Short answer: yes, they exist and they are genuinely free. The three types are broker demo contests (marketing), prop firm competitions (recruitment) and independent contest platforms (profit-share). The prize that matters most is a funded account, because it converts one good week into ongoing earning power.
The three types, and what each organiser actually wants
1. Broker demo contests
Run by brokers to attract new accounts. Prizes are usually cash, gadgets or trading credit. Entry is free, the field is often huge, and the ranking is almost always raw return — which rewards maximum leverage rather than skill. Fun, low value for your development.
2. Prop firm competitions
Firms run these to find traders worth funding and to market themselves. Prizes are typically free evaluations or funded accounts. Genuinely valuable when they happen — but irregular, and you cannot build a plan around a giveaway that may not run again for months.
3. Independent contest platforms
Platforms whose entire product is the contest. Prizes are funded accounts, and the platform earns from a share of winners' future payouts rather than from entry fees.
TradeWars works this way. A new contest opens every Monday 00:00 UTC and closes Sunday 23:59 UTC. Free entry, MT5 demo account, no deposit and no card. The top 3 by weekly return each win a €5,000 funded account; the best trader of the month wins €25,000. Winners keep 75% of the real payouts they generate — the platform's 25% is its only revenue, so it earns only when winners do.
How to pick a competition worth your time
- Check the ranking metric first. Ranked on absolute return with no risk constraint? The winner will be whoever gambled hardest and got lucky. Look for drawdown or consistency tie-breaks — those reward actual skill.
- Check the field size. This is the single biggest factor in your odds and almost nobody looks at it. A contest with 10 entrants and 3 prizes is a completely different proposition from one with 10,000. Look at the live leaderboard before entering.
- Check the reset rules. Contests that reset every week give you a fresh start after a bad run. Contests running for months mean one early blow-up ends your season.
- Check what the prize actually is. $500 cash is spent in a month. A funded account is an income stream if you can trade it.
- Check what they ask for. A contest never needs a deposit, a card, or your master trading password. Read-only investor password access is normal and safe; anything more is not.
How to tell if a leaderboard is honest
This is the uncomfortable part of the industry: most contest leaderboards are unverifiable. You see a name and a number, and you have to take it on faith. That is exactly how fake results and house-favoured winners survive.
The test is simple — can you audit the winner?
- Can you see the trades that produced the result, not just the final number?
- Are open positions visible while the contest is running?
- Are the rules published before the contest starts and left unchanged?
- If the organiser runs its own accounts, does it say so openly?
On TradeWars, every participant's live open positions and full trade history are public — including the accounts TradeWars operates itself, which are disclosed and compete under identical rules. Click any name on the leaderboard and you can reconstruct exactly how that result happened.
How to actually win one
- Trade the metric you are scored on. If ranking is weekly return with a drawdown tie-break, a steady +8% with small drawdown can beat a wild +30% that nearly blew up.
- Do not gamble on day one. In a weekly contest, most entrants blow up early trying to top the board immediately. Survival through Wednesday puts you ahead of a surprising share of the field.
- Enter early contests. A new platform has a small field. This is temporary and it is the single biggest edge available to you — mathematically better odds than any strategy tweak.
- Treat it as practice for funded rules. Trading under contest pressure with real stakes on the line is the closest free simulation of a prop evaluation you will get.
Free to enter, resets every Monday. The TradeWars weekly contest awards a €5,000 funded account to each of the top 3 traders. Join this week · Read the rules first