Trading With $MON: How MongoTrader's Virtual Economy Works

Published August 25, 2026 · MongoTrader Team

$MON is the currency of the MongoTrader platform: the virtual money you earn every day, spend on league entries and algorithm streams, and win back from prize pools. It is separate from the simulated cash inside your portfolios, and it has no cash value — it is earned and won, never bought.

New traders on MongoTrader often ask the same question in their first week: what is the difference between the balance in my portfolio and the $MON balance on my account? They are two different kinds of virtual money with two different jobs. This guide explains what $MON is, how you earn it, what it pays for, how league prize pools are funded and paid out, and what $MON deliberately is not. Once the economy makes sense, planning a league calendar and an algorithm budget becomes straightforward.

Portfolio cash vs. $MON

Every portfolio you create on MongoTrader comes with its own simulated cash. That is the money you use to buy stocks, crypto, ETFs, and the other asset classes against real-time market data. When you place an order, the cost comes out of the portfolio's cash; when you sell, the proceeds go back in. It behaves like the cash in a brokerage account, and it never leaves the portfolio.

$MON is different. It is a single account-level balance that sits outside all of your portfolios. You do not use $MON to buy shares, and a portfolio's gains and losses do not change your $MON balance directly. Instead, $MON is the currency of the platform itself: it is what leagues charge to enter and what algorithm streams consume to run.

A useful mental model is a trading floor with an entry fee. The money you trade with inside the building is portfolio cash. $MON is what you pay at the door — and what you carry out if you finish near the top.

How you earn $MON

There are two ways to earn $MON: claim it daily, or win it in leagues.

• Daily $MON. Every account earns a daily allowance, and the amount depends on your subscription tier: 3 $MON per day on Free, 10 per day on Premium, and 30 per day on Max. You claim it in the app, so opening MongoTrader once a day on web or iOS is enough to keep your balance growing.
• League prizes. Leagues pay $MON prize pools to their top finishers. Place well and you can earn back your entry fee many times over, which is how active competitors fund their next entries.

Because $MON cannot be bought outright, a bigger bank account does not translate into a bigger $MON balance. The daily allowance and the leaderboard are the only sources, which keeps the economy tied to participation and skill rather than to spending.

What $MON is spent on

$MON has two uses on the platform.

• League entry fees. Leagues charge an entry fee in $MON. Paying it enters the portfolio you choose into the competition, and in user-created leagues the fee goes straight into the prize pool. Your very first league entry ever is free — the fee is waived — so you can try a league before spending anything you have earned.
• Algorithm streams. The Algorithm Builder lets you design and backtest strategies from built-in templates such as DCA, momentum, and mean reversion, or connect your own through the External API template. Running a strategy live, as a stream that trades for you, costs $MON. Your tier sets how many streams can be active at once: 1 on Free, 3 on Premium, and 15 on Max.

Trading itself never costs $MON. Creating portfolios, placing orders across every asset class, and following the leaderboards are all part of the account, and the Free tier includes full trading access.

How league prize pools work

Where the prize comes from depends on who created the league.

User-created leagues. Anyone can create a league for friends or a community. The entry fees paid by everyone who joins are pooled into a $MON prize pool, and at the end of the league that pool is split among the top finishers according to the league's payout curve — the schedule that decides how much first place takes versus second, third, and so on. A larger field means a larger pool.

Platform leagues. Leagues run by MongoTrader can carry a platform-funded $MON pool, so the prize does not depend on how many people enter. Some platform leagues offer a real-money pool instead; those are the USD cash-prize leagues, which have their own rules and eligibility requirements.

Three rules apply to entry fees whichever kind of league you enter:

• Your first entry is free. The fee on your very first league entry ever is waived.
• Fees are refunded if a league does not fill. If a league does not reach its minimum number of entries, entry fees are refunded to everyone who entered.
• Re-entering costs the fee again. Leagues can allow you to re-enter mid-league, which resets your baseline and wipes your standing back to the start. That is a fresh entry, and it charges the entry fee again — so re-entry is a real decision, not a free undo. Our post on league re-entry and your first league free goes into the details.

For how leaderboards and scoring work, see our guide on how trading competitions work, and browse what is open right now on the leagues page.

What $MON is not

$MON has no cash value. You cannot buy it, and you cannot withdraw it or convert it into real money. It is earned through daily claims and won in leagues, and it is spent only inside the platform. That keeps the economy fair: nobody can pay their way to a bigger balance, and a large $MON balance is a record of consistent play rather than a deposit.

It is also not your trading capital. Losing a trade inside a portfolio does not cost you $MON, and a winning portfolio does not mint any. The only way trading results turn into $MON is by finishing near the top of a league you entered.

The one place real money appears is the USD cash-prize leagues, which run on a separate real-money pool with their own eligibility rules. Ordinary $MON leagues are entirely virtual.

Subscription tiers and $MON

Your tier changes how much $MON you claim each day and how many algorithm streams you can run. It does not change the rules of the leagues themselves.

• Free. Full trading access across every asset class, league entry, 1 active algorithm, 3 $MON per day, and limited API access.
• Premium. Market research tools, 3 active algorithms, 10 $MON per day, and an ad-free experience.
• Max. 15 active algorithms and 30 $MON per day.

Free is a complete way to use MongoTrader. The paid tiers accelerate the economy — more daily $MON to enter more leagues, more streams to run more strategies — without changing what a $MON is worth.

Making your $MON go further

• Claim every day. The daily allowance is the steady source, and it only arrives when you claim it in the app.
• Use the free first entry on a league you can finish. The waived fee is a one-time benefit; pick a league whose length suits your schedule.
• Check the minimum entries and the payout curve before you enter. They tell you whether the league is likely to run and how the pool will be split.
• Backtest before you stream. Running a stream costs $MON, so prove a strategy on historical data before you put it live.
• Treat re-entry as a new entry. It charges the fee again, so re-enter only when the reset is worth it.

Think of $MON as a scorekeeper for how well you use the platform. Claim it, spend it deliberately, and let the leaderboard do the rest.

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