Every prop firm evaluation on the market measures the same thing: how many dollars you made, as a percentage of your account. It sounds reasonable — until you look at how traders actually fail.
The industry's own numbers say roughly 90% of challenge participants don't pass. And the most common cause isn't bad analysis. It's oversized positions: a trader two good trades away from the target doubles their lot size to get there faster, and one adverse move wipes the account. Percentage-based targets don't just tolerate that behaviour — they quietly encourage it.
That's the problem Pipcy, a proprietary trading firm launched globally in 2026, set out to solve with the Pips Mastery Challenge — the industry's first evaluation measured in pips instead of dollars.
The Case Against Dollar-Based Metrics
A percentage target hides a critical variable: position size. Two traders can both finish +10%, one through fifty disciplined trades at consistent risk, the other through a single oversized gamble that happened to work. On a dollar-based scoreboard, they look identical. Only one of them is a professional.
Pip measurement strips that distortion out. A pip is the smallest standard unit of price movement in forex — and counting net pips instead of net dollars means the evaluation tracks execution quality: entries, exits, and consistency. Not bet sizing.
How Pips Mastery Works
The design rests on three mechanics:
Fixed lot sizes. Every account trades a set lot size tied to its balance — 0.05 lots on a $2,500 account, scaling to 2.0 lots on a $100,000 account. No guessing, no overleveraging. Every trader on the same tier competes under identical risk conditions.
Pip targets, pip limits. Traders choose between two variants: Mastery X2, with a 500-pip target, or Mastery X3, with a 750-pip target at a lower entry fee. Both set the maximum loss at 250 net pips — a boundary that no lot-size manipulation can game.
Rewards per pip. On funded accounts, performance converts to payouts at up to $400 per pip on the largest tiers, with lot sizes scaling as high as 16 lots as traders progress through funded levels.
The surrounding conditions follow the rest of Pipcy's programmes: no daily drawdown, three minimum trading days, news trading allowed, up to a 95% profit split, and payouts processed within 48 hours. Entry fees run from $18 for a $2,500 account to $419 for $100,000. The challenge runs exclusively on forex — the market where pip measurement is cleanest — on MetaTrader 5.
What This Changes for Traders
The practical effect of fixed lots is that risk per trade becomes a known constant. A stop 20 pips away always costs the same. That removes the single most destructive decision in every dollar-based challenge — "how much should I risk on this one?" — and replaces it with the only question that should matter: is this a good trade?
For traders who have failed percentage-based challenges through overleveraging rather than poor analysis, that's not a cosmetic difference. It's a different test, measuring a different skill — arguably the right one. For newcomers still learning what evaluations involve, this primer on what a prop firm is covers the standard model that pip-based scoring departs from.
Pipcy — which has drawn coverage from Finance Magnates, FXEmpire and Benzinga since launch — still offers a conventional percentage-based programme, the Classic Challenge, with one of the industry's most forgiving rulebooks: 12% maximum loss measured from the initial balance, no daily drawdown, and scaling up to $3 million.
But Pips Mastery is the firm's statement about where evaluations should go: away from account-size theatre, toward pure execution. In an industry where firms increasingly compete on splits and price, competing on measurement is a genuinely new axis.
Whether pip-based evaluation becomes an industry standard or stays a specialist's choice, it answers a question the 90% failure rate has been asking for years: what if the test rewarded the discipline it claims to select for?
Traders can try both models with a free trial, and current promotional offers are listed on the Pipcy website.
This article is paid content. It has been reviewed and edited by the Asian Trader editorial team to meet our content standards.