What is a trading tournament?

A trading tournament is a timed competition in which traders trade the same markets with equal simulated capital and are ranked against each other for a prize pool. The session has a fixed start and end, every entrant faces identical conditions, and the final leaderboard decides who gets paid.

The key word is against each other. In normal trading your opponent is the market; in a tournament your opponent is the rest of the lobby. You do not need a great absolute result — you need a better one than the other entrants over the same window. That changes the game: a disciplined +2% can win a session where everyone else over-traded into losses.

On Sivex Play, trading is paper trading on live price feeds: the prices are real and move in real time, but no order is routed to an exchange. The entry fees and prize pools are real money. Every scheduled tournament runs for 30 minutes with $10,000 of identical simulated capital, across BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB, gold, silver, and WTI crude oil. See how tournaments work for the full session walkthrough.

Entry fees from the lobby fund the prize pool, minus a platform fee. The more entrants, the bigger the pool — the platform takes its fixed cut and has no stake in who wins.

This is the opposite of a prop firm evaluation fee, which goes to the firm whether you pass or fail. In a tournament, the money the players put in is the money the players win back; the operator is paid for running the event, not for your losses.

On Sivex Play, scheduled tournaments run from free up to $50 — free, $5, $10, $25, $50 — with most of the weekly schedule between $5 and $25. Players who want higher stakes host their own custom matches, from $100 up to $500 and beyond. Payouts widen with the field:

The phrase “trading competition” covers four distinct formats: exchange volume contests, broker demo contests, fantasy-style trading apps, and skill tournaments. They reward very different things.

Each format has a real audience. Exchange contests offer the largest pools anywhere if you already trade serious size on that venue. Demo contests cost nothing to try. Fantasy apps are a light way to follow markets. A skill tournament is the format to choose when you want the result to reflect how well you traded. For the crypto-specific comparison, see crypto trading competitions compared.

Skill tournaments score risk-adjusted return: profit counts, but reckless risk is penalised, so the leaderboard rewards how you made your return, not just how big it was.

Sivex Play’s model is a worked example. Every entrant starts with an identical $10,000 of simulated capital and trades live price feeds for the session. The score is:

The effect is that a steady +4% with controlled risk routinely beats a wild +9% that rode a 20% drawdown. Up to the top 20% of a full lobby is paid. The full math, with examples, is in how tournament scoring works, and results are independently verifiable: trades are hashed into a Merkle tree every 5 minutes, the root is committed to Solana, and anyone can check the data at /verify.

No. A skill-based trading tournament is not gambling: outcomes are determined by trading decisions made against live market prices and ranked against other players, never against the house.

Three design facts separate it from a wager. First, there is no house edge on the outcome — the platform takes a fixed fee for running the event and has no stake in who wins. Second, the same inputs produce the same score: the result is a deterministic function of the trades you placed. Third, skill persists — the traders who manage drawdown and size positions well finish high repeatedly, which is exactly what a game of chance cannot produce. The full argument is at is Sivex Play gambling?

A prop firm challenge is a solo evaluation against a fixed rulebook; a trading tournament is a head-to-head competition against other traders over a single timed session.

The prop challenge runs for days or weeks, costs more per attempt, and pays out a funded account if you pass. The tournament is over in 30 to 90 minutes, costs a fixed low entry, and pays a cash prize-pool share by rank. They also feed different goals: many traders use cheap, repeated tournament sessions to drill the drawdown discipline a prop evaluation tests. The full comparison is at trading tournament vs. prop firm challenge.

Start free: practise in TradeLab, then enter a low buy-in tournament when your process feels repeatable.

• ◆Practise first. TradeLab offers free practice on hidden-outcome historical scenarios — 7 sessions a day on the free tier — and seeds your Sivex Rating up to around 1,200.
• ◆Enter small. Most of the weekly schedule runs at $5 to $25 buy-ins (the schedule tops out at $50), every scheduled session is 30 minutes, and free tournaments exist too.
• ◆Climb. Ranked matches move your rating after the seed, and the Drop pays $5,000 every two weeks to the top 1% of the rating — 6 ranked matches in the window, no separate entry.