with experience of trading on volatility indexes, and prefer a market that operates around the clock.
Traders who don’t want to do two phases (Step 1 and Rapid) can do one of the two. Rapid, in particular, is created to be quick: about a 10% profit goal with a more restricted maximum drawdown, plus at the very least 3 active trading days to pass. The downside of the shorter route is that the draw-down ceiling is less forgiving after all, you have only one draw-down period to prove yourself, not two chances to ride out a rough one.
Instant Funding: Paying to Skip the Line
Instant Elite and Instant Lite completely remove the evaluation from the process. These types of accounts are bought and you have money from day one and are trading in real time against Blueberry Market LIVE pricing feed, but IN A SIMULATED WRAP, where payout eligibility is based on the trading day and profit requirements and not a pass or fail target. The obvious attraction is speed–just no evaluation to fail, no waiting weeks to prove oneself. The not-so-obvious catch is that instant accounts often provide lower daily maximums than evaluation-based accounts, and there is a cost premium for instant accounts, as it is a guaranteed account, as opposed to an earned account.
In all seven models, the smallest Blueberry Funded account size is about $1,250 and the largest single purchase is $200,000, with a scaling plan overlaid on top for accounts that continue to perform. The answer to which is the best is squarely based on your trading style: swing traders are more likely to choose the seven because the lack of a per-trade cap is more important to them, high-frequency intraday traders tend to dislike the tighter drawdown accounts as they’re unlikely to use them on a consistent basis, and traders who already know they’ve got a good, well-tested strategy are often willing to pay the premium for instant funding instead of waiting and hoping to pass a lengthy risk assessment.
Drawdown Rules, Profit Targets, and Restricted Strategies
Most attention is focused on the profit targets because they’re the ones that are listed on the pricing sheet, but the drawdown is the one that really matters when it comes to whether you’ll keep your account. Drawdown is calculated by Blueberry Funded based on whichever is highest: your account balance or equity at 5 PM EST, and the amount of that equity becomes a fixed floor for the rest of the trading day, which surprises more traders than you’d think because they might have an unrealized gain earlier in the session, which will then be a floor for the remainder of the trading day even if they lose some of it later. Most of Blueberry Funded’s evaluation accounts employ static maximum drawdown, which is based on your account’s starting balance and not adjusted as your account grows, unlike some other competitors’ trailing drawdown model that ratchets the floor amount down each time you reach a new equity high.
In addition to the numeric restrictions, Blueberry Funded’s prohibited trading behavior list is pretty common among the industry we operate in, but in practice, it causes a lot of trader disputes. HF Trading, Latency Arbitrage, Tick Scalp, etc., are strictly prohibited and not allowed for any type of account. News trading is not allowed in most models, opening, closing, or modifying a position within a surrounding period of a red folder event on the ForexFactory economic calendar. The practice of martingale position sizing, taking a larger size after a losing trade in order to make up for that loss, is seriously considered a violation and the bulk of the negative reviews on Trustpilot focus on this practice. As per multiple traders, after losing a trade, accounts are being flagged for lot size increase as low as a hundredth of a lot when the amount of the trade was a fraction of a per cent of total account risk. Copy trading is strictly between the trader’s own Blueberry Funded accounts and copying signals from an external provider or another trader’s account is against the rules and will lead to termination.
Swing traders will appreciate that weekend and overnight holding is typically permitted, a big plus for Blueberry Funded, and Expert Advisors are also supported on the majority of accounts, thus allowing for systematic and algorithmic trading, which can’t go wrong if it doesn’t fall into the previously mentioned banned categories. On paper, where the firm draws its lines is fairly standard. Where the rub comes in is enforcement. Some of the breach provisions, especially one which traders have informally dubbed by its section number, are drafted so broadly that the firm has a lot of room to move when deciding whether to have a breach, and a common thread through numerous independent assessments is a lack of transparency on the specific trade information that’s being used to make the assessment. That is a criticism that is very important to consider, but not unique to Blueberry Funded. In 2026, the world’s oldest brand FTMO, has also been hit with a flood of complaints from traders who say they are being closed under vague justifications without being provided with clear supporting evidence. While this is seemingly an industry-wide soft spot, it doesn’t mean it’s acceptable, but it does mean you shouldn’t make your decision based solely on this.
