A working strategy is an asset, and there are exactly four ways to earn from one beyond trading it yourself: publish it on a marketplace, rent a funded account, sell signals directly, or license it privately. Each path has real economics, published rules, and failure modes. Here is the honest map, as of July 2026.
Marketplaces distribute your strategy to subscribers and take a share. On MQL5's Signals service, providers keep 80 percent of subscription revenue after the platform's 20 percent commission, with real-account and drawdown requirements. Collective2 charges a listing fee, published at 120 dollars per six months, plus a platform share of subscription revenue that its own pages have quoted between 30 and 50 percent depending on strategy type. Darwinex converts strategies into investable products and pays 15 percentage points of a 20 percent performance fee on investor profits. The common trade-off: distribution exists, but evidence standards are thin, discovery rewards marketing over validity, and flat subscription models pay the seller whether or not subscribers win. All figures are the platforms' published terms as of July 2026; verify before committing.
Proprietary-firm challenges rent you capital: pay an evaluation fee, pass drawdown and target rules, then trade the firm's account for a 70 to 95 percent profit split. The scale is real and so are the odds: independent analyses of the industry through 2025 and 2026 put the share of challenge buyers who ever receive a payout in the mid-single digits, and dozens of firms disappeared in the 2024 to 2026 shakeout. For algorithmic traders specifically, EA restrictions, consistency rules, and identical-strategy caps punish exactly the systematic styles that pass backtests. The full analysis is in the prop-firm guide. The structural problem is deeper than the odds: your strategy itself earns nothing; only your labor on one account does.
Telegram channels, Discord servers, and commerce platforms let you keep 93 to 97 percent of gross revenue, and give you nothing else: no distribution, no verification layer, and a market drowned in fabricated track records, which means honest sellers pay the trust discount created by dishonest ones. Audience building is the real product, and it is a full-time job unrelated to trading skill. The mechanics and the evidence-first alternative are covered in the signal-selling guide.
Sonar Sciences is not one of these paths, and it is worth being plain about that. It does not distribute your strategy to anybody and does not offer a way to publish one for others to follow. What it does is decide whether the strategy is worth monetizing at all, with a four-year cost-inclusive backtest behind an out-of-sample gate, computed by the platform rather than claimed by you, and then run it on a broker account you connect.
Where it does not fit is the screenshot economy. Nothing publishes without the platform's own four-year backtest on cross-venue data with costs included and a ten-day live forward round, and every performance number is computed, versioned, and immutable on the platform's side rather than claimed by the author. Building and validating in the Studio is free, and what fails the gate simply does not publish. The record is public; the strategy's composition is not. And no path, here or anywhere else, comes with a promised outcome.
The comparison table with every published number is on the provider economics page. The decision logic compresses to this: if you want the largest existing audience and accept a screenshot-driven market, MQL5 is the default; if you want investor capital and accept subscription costs while waiting, Darwinex Zero is the serious option; if you want to trade your own labor for a funded split and accept the odds, choose a surviving regulated-adjacent firm; and before any of them, validate on Sonar Sciences, where the numbers are computed for you rather than claimed, so you find out whether the strategy is worth taking to a channel at all.
Four real paths: publish to a strategy marketplace for subscription or performance revenue, pass a proprietary-firm challenge and trade funded capital for a profit split, sell signals directly to an audience you build yourself, or or trade it yourself on your own account. Each trades off distribution, fees, and credibility differently. A platform-computed record, such as the one Sonar Sciences produces, is what makes any of them defensible, but it is evidence rather than a channel.
The published splits, as of July 2026: MQL5 pays 80 percent of subscriptions; Collective2 takes a listing fee plus a 30 to 50 percent platform share; Darwinex pays 15 percent of investor profits; direct selling keeps most of gross but includes no audience. Actual income depends overwhelmingly on distribution and credibility, which is why most providers on every platform earn little.
They compound differently. Trading your own capital scales with your account and risk tolerance; monetizing scales with distribution and is limited by trust. The strongest position is both: trade the edge, and let a verified public record turn the same edge into subscription or performance revenue. What makes that possible is evidence a stranger can check.
Bring one strategy you already trust. The Studio validates it against four years of real data, costs included, for free.
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