Same Account, Same Clock, Same Rules
Fairness is not a slogan. It is a list of design decisions, each with a cost. Here are the ones we made, and why we made them.
Nobody questions the result of a 100-metre final.
The runners are different. Their training, their coaches and their talent are different. But every one of them starts at the same line, runs the same distance, hears the same gun and is timed by the same clock. Because the conditions are equal, the result means something. The fastest person won.
Sport earns trust through its conditions, not its outcomes. That is the idea at the centre of TSTrader, and we have tried to apply it with the same discipline a race official applies to a starting line.
Every event on TSTrader rests on three promises: the same account, the same clock and the same rules. Each one sounds simple. Each one forced us to make choices that a less careful platform would avoid. This is a short account of those choices.
The same account
In a 1v1 Trading Duel, both traders receive an identical MetaTrader 5 account. Same starting balance, same leverage, same instruments, same conditions. Account sizes run from $5,000 to $1,000,000, and both traders in a Duel always trade the same size.
This matters more than it first appears. In ordinary trading, the size of your account changes everything: how much risk you can carry, how long you can survive a bad run, how much a single good idea is worth. A trader with a large account and average skill can look better than a trader with a small account and great skill.
On TSTrader, the account is not yours to bring. It is given to you, and it is the same as your opponent's. The size of your savings does not decide the result. Your decisions do.
The same clock
Every event has a fixed timeline that both traders know before they pay. A Standard 1v1 Trading Duel runs for four hours. A Multi Trader Cup moves through a group stage, a round of 16, quarter-finals, semi-finals and a final, each with its own clock.
When the clock reaches zero, we measure both accounts at the same instant, using Equity: the balance plus or minus the value of every open position. We chose Equity deliberately. If we measured balance alone, a trader could leave a losing trade open and hope it is ignored. Equity does not allow that. Whatever is in your account at the final second, good or bad, counts.
There is something honest about a hard stop. It removes the most comfortable lie in trading, the one that begins with it will come back. On TSTrader, there is no later. There is only the bell.
On TSTrader, there is no later. There is only the bell.
The same rules
Every rule of an event is shown to you before you pay to enter it, and nothing changes once it starts. The rules of a Standard Duel are short:
- A maximum drawdown of 25 percent of the account. Reach it, and you lose at once.
- No daily drawdown limit.
- An Active Trader Rule: to win, you must finish at least 0.1 percent away from where you started, up or down. A trader cannot win by doing nothing.
Pro members can create Pro Duels with their own rules and timelines. Those rules are fixed when the Duel is created and shown in full to any trader before they accept. Nobody can change the terms halfway through.
What we chose not to do
Fairness is also about what you leave out.
We do not have consistency rules. We do not tell you how to trade, how often or with what. News trading, scalping, expert advisers and automated strategies are all welcome. If your edge is real, use it.
We do not have hidden conditions that appear only when you try to withdraw. If you win fairly, you are paid. That sentence should not need to be a selling point, but in this industry it is.
Fair play you can see
Two traders in a live Duel can watch each other's progress: equity, return and the time left. What they cannot see during the event are each other's open trades.
We made this decision for a simple reason. If you can see your opponent's positions while they are still open, the easiest strategy is not to trade well. It is to copy them, or to take the opposite position and wait. That turns a contest of skill into a contest of surveillance. So while an event is live, each trader sees only the other's closed trades. When the event ends, everything is visible.
The same thinking applies to ties. If two traders finish level to the cent, nobody has beaten anybody, and the entry fees go back to both wallets.
A record that means something
The last promise is the one we care about most, because it is the reason all the others exist.
When a result is produced under equal conditions, it can be trusted. And when it can be trusted, it can be recorded. Every win on TSTrader earns a certificate with its own number and a public page where anyone can check that it is real. Every result also feeds the Global Ranking, which is built from points for results, not from money. A win earns points and a loss costs points, and the scoring is the same for every trader at every account size.
For the first time, a trader can point to a record and say: this is what I did, against real opponents, under the same conditions, and you can check it.
That is what fairness buys. Not a slogan on a website, but a result that is worth something because of how it was produced. Same account. Same clock. Same rules. Everything else is up to you.