The Real Cost of a Blueberry Funded Challenge
It’s not easy to nail down prices at any particular time across prop firms, as almost every firm has frequent promotional discounts and Blueberry Funded is no exception. Flash promotions from 30% to 40% off are regular enough that it’s probably the exception if the price is not on sale. However, the overall trends in the pricing are similar across various independent sources. For the entry-level accounts, especially those on the Synthetic and lesser crypto tiers, Blueberry Funded offers one of the lowest amounts of $25 to $40. At a glance, the Prime 2-Step full-sized evaluation, which has a requirement of $100,000, is priced somewhere between $300 and $450, in line with, or slightly lower than, the equivalent evaluations offered by FTMO, although they do not have an instant-funding option.
In addition to this headline evaluation fee, there are a couple of costs to factor in. The commission for Forex and metals is $7 per round turn (divided into $3.50 on open and close) for a standard lot, and $2 per lot for U.S. stocks CFD. Crypto, indices and commodities are priced spread-only, which means there’s no separate line for your cost, your cost is embedded in the entry/exit price and this is good for traders with a hold position rather than scalping several times. The accounts that allow for instant funding are a significant premium over evaluation-based funding, as you are paying to avoid the proving process altogether, and add-ons like reducing the base payout period of 14 days to 7 days or to “on-demand” are additional to that cost.
No matter the type of account you choose, the one thing that’s the same in every case is that you must pass the evaluation, or the initial fee will be non-refundable. Several of the reviewers say that Blueberry Funded (like all of these companies) can effectively “return” the fee indirectly to the trader who is successful by crediting them back on the first payout, but that only helps if one passes and as the earlier pass-rate statistics indicate, the majority of challengers who buy into these types of companies don’t make it past the first payout line. Prices and promotional codes change so frequently, and there are many different websites that offer their own promotional codes, which may or may not be valid. The best thing to do is check Blueberry Funded’s live pricing page before payment.
Profit splits, payout cycles and the Scaling Plan
The number that will matter once funded is the profit split and at Blueberry Funded, it is 80:20, with the trader taking $800 for every $1000 in profit, while the firm keeps $200. That’s the industry-standard starting point. FTMO, FundingPips, and the majority of mid-tier firms in this space both open at 80/20 a few newer players offer splits as high as 95% to 100% on certain types of accounts to help them stand out from the crowd.
What Blueberry Funded aims to do differently is the extent to which that split can be raised over time. The firm’s scaling plan allows traders to benefit from a profit increase in direct proportion to the trader’s account size, capped at 90% at the highest levels, that gradually increases as traders make a minimum of 10% net profit in their accounts during a three-month period and complete at least four payout cycles within that same period. Repeat this many times and an account can progress from an initial $200,000 buy to the program’s promised $2,000,000 limit, in a span of just about two years of regular execution. It’s an aggressive scaling structure, similar to what some of the biggest names in the game are offering, but keep in mind that in order to attain the levels, they need to be profitable for a long period of time (months) and very few funded traders actually manage to do so.
The regular payout period is every two weeks. For the first time withdrawal, it is made 14 days after the 1st trade and you have to have at least 3 days of trades with more than ½ percent closed profit and your total profit amount must be above the minimum withdrawal amount of 100 USD.
Those who can’t wait can buy a seven-day or on-demand payout add-on, but at a price. The withdrawals are via cryptocurrency, typically USDC or USDT on the TRC-20 network for smaller amounts, or via RiseWorks, a payments and payroll platform, for larger amounts, which has become somewhat common among prop firms in the industry so that firms with offshore jurisdictions can avoid the friction and expense of international wire transfers. Since payouts land as crypto, it’s worth double-checking the receiving wallet address before you send anything. Crypstudio’s free scanner flags risky or mistyped addresses in seconds.
This is all a legit competition here. The difference between genuinely competitive on paper and reliably delivered in practice is where the reputation questions in the next section come into play, as a payout structure is only relevant if the account is going to last long enough to utilize it.
Markets, platforms and tradable instruments
Blueberry Funded operates 4 trading platforms: MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, TradeLocker and DXtrade (some may not be available depending on the type of account and challenge model you select). Both MT4 and MT5 are explicitly allowed for automated trading under Blueberry Funded’s policy and continue to be the popular choice of most Forex and CFD traders due to their huge collection of custom indicators and Expert Advisors. Newer browser-based options, such as TradeLocker and DXtrade, don’t need software to be installed and have gained traction among prop firms in particular due to their ease of integration with the type of real-time rule enforcement and dashboard reporting required by evaluation-based trading.
