18th Street Trading Prop Firm Review

Updated and verified on 28 September 2026

Pricing snapshot

One purchase, one price, no subscription. The plan fee runs from $265 for a $25,000 plan to $1,595 for a $150,000 plan, and it is identical on all four platforms. There is no activation fee and no charge to advance between phases, and market data and platform fees are included through Phase 4.

The number worth holding on to is the ratio between the fee and the first payout. On the $25,000 plan you pay $265 and Phase 1 pays $500. On the $150,000 plan you pay $1,595 and Phase 1 pays $3,000. Complete one phase and the fee has come back with change, which is a different shape from the fee-rebate-on-first-payout model most CFD firms use.

Company and regulation

The listing company is 18th Street Trading, LLC, at 732 S 6th St, Ste R, Las Vegas, NV 89101. The founder is Jay R. Pocius, and the name comes from Chicago’s South Loop, where South Prairie Avenue meets East 18th Street. The firm is not regulated by any financial regulator.

The structure matters more than the address. 18th Street Trading is an affiliate of Prop Account, LLC. Prop Account, LLC provides the funding assessments and receives the assessment fees, and the Trader Agreement you sign before your first payout is with Prop Account, not with 18th Street Trading. 18th Street provides everything else. Two practical consequences: read which entity your agreement names, and expect the charge on your card statement to show as dashboardanalytix.com rather than as 18th Street Trading. The terms, privacy policy and refund policy are also hosted on that domain.

Maximum allocation is $325,000 in combined starting balances. You may hold one active account per plan size, so up to four at once, one of each size.

How the four phases work

There is one product and it does not branch. Every trader starts at Phase 1 on the plan size they bought, and the requirements are identical in all four phases and at all four sizes. Only the dollar amounts scale.

Resets are not available. A breached or expired account is replaced by buying a new plan and starting again at Phase 1, and nothing carries forward.

The trailing loss

The loss threshold sits 5% below the account’s highest end-of-day balance, so intraday spikes do not move it and intraday dips do not breach it. It follows the account up on a closing basis and never moves back down. Once the account closes 5% above its starting balance, the threshold locks at the starting balance permanently. On a $50,000 plan that means the breach level walks from $47,500 to $50,000 and then stops.

The 25% consistency ratio

Your best single trading day must be no more than 25% of total profit in the phase, measured as best day divided by total. It is not a breach rule: the account stays open and you keep trading until the ratio comes back into range. It is also what sets the four-day minimum, because one day at 25% of a target mathematically needs three more like it.

Contract limits

One standard contract on the $25,000 plan is tight. A single E-mini S&P 500 contract moves $50 a point against a $1,250 loss buffer, so the smallest plan is effectively a micro-contract plan.

Split and payouts

This is where 18th Street differs most from the rest of the futures field. In Phases 1 to 4 there is no profit split at all. Each phase pays a fixed amount on completion, and profit beyond the 9% target does not increase it. The payout has to be requested and completed before the next phase begins, and each new phase starts from a fresh balance.

Know Your Customer verification and the Trader Agreement with Prop Account must be completed before the first payout request. An account that does not pass KYC is closed.

Read that table both ways. The good half is that the fee is recovered on the first completed phase at every size, and four separate payouts arrive before you ever touch live capital. The less good half is the ceiling: a trader who makes 30% in Phase 2 of the $50,000 plan is paid $1,500, exactly the same as a trader who stops at 9%. The consistency ratio already discourages outsized days, and the fixed payout removes the reward for them entirely.

The Capital Partner live account

Completing Phase 4 moves the trader to a live exchange account, which 18th Street calls Capital Partner. It is real capital, not notional, and the terms change completely: no profit target, no consistency requirement, no time limit, a 90/10 split in the trader’s favour, and a fixed maximum loss at 50% of the balance rather than a trailing one.

The size gap is the thing to understand before you buy. The live account is sized separately from the plan and is a lot smaller: clearing four phases on a $150,000 plan gets you $18,000 of real capital. That is honest about what live risk capital costs, but a trader picturing $150,000 on the exchange at the end of the road will be disappointed.

Withdrawals on the live account are on demand for the first request, then once every 30 calendar days. Platform and market data fees, which are included through Phase 4, start coming out of the live balance monthly. If the live account breaches while it is in profit, the trader still receives their 90% share of the gains.

Payout data

There is none. 18th Street Trading discloses no payout figures at all, no total paid, no number of payouts, no largest single payout and no country breakdown, and it publishes no payout log.

