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Prop firms

The Prop firms tab on the Risk page takes a finished backtest, or a paper run that is still trading, and replays it against the rules of every prop firm program in our catalog. Each program gets one verdict:

Verdict Meaning
Funded $X The strategy passed every evaluation phase and reached the funded account. $X is what the firm would have paid out over the run, net of the evaluation fee.
Open No rule was broken, but the run ended before the last phase finished (a target not yet reached, a minimum-days rule not yet met). A run with no trades yet is open everywhere.
Breached A hard rule ended the account: daily loss, max loss, time limit, inactivity, or a consistency rule set to fail. The row says which rule and when.
Banned The account would have survived, but the firm's trading-style rules reject the strategy: minimum hold times, a cap on trades per day, weekend or news restrictions, martingale adds, a single day carrying too much of the profit.
Not tradable The firm does not offer the run's instrument, or the strategy needs more leverage than the firm allows.

Rows sort best-first: funded programs by net payout, then open, breached, banned, and not tradable.

How the replay works

The engine records an equity envelope while it runs: for every hour, the closing equity, the intra-hour low and high (positions marked at the candle's extremes), the closed balance, and the deepest drawdown inside the hour. The replay walks that envelope with the firm's rules:

  • Account size — pick the firm account you would buy. With Proportional sizing the strategy's returns are re-based to that balance at every phase start and after every payout, so a 10 % drawdown on your $10,000 backtest is a 10 % drawdown on a $100,000 challenge. Flat sizing keeps the strategy's dollar moves unchanged.
  • Daily loss is measured the way each firm measures it: against the starting balance, the day's opening balance, the day's opening equity, or the higher of the two, resetting at the firm's own clock.
  • Max loss covers static floors and every trailing variant we found (intraday, end-of-day, locked at a profit offset, trailing the balance).
  • Phases run in order: challenge, verification, funded. Instant-funding programs skip straight to the funded account. A two-step challenge shows both evaluation phases from the start, with Verification and Funded locked until the preceding phase passes. Passing Challenge starts Verification at the original account size; its target and minimum trading days must be met separately. Passing Verification unlocks Funded, where the strategy can earn simulated payouts under the firm's rules. If an evaluation target is unknown, that phase stays open and the missing rule is listed; it cannot pass automatically.
  • Payouts follow the firm's cadence, minimum, profit split and cap, and the first-payout waiting period. Fees are subtracted once, at the start.

The hourly envelope catches moves the candle closes hide, but it is still an approximation: a floor touched for a few minutes inside an hour counts as a breach, and a stop that would have saved the day on a real account is not modelled. Backtests that finished before the envelope existed replay from bar closes only, and the tab says so when that is the case.

The strategy profile

Above the table the tab shows what the firms see: leverage actually used, median hold time, the share of trades and of profit under 5, 10, 30 and 60 seconds, the busiest day, weekend exposure, martingale-style adds, and the largest single day's share of profit. These are the numbers the style rules key on, so a Banned row always has a matching line here.

Reading a row

Click a row to open the evidence:

  • the firm-dollar equity path with the max-loss floor, the daily floor and the profit target drawn on it;
  • the phase timeline, with the day a phase passed or breached;
  • the rules that decided the verdict, and any rule we could not evaluate;
  • the payouts, gross and paid;
  • for backtests, the Monte-Carlo pass probability of the program's first phase over reshuffled trade orders.

Warnings and partial rules

  • Manual execution only — the firm prohibits automated trading. The replay still runs, because the rules apply to the trades whoever places them, but you would have to execute the signals by hand. It is a warning, never a verdict.
  • Partial rules — the firm's rules came from mixed or secondary sources, or one of its rules is not modelled yet. The row lists what was skipped.
  • Rules verified {date} — when we last checked the firm's published terms. Prop-firm rules change often; a verdict is only as current as that date.

Paper runs

A paper run's page shows its top five programs, refreshed as bars close, with a link to the full table. Because a paper run keeps trading, an Open row can turn into Funded or Breached tomorrow. The full paper-run table refreshes every minute and shows the current phase within the same challenge, including while its details are open.

Filters

  • Tradable only hides Not tradable rows (on by default; the count of hidden rows is shown).
  • Vertical narrows the table to CFD, futures or crypto-native firms.

The tab is available on Trader and Quant plans.