A very young firm with wide market access. The Forex majors, minors, and exotics are all represented, and gold is mentioned frequently in reviews for its unusually tight spreads, energies, and global indices. Crypto traders have access to over 50 crypto CFD pairs, which are spread-only and capped at a maximum leverage of 1:2, not the highest of any crypto-focused competitors, but still quite conservative considering how volatile digital assets are and how cautious most regulated-adjacent crypto brokers are. Traders building a strategy specifically for that side of the account might want to skim our crypto trading strategies guide before risking evaluation capital on it. In April 2025, the firm also added over a thousand U.S. stock CFDs to its evaluation and funded accounts, which is a significant step towards moving beyond its forex-first reputation that many prop firms have. There is also a special synthetic indices option, with a dozen instruments included in what the company dubs its SYN, Surge, Drop and Leap categories, designed for traders transitioning from the Deriv and Volatility Index ecosystem to a market that is constantly open and correlation-free from conventional trading hours. For traders who specifically wish to trade futures, Blueberry Funded’s sister brand, Blueberry Futures, is offered, and it shares a lot of the same features and rules.
There is not a single guideline for leverage, but instead one for each asset class and type of account. Forex is usually limited to 1:30 and sometimes 1:50 on certain two-step accounts, indices are usually limited to 1:10 and crypto is capped at 1:2. None of that is particularly over-generous by industry standards, but it’s fairly typical of what a regulatory cap would look like for retail forex trading in a broker-based regulatory regime such as ASIC’s, where the evaluation accounts themselves are not under the ASIC umbrella.
Is Blueberry Funded legit? A Glimpse at its Fame
This is what most people who search for the Blueberry Funded are interested in and the answer to this one should not be a marketing answer. It’s a real life answer. The firm looks like a real business that pays traders, but the traders who are the ones who have done real life trading with them and had experience with them have a mixed record, and it’s one that has become even messier over the last couple of months.
Focus on what is going well for Blueberry Funded. The broker backing is a true and verifiable trust signal that you can verify on the regulator’s public register (which is more transparent than most prop firms provide their prospective clients). The firm won the 2025 Prop Firm Match Awards in the category of Best Broker Backed Firm, which is an independent aggregator that’s relatively well-known in the market. It claims to have over eleven thousand active traders, with its own published payout tracker stating that it is on track to pay out more than $7 million in mid-2026, having paid about $2.3 million in its first year of operation. And numerous individual reviews speak of exactly what you would want: quick trade execution and low spreads on gold and major forex pairs, a clean dashboard, and, as many say, a live chat service that is so fast that they are able to solve issues with your account on the same day.
Against that backdrop, there’s a pattern of complaints that is constant enough not to be dismissed as isolated incidents from independent sources. Trustpilot has issued a rating warning to the page of Blueberry Funded, saying it was unable to rate the company because its page violated Trustpilot guidelines. That’s the platform’s way of warning about pages that are thought to have gamed the system, whether by incentivising their own reviews, by creating positive reviews or by trying to mask negative ones. The page still shows a number of upwards of 1,500 individual traders, and reading through them gives a consistent story – a trader gets a positive evaluation, then trades successfully on a funded account, then requests a payout, only to get a letter stating that they’ve breached a clause within the agreement, just before or at the same time they file for a payout. Several traders report having been notified that their account had suspicious activity or that it was breaching a certain sub-clause of a clause, but that they were not being provided with the trade data that was used to reach that conclusion. Trustpilot has also stated on its own that it took down a group of reviews linked to its company profile for not adhering to its guidelines, which detracts in an unclear way. It could be that the firm or an affiliate was pushing the ratings it assigned itself or it could be that the firm was facing some sort of orchestrated fake negative reviews from a competitor or an unhappy affiliate, and from the outside, without any better transparency from either party, it’s hard to say.
It is important to note that this is not an issue that is just associated with Blueberry Funded. There’s an inherent structural tension in the prop trading industry: traders make money for prop firms, and when traders lose money, prop firms are not liable to pay out. Also, discretionary breach clauses exist for almost every competitor, including FTMO. However, the specificity and frequency of the complaints here, especially complaints falling just around the payout eligibility, and the lack of clarity traders give when they request supporting evidence, are more noticeable than what you’ll see on more established competitors’ review pages. When considering Blueberry Funded, the sensible idea is not to ignore the bad comments as noise, and it’s not to presume that the firm is not in good faith based on anecdotes alone. As you read the current rule pages and keep your own trade records and screenshots as you go, bear in mind the firm’s own claim that it won’t reveal exact breach-detection methodology for fear that it would encourage rule-gaming. Don’t just take that on faith.
Blueberry Funded vs. FTMO and the Rest of the Field
Every trader is always comparing any prop firm to others and in this case, it is Blueberry Funded vs FTMO, followed closely by FundingPips and FundedNext.