A firm that launched this year cannot produce a record it does not have, so this is not evidence of anything going wrong. It is still the reason this review cannot tell you what actually happens when you press the payout button. Until a record exists, the phase-payout structure is the thing working in the trader’s favour: the first payout request comes after one completed phase rather than after months on a funded account, so it does not take long to find out for yourself.

Rules and fees at a glance

• Split: no split in Phases 1 to 4, fixed payouts instead. 90/10 on the live account.
• Fees: $265, $525, $1,000 and $1,595, one-time, the same on every platform. No activation fee, no phase fee, no monthly subscription. The plan fee is not refundable.
• Commissions: charged, at the same per-contract rates the exchanges and liquidity providers charge self-funded retail accounts. The firm quotes $2.18 per side on the E-mini S&P 500 and $0.71 per side on the Micro E-mini.
• Drawdown: 5% trailing, end of day only, measured on the closing balance. It locks at the starting balance once the account closes 5% up. No daily loss limit.
• Markets: futures only, on CME, COMEX, NYMEX and CBOT. Equity index, currency, energy, metals, agricultural and micro crypto contracts. Front month only; trading an out-month contract can cost the account.
• Platforms: DXFutures, Volumetrica Deepcharts, Rithmic, TickBlaze, ATAS. You pick one at signup and the fee is the same either way. NinjaTrader is not available.
• Market data: a CME attestation is required before trading, and Non-Professional status only. Professional subscribers cannot be supported.
• Trading window: Globex, 1700 CST to 1555 CST the next day. All positions auto-flatten at 1555 CST.
• Overnight and weekend holding: not permitted, in any phase or on the live account. On holiday sessions with an early close, automatic liquidation may not run and closing out is the trader’s responsibility.
• News trading: holding a position through a scheduled high-impact release is permitted, and a pre-set stop triggering inside the restricted window is not a violation. What is banned is opening a new position within three minutes either side of a red-folder release.
• Automation: automated strategies are permitted, subject to the prohibited trading policy. Off-the-shelf strategies sold to pass evaluations, latency or platform-error exploits and all-or-nothing sizing are prohibited and can end participation.
• Copy trading: permitted.
• Scalping: no scalping restriction.
• Consistency: 25% in every phase, best day divided by total profit. Not a breach rule; it delays completion rather than closing the account. None on the live account.
• Inactivity: a trade at least every 14 days in Phases 1 to 4 and every 7 days on the live account. The timer cannot be paused, including for travel.
• Resets: not available at any price.
• Accounts: one per plan size, up to four at once, capped at $325,000 in combined starting balances.
• Eligibility: 18 or over, and not resident in an OFAC-restricted jurisdiction. Further geographic limits may apply through technology providers.
• Payouts: requested on completing each phase and completed before the next one starts. Processing is immediate, no fee is deducted and there is no cap. On the live account, on demand once, then every 30 days.
• Tax: traders are treated as independent contractors and are responsible for their own taxes.
• Billing: appears on your statement as dashboardanalytix.com.

Verdict

18th Street Trading has done something unusual with the futures evaluation model, and most of it is in the trader’s favour. The whole specification is published before payment, down to the trailing-loss worked example and the consistency arithmetic, and the firm goes out of its way to list the conditions traders normally discover after paying. There is no daily loss limit, which is the rule that quietly ends more futures evaluations than anything else. The trailing loss stops trailing once the account is 5% up rather than following equity forever. And the money arrives early: the Phase 1 payout beats the plan fee at every size, so a trader who clears one phase is already ahead, which is a materially better deal than a fee rebate that lands on a first funded payout months later.

The costs of that design are real too. Four phases is a long road, each with its own 60-day clock that cannot be paused and a 14-day inactivity rule running underneath it, and there are no resets, so one bad afternoon in Phase 3 means buying a new plan and starting at Phase 1. Fixed payouts cap the upside inside the phases completely. The live account at the end is much smaller than the plan headline, $18,000 on a $150,000 plan. No overnight or weekend holding means this only works for intraday traders. And the firm is brand new with no payout history, running its assessments through an affiliate, Prop Account, LLC, with a card statement that reads dashboardanalytix.com.

The fair summary is a well-documented, day-trading-only futures programme with an unusually honest fee-to-first-payout ratio and no track record yet. Start at $50,000 or above if you want more than micro contracts to work with, check that your strategy survives a hard 1555 CST flatten and a 25% best-day ratio, and treat Phase 1 as the test of the firm as much as of yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions