For years, proprietary trading evaluations have followed one formula. Hit a percentage profit target, stay under a percentage drawdown, get funded. Pipcy, a prop trading firm with traders in 47 countries, has broken from that formula with the Pips Mastery Challenge, the industry’s first evaluation that measures traders in pips rather than dollars.
Instead of asking how much money a trader made, the program asks a harder question: how well does this person actually trade?
Why the Old Formula Falls Short
Consider how a standard prop evaluation works. A trader pays a fee, receives a simulated account of, say, $10,000 or $100,000, and must grow it by a set percentage, usually 8 to 10 percent, without breaching a maximum drawdown. On paper this looks like a fair test. In practice it often tests something else: how much risk a trader is willing to take under time pressure.
Two traders can run the same strategy on the same pairs with the same entries and exits, and finish with completely different results, because one of them sized positions more aggressively. A careful trader who banks 300 pips in a month with small positions can fail a dollar-based challenge. A reckless trader who gets lucky on two oversized positions can pass it. The test grades the outcome, not the skill behind it.
This shows up in the industry’s most uncomfortable number. Most participants fail prop firm challenges, and over-leveraging appears near the top of almost every analysis of why.
This is the problem Pipcy set out to solve. The firm was founded by Omer Ben Matityahu, a fintech entrepreneur with years of hands-on experience in the proprietary trading world, who built the company around a simple position: account size has distorted how the industry measures talent, and stripping the evaluation down to pips leaves nowhere to hide. A trader cannot over-leverage their way to a passing grade or blow up on one oversized position. What remains is execution, which is what the firm set out to reward.
How the Pips Mastery Challenge Works
The rules are short. Every account comes with a fixed lot size tied to its balance, from 0.05 lots on a $2,500 account up to 2 lots on a $100,000 account. Since position size is locked, every trader’s result comes down to the same thing: net pips gained or lost.
There are two variants. Mastery X2 sets a target of 500 net pips. Mastery X3 raises the target to 750 pips in exchange for a lower entry fee. In both versions the maximum loss is 250 pips. Traders need a minimum of three trading days, and there is no daily drawdown limit. That last point matters more than it sounds. Many traders consider the daily limit the harshest rule in standard evaluations, since one volatile session can end a challenge even when the account as a whole is fine.
The challenge runs only on forex pairs, through MetaTrader 5, with charting across 21 timeframes and depth of market on desktop and mobile. Keeping the test to one asset class keeps the scoring clean. A pip is a pip, and results can be compared across every account size on equal footing.
News trading, which many established firms restrict or ban, is allowed. Pipcy’s view is that a trader who can execute through high-impact events has a skill worth rewarding, not punishing.
Entry fees start at $18 for the X3 variant. Competing entry-level challenges commonly cost between $32 and $165, which makes Pips Mastery one of the cheapest ways into the funded trading space.
What Successful Traders Earn
Passing the challenge is step one of the model, not the end of it. Funded Pips Mastery traders scale into lot sizes of up to 16 lots as they move through funded levels, and can earn up to $400 per pip at the highest tiers. Profit splits reach 95 percent, among the highest available anywhere, and payout requests are processed within 48 hours.
The staged structure is the point. Rather than handing a trader maximum size on day one, the program unlocks larger fixed lots as consistency is proven. This mirrors how professional trading desks allocate risk. The trader who proves reliable at 0.20 lots earns the right to trade 1.60, then more.
There is a psychological effect here that the program’s design leans on. When a trader cannot increase size to chase back a loss, revenge trading loses its power, and attention shifts from the next hundred dollars to the next hundred pips. That thinking reflects the background of Vladimir Rybakov, Head of Pipcy Academy, a CFTe-certified financial technician with 19 years of market experience who began as a dealer at a brokerage, later traded proprietary funds, and has spent much of his career teaching traders why discipline outlasts bravado. The challenge builds that lesson into the rules themselves.
Education Built Around the Model
Pipcy pairs the challenge with free trading education through Pipcy Academy, led by Rybakov, an award-winning educator who speaks regularly at trading events around the world. The academy covers price action, risk management and market behavior, which are the exact skills a pip-based evaluation tests.
For newer traders still learning how prop firms work, the firm also runs an educational blog on proprietary trading, trading psychology and market analysis, plus a video hub with weekly forecasts and an active community on Discord, Telegram and YouTube.
A Growing Global Footprint
The numbers suggest the model has found its audience. Pipcy now counts more than 1,264 active traders across 47 countries and has paid out over $5.3 million in rewards, with live support running around the clock. The firm has been featured in Finance Magnates, FXEmpire, Benzinga and StreetInsider.
One detail sets the operation apart from most challenge providers. Pipcy built its technology in-house, including its platform, CRM and trader dashboard, rather than licensing third-party systems. The company, founded by traders and fintech entrepreneurs with over 15 years in forex, stocks and options, says owning the full stack is what lets it process payouts in 48 hours and ship changes based on trader feedback without waiting on vendors.
Alongside Pips Mastery, Pipcy offers its Classic Challenge, a percentage-based program in one-step and two-step formats with a 12 percent maximum loss, one of the highest drawdown allowances in the industry, no daily limit, and account scaling up to $3,000,000. Between the two programs, traders pick their own yardstick: percentages or pips.
A New Category, Not a New Feature
Pipcy is direct about where it thinks this goes. The company treats Pips Mastery as the start of a new category in trader evaluation rather than a product variation, and expects competitors to follow. Its position is that every serious competitive field eventually finds a way to separate skill from bankroll, the way poker did with tournament structures and chess did with ratings. Prop trading had not, until now. Whether or not rivals adopt the format, the record will show the industry’s first pip-based evaluation was built at Pipcy.
Traders can explore both variants of the Pips Mastery Challenge at pipcy.com/challenges/pips-mastery.
About Pipcy
Pipcy is a proprietary trading challenge platform built by traders and industry professionals. The firm offers performance-based evaluations, including the industry-first pip-based Pips Mastery Challenge and the flexible Pipcy Classic, free education through Pipcy Academy, and in-house technology, giving disciplined traders a clear path to rewards of up to a 95 percent performance split. Learn more at https://pipcy.com.
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