FTMO continues to be the benchmark for the industry for good reason. It was established in 2015 in Prague, has been operational for over 10 years, and claims to have paid out over $500 million since it was originally established, which is something that other younger companies, including Blueberry Funded, cannot claim. FTMO acquired the regulated broker, OANDA, in December 2025, expanding its infrastructure into licensed brokerage entities in various jurisdictions, thus further bridging the trust and confidence gap with newer players, at least in theory. Where Blueberry Funded can really compete is price, FTMO’s equivalent tiers (as an example) are typically higher, and Flexibility, where Prime doesn’t currently offer an instant-funding route, and FTMO’s rule book is more prescriptive and less varied than others would like. It’s also important to note that FTMO is not the only firm that has received criticism for discretionary enforcement, as there have been an increasing number of trader complaints against FTMO regarding the closure of traders’ accounts with vague explanations in 2026.
FundedNext and FundingPips are another comparison: while both are newer than FTMO, they are both more established and stable than Blueberry Funded at this time. The profit split is pushed up to 95%, not 45% as Blueberry states, and FundedNext also features a scale-up structure that can grow to a $4 million profit cap, which is twice Blueberry’s stated scale-up ceiling, and promises to process payouts within 24 hours, with a $1,000 penalty for failing to do so, an unusually forthright approach to putting its money where its mouth is. FundingPips operates a similar 80%-100% range with its own $2m scaling maximum and has accumulated nearly 46,000 Trustpilot reviews with a healthy 4.5-star average again indicative of a longer runway to build trust than Blueberry Funded has enjoyed. TopStep is also worth a mention for futures traders, as it has a very forgiving drawdown calculation, which is based on the end of day, which many swing and futures traders prefer over intraday drawdown, and has established a reputation particularly in the payouts arena, not for the profit split headline.
In other words, if your primary concern is the largest possible track record and the most thorough reviews, FTMO is the better option and if scaling ceiling or payout speed guarantees are of the highest importance to you, then FundingNext is currently the safer choice. Blueberry Funded’s advantage is its broker-backed execution quality, its very unusual menu of account types, and pricing that’s lower than most of its broker-backed competitors’ pricing, a case that’s strong for traders that value flexibility and price but has more reputation risk today than is currently associated with the more established names.
Who’s Really the Blueberry Funded Model?
The marketing and the complaint thread are removed, and Blueberry Funded is a very particular type of trader that fits the bill. The fact that the firm uses a static drawdown model for prime accounts and that they don’t offer a consistency rule for prime accounts actually benefits you if you already have a tested rules-based trading strategy with clearly defined risk per trade, don’t trade based on martingale recovery sizing and do not hold positions for seconds, but rather hours or days. In particular, swing traders and position traders have an easier time than aggressive scalpers, as the daily drawdown reset feature and news trading restrictions present the most friction for the high-frequency and intraday trading style.
The traders who size up after losing a little bit more, who trade into the day when the news is choppy, and who haven’t yet found a solid footing and are relying on the funded account to finance their learning curve are more likely to find themselves in trouble. As with all prop companies, traders who want to use Blueberry Funded should be profitable and disciplined on a demo or personal account, and should not be using it to get their trading footing so that they can go on to become profitable.
Directness is a good thing when it comes to geography, too. Unlike most other CFD-related firms, which have a list of sanctioned countries that they typically do not list, Australia is on many of the lists of restricted countries for CFD products offered by the firm’s parent broker (Blueberry Funded), and it is actually not available for use by U.S. residents, perhaps counterintuitively, since the parent broker is Australian. Outside of those limited areas, the qualifications are typically that you successfully complete the normal identity verification procedures for Blueberry Markets during registration.
How to Improve Your Odds Before You Buy a Challenge
While you may or may not select Blueberry Funded specifically, a couple of habits will help you increase your odds in any challenge you undertake with a prop firm, and it’s something you should keep in mind before you pay a buck to evaluate a prop firm.
Before trading, read the rules do not wait for a breach notice. Usually, rules pages are updated regularly, and because Blueberry Funded itself has evolved its own prohibited-strategy framework, this might not actually be the rules that are in play when you purchase the account. Take special note of the time of day that the fund’s balance-or-equity snapshot is calculating (the Blueberry Funded one is at 5 PM EST), as that is a detail that is easy to miss, and potentially costly to misunderstand, and also for exactly what constitutes a restricted strategy in your specific account type the rules could meaningfully differ between Prime and Rapid, even within the same account.
