IQ Capital Advertises 80% Off Plus Buy Three Get One Free on Its Own Banner, While Its Email Promotes Only the 3+1
IQ Capital is running a flash sale that its own home page advertises as 80% off plus a buy three, get one free offer across every product, while the email the firm sent to its list on 6 October promotes only the buy three, get one free part and a refund mechanic on Instant Funding, and never mentions the discount at all. For a trader deciding where to spend money this week, that gap matters: acting on the email alone would mean missing the headline saving the firm is advertising on its own site. IQ Capital has also left two different discount banners rendering on the same page, one of them labelled a summer sale, and has published no closing date, time or time zone for either in plain text.
What the Firm Advertises and What the Email Says
The promotional bar on iqcapital.io reads, in visible text, “Flash sale” above the line “80% OFF + Buy 3, Get 1 FREE on everything”. That is the firm’s own published position on its own home page, and it covers two separate benefits applied to its full product range rather than to challenges alone.
The email, sent at 13:01 UTC on 6 October over the signature of founder and managing director Christoph Radecker, describes the position differently. It says two offers are currently live. Under a heading reading “Flash Sale, this week only, until Friday” it lists “3+1” for challenges, explained as “Buy 3 Challenges, get the 4th of the same size for free”, and “100%” for Instant Funding, explained as “Purchase price back with your first payout”. The body repeats both in sentences and closes with the line that both offers are only valid this week. Nowhere does it mention a percentage discount.
So the firm is advertising a bigger offer on its site than it is describing to its own mailing list. It also scopes the free account differently: the email limits buy three, get one free to challenges, while the banner says it applies to everything, which on IQ Capital’s product menu would include Instant Funding. The firm has not reconciled the two, and the terms shown at checkout are the ones that bind.
There is a second problem on the same page. A separate banner renders above the flash sale bar reading “Up to 85% off Challenges & Funding + Raffle!” under the label “Summer Sale”. That is a third discount figure, in October, sitting alongside an 80% figure and a mailing that quotes neither. JoinProp is not asserting that the summer sale is still live. The point is about the reader: a visitor landing on the page today sees two competing percentage claims and has no published way to tell which applies to the product they are about to buy.
The Account Terms the Discount Applies To
The plan table on the home page publishes two sizes in detail, and the numbers are worth reading before any percentage is applied to them.
The 50K account is listed at $245 for the challenge with a $49 one time fee charged after you pass. Its simulated profit target is $3,000, its maximum drawdown is $2,000 calculated on an end of day trailing basis, its daily loss limit is listed as $1,000 with an asterisk, there is no consistency rule, the duration is 30 days, an extension costs $19, and a trader may hold up to 10 accounts.
The 100K account is listed at $475 with a $95 one time fee after passing. Its target is $6,000, its maximum drawdown is $3,000 on the same end of day trailing basis, its daily loss limit is $1,500 with the same asterisk, consistency is again none, duration is 30 days, extension is $19, and the account cap is again 10.
Read as percentages, the larger account is the tighter one. Both carry a 6% target, but the 50K allows a 4% maximum drawdown against the 100K’s 3%, and the 50K’s daily loss limit is 2% of the starting balance against 1.5% on the 100K. A trader scaling up is therefore taking on a stricter risk envelope, not a looser one. Anyone unfamiliar with how these limits interact should read our explainer on drawdown in prop trading before buying on a discount.
The same page also carries a claim that sits badly next to that table. The hero section lists “No daily loss limit available” as a feature, directly above a plan table that assigns a specific daily loss limit to both published sizes and marks each with an asterisk the page never explains. A no daily loss limit variant may exist on another product, with the asterisk pointing to a footnote the page does not render. The firm has not said so, and until it does the honest summary is that IQ Capital publishes a daily loss limit and separately advertises not having one.
Payouts, Platforms and the Numbers the Firm Publishes About Itself
IQ Capital splits its range into futures, served through Quantower, ATAS and Deepchart, and CFD plus crypto. Within those it lists Core, One Day Pass, Rapid, flagged as faster payouts and marked new, and Instant Funding, described as skipping the challenge. The home page states that payouts go out in crypto or by bank transfer with no minimum, and that the first payout comes after 10 active trading days. It advertises a profit split of up to 90%, up to 10 accounts, entry from $9, and end of day drawdown with up to two forgiven breaches.
On its own performance, the firm publishes 20,000 or more active traders, a maximum payout processing time of 48 hours, more than $3.5 million paid out in total, and traders in 52 countries. It also describes itself as the first prop trading firm with TUV certified expertise. One inconsistency is worth flagging: the page states a 4.7 out of 5 rating in one block and 4.8 stars in another. IQ Capital is a brand of BEYOND IQ CAPITAL Ltd, Saint Lucia.
Against that $3.5 million lifetime payout figure, a free fourth account is a marketing cost the firm can carry easily. That is context rather than criticism. How much a bonus account is worth depends entirely on whether a trader can pass an evaluation at all, and the arithmetic of profit split terms decides that, not the number of accounts in the basket.
What IQ Capital Has Not Published
Several things a buyer would want settled are not answered anywhere the firm has published.
Whether the 80% discount and the buy three, get one free offer combine, or whether choosing one forfeits the other, is not stated. Nor is whether the four accounts must be bought in a single transaction, whether the free fourth account carries identical rules and payout terms to the three purchased, or whether its post pass fee is waived. On Instant Funding, whether the refunded purchase price arrives as cash or as account credit is not stated, and nor is what happens to the entitlement if the account is breached before a first payout is reached.
The closing date is the clearest omission. The email says this week only and until Friday. The firm’s banner displays a countdown, but no date, time or time zone appears in text anywhere on the page. A countdown without a published deadline is not something a trader can plan around. Traders comparing this against other live October promotions can see the current set on our prop trading discounts page.
What This Means for the Broader Prop Industry
The pattern in this story is becoming the most common defect in prop firm marketing, and it is not deception so much as drift. A firm runs several promotional channels at once, a site banner, a countdown, an email list, an affiliate network, and each is updated on a different schedule. The result is a trader who receives three versions of the same week with no way to reconcile them. JoinProp has documented the same shape at Funded7, whose home page advertised last month’s code while its product page carried this month’s.
The second pattern is the free account as the industry’s default sweetener. A discount reduces what a firm collects today. A conditional extra account costs nothing unless the trader succeeds, and most do not. That is why buy three get one free, buy one get one and free resets have largely displaced straight price cuts in the promotions JoinProp tracks. A trader who was going to buy four accounts anyway is genuinely better off. It does mean the headline number is a poor guide to value and the rules underneath it are the only thing that is.
The practical lesson is cheap to apply. Read the terms at checkout rather than in the email, screenshot them before paying, and treat any promotion without a published closing date as one that can end without notice. For how firms differ on exactly these points, see our 2026 prop firm comparison.
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