The HTF Challenge
Hold · The · Floor
Can you hold the floor all the way to ×10?
One month. A $500 demo account. One rule — you do not trade below your floor. That is the entire game. It is simulated money, there is no entry fee and no prize money, and the only thing on the line is whether you can keep a line you drew yourself when nobody is watching.
Put me on the board →Simulated Funds · No Income Claims · Not an Offer · Education Only
HTF — In the Order You Already Lived It
If you have traded a funded account, none of this is new to you. It is the thing you were already doing, moved to a market where the line is yours to set.
Every funded day you have ever traded was a day spent holding a floor. Daily loss limit, trailing drawdown, the number that ends the account if you touch it. You did not think of it as a skill because it was a condition of the job — but holding a line under pressure, for weeks, is the whole of it.
The firm handed you your number. Here you write it yourself, before the first order, and nobody takes anything away if you cross it. That sounds easier and it is the harder version — the discipline is identical, the enforcement is gone, and what is left is whether you meant it.
The payouts were theirs to approve and the rules were theirs to set. The ability to hold a line was never theirs, and it is the one thing that walks out of the firm with you. Here it is a $255 line on a $500 simulated base, in a market you have not traded yet — same skill, new venue.
Simulated. The gap between the $500 base and the $255 floor.
Simulated. The gap between the base and the $5,000 top of the board.
A demo account and about a month of screen time. Nothing to buy, ever.
Those two numbers are the shape of the challenge — the distance down to the floor and the distance up to the board — not a forecast, an average, or anything anyone has made. Nobody makes money here: the whole challenge runs on simulated funds. A floor is also the level at which a stop triggers, not a price you are guaranteed to exit at; gaps and outages can carry an account straight through a level.
What’s Actually Being Scored
Every Other Challenge Scores the Upside
Hit the target, pass. So everybody optimises for the target, and the way you optimise for a target is to take more risk near the end of it. That is backwards, and every trader who has blown an account late in a good run already knows it.
This One Scores the Floor
The only thing being measured is whether you traded below a line you set before you started. The ×10 is the fun part. The floor is the part that is actually hard, and the part that transfers to every account you will ever run.
Which Means the Run Can Go Past the Goal
The rules let a run finish anywhere between the floor and the board. Reach ×10 in a fortnight and you are done early; never get close and the month still counts as held, provided the floor held. Neither end of that range is the score — the floor is.
Why a Floor Is Harder Than a Target
A target pulls. It gives you something to want, and wanting is easy — nobody has ever needed to be motivated to make money. A floor does the opposite. It asks you to do nothing at the exact moment doing something feels most urgent, and it asks you to do nothing repeatedly, for weeks, with no applause.
That is why we score it. Almost everything that ends a trading account is a decision made in a small window where the rule and the feeling disagreed, and the feeling won. The window is usually about ninety seconds long. You cannot train for it by reading, and you cannot train for it on a chart replay, because both of those let you off. You can only train for it by being in the window, on a live tape, with a line you already committed to and an audience of one.
A month is the right length for that. It is long enough to contain at least one bad week — and the bad week is the entire point of the exercise, because it is the only part of the month that tells you anything about yourself. A good week teaches almost nothing.
And it runs on demo precisely so the lesson is clean. Real money adds a second problem — can you afford this — on top of the one we are actually training. Solve the discipline first, on money that cannot hurt you. It is the same reason a pilot logs hours in a simulator, and nobody thinks less of the simulator for it.
It’s a Run, Not a Job Application
Think of it the way you’d think of a ranked season rather than an interview. There is a board, there is a month, there are rules everyone runs under, and at the end you have a record you can look at. That is it. We are not evaluating you for anything, there is no funding at the end of it, and nobody here is going to hand you capital — we can’t and we won’t. Give someone a fish and all they have is dinner, which is roughly what funding is. We’d rather teach you to fish. The challenge exists because the run is worth doing and the skill is yours to keep afterwards.
Which also means you cannot really lose it. Blow past ×10 in two weeks and you had a great run. Touch the floor on day three and you found out something real about your process in three days instead of three years, at a cost of nothing. Those are both good months.
The Rules, in Four Lines
One account
A $500 demo. Not a tier, not a copy, not a pool — one account, and every decision on it is yours.
One floor
$255, set before the first order. That is $245 of simulated money between you and the end of the run.
One month
Roughly twenty trading sessions. Start on the first session of the month, stop on the last.
One Line to Beat
$5,000 is the top of the board. Reaching it ends your run early — in this challenge that counts as finishing, not as a reason to keep pressing.
That is the whole of it. The full breakdown — sizing, the setup walkthrough, and what usually decides the month — is on the next page, and you get there by signing up below. No waiting on an email.
If You Already Trade a Funded Account
Then you are the person this was built for, and you are going to find the framing familiar — because you have already done the hard version. You passed an evaluation. You have traded under a drawdown rule with a real consequence attached to it. You know what the last day of a losing week feels like when the rule says stop. Most people signing up for a trading challenge are trying to acquire that; you already have it, which means this month is not about building the discipline. It is about pointing it somewhere new.
The somewhere new is forex, and the familiar part is the chart. The instruments are largely the ones already on your screen — gold, the indices, oil — and the way you read them transfers. What does not transfer is everything underneath: retail forex trades over the counter against a dealer rather than on a central exchange, with its own leverage regime, overnight financing, hours and contract sizes, and the account is yours rather than a firm’s. Treat the venue as new even though the chart looks old.
And the cost of finding out is zero, which is the point of running the test at this size. No dollar of yours moves — the base is simulated. You are not risking a diversification decision on a real allocation; you are spending a month of screen time to learn whether a second avenue is worth having at all, before anything is committed to it.
One honest caveat, since you will spot it anyway: prop firms have their own rules about what else you trade and how. Check yours. Nothing here asks you to break them, and we are not in a position to tell you what your agreement does or does not permit — read it yourself rather than taking our word for it.
Education only; simulated funds. HOLD THE FLOOR is a free educational exercise run on demo accounts. There is no entry fee, no prize money, no funding, and nothing for sale. The $500, $255 and $5,000 figures are the parameters of that exercise — not a projection, an expectation, a track record, or a representation that any participant will or is likely to reach them. No income claim is made or implied, and no result on a demo account predicts a result on a live one. You must be 18 or older to take part. Availability of demo trading accounts varies by country and is set by the broker, not by us; nothing here is directed at anyone in a jurisdiction where it would be unlawful.
Self-directed; registration. Any account you open is opened in your own name and traded at your own discretion. Kingdom Portfolios takes no custody of anyone’s funds, does not trade anyone’s account, and accepts no investment capital. Kingdom Portfolios LLC is a Wyoming limited liability company. It is not registered with the NFA or CFTC as a Commodity Trading Advisor and offers no managed-account services; registration, when and if obtained, does not imply that the NFA or CFTC has approved or endorsed any entity, person, or method. Nothing here is an offer, a solicitation, or investment, tax or legal advice. Trading forex and futures involves a substantial risk of loss, including the loss of everything put at risk, and is not suitable for everyone. See our disclosures.