Its size is well below the maximum that is allowed under the rules. The daily and maximum drawdowns that are posted by any firm are the absolute maximum that the firm allows before disqualification, not a goal to aim for. If professional risk management is used in a funded account, then the management’s risk can usually be no more than a few percentage points per trade and a single poor trade or even a poor week will not jeopardize the entire evaluation. Use the drawdown limit like you would a fire escape: know where it is, don’t walk towards it on purpose.
Maintain your own records. While many prop firm disputes have been about whether or not a particular trade actually did that, it isn’t paranoid to periodically take screenshots of your open positions, your stop losses, and your account state. If a dispute does occur, it is better to have your own evidence that is timestamped than to have just the firm’s evidence from the dashboard after the fact.
Don’t do anything that looks like size chasing in the aftermath of a defeat. With the way martingale-like activity is being dealt with across the industry, particularly with complaints about small lot size increases after losing trades coming out of Blueberry Funded, it is best to stick to a mechanical approach to position sizes, and not allow an automated review system to be run too much on “how I am managing my trades.
If you’re investing in funded trading as a way to make money, spread your risk between multiple companies. Having all your trading capital-access strategy put behind one firm, even the best-established, means that one firm’s dispute, platform problem, or policy change can take you out of the game. A trader who takes the problem of his prop firm as a real business company will inevitably evaluate several companies at once, and not just focus everything on one company.
The Bigger Picture: Why Prop Trading Exploded in the First Place
It is hardly surprising that Blueberry Funded has grown so quickly, given the growth of the entire prop trading category. It’s been a significant increase, seeing a rise of approximately 607% from 2020 to 2024, and, again, by some more recent 2026 analyses, the surge in interest has been even more pronounced as the futures-focused firms have attracted a whole new cohort of search traffic on top of the initial forex-induced boom. In an industry very few retail traders had known prior to 2020, the number of monthly global searches for “prop firm” had more than doubled, now reaching over 49,500 per month by the end of 2025.
The dollar values convey a similar narrative. Based on independent estimates, the total value that the global proprietary trading industry generates is around $20 billion and is generated by over 2,000 firms, with the majority of their retail-facing sales of evaluation products being sold to traders outside the U.S. FTMO’s 2024 revenue was just about $329 million, a 53% increase from the previous year, and had over 2.3 million open trading accounts on its books. Since 2022, Apex Trader Funding, a futures trading company, has paid out over $598 million in total payouts. These are not numbers of one or two retail trading corners, they are a fundamental change in the way a significant proportion of retail traders are trading with capital, no longer making deposits of their own money in a brokerage account, but trading someone else’s money.
The growth has not been consistent. The worst month of the year in terms of negative consequences for the industry was February 2024, when True Forex Funds’ platform was disqualified by MetaQuotes, triggering a domino effect of similar terminations and ultimately leading to over 80 prop firms going out of business that month alone. The companies that have weathered all those changes and the new companies that have come out since have tended to be the ones that’ve been more willing to go with precisely the positioning that Blueberry Funded is all about: broker support, regulatory alignment, and infrastructure not requiring a third party to simply pull the plug at a whim. If that is sufficient to stave off the next shakeout for taking a greater number of companies remains to be seen, but it’s a logical reaction to what the last one revealed. The real takeaway is that the infrastructure and regulatory environment are important factors to consider when choosing a brokerage, but they are not enough to make a decision by themselves: traders should read the rules before using any prop firm, understand in detail how they pay out, and spread their holdings across more than one provider in 2026.
The Bottom Line
Blueberry Funded is not in the traditional sense of a scam, such as a business that charges fees and then goes out of business. It’s a real, broker-backed prop trading firm with a huge variety of account types, a competitive price point and a growing payout record since it was launched in 2024. If you are a strict trader and someone who has tested their strategy and adheres to it in a strict manner, in particular if you are a swing trader who enjoys the flexibility of a prime account, there is a viable argument for selecting the prime account over more expensive and regimented options.
It’s also a young company which is in a real shitstorm at the moment, having a Trustpilot account that is flagged for some guidelines violations, and a history of traders challenging the decisions of whether they are entitled to money-back guarantees, which seems oddly like a request for a refund. The first fact doesn’t negate the second fact. The honest answer is that Blueberry Funded is for traders who read the fine print, trade based on a technique and not emotion, keep a record of everything along the way and are prepared to accept from the outset that this is a business like any other – and as with all businesses, good or bad, there is no guarantee of a payout. If you are already a trader who fits that description, you need to seriously consider Blueberry Funded. Otherwise, don’t let an evaluation fee or the percentage of profit or spread comparison influence you.
