Two platforms cover most prop-firm futures trading, and they behave differently enough that each needs its own page. Tradovate is what Apex, MyFundedFutures, Tradeify, Take Profit Trader, TradeDay and FundedNext's futures programmes run on. TopstepX is Topstep's own platform.
Both files import from the Brokers hub — drop the file on the dropzone and the format is detected for you.
Tradovate — set your commission first
Tradovate's Orders report contains no commissions at all. They live in a separate Cash History report. That matters more here than it would anywhere else: a futures book with no costs makes every drawdown-headroom figure on your dashboard look better than it really is, which is the one direction an estimate must never be wrong in.
So we ask your account for the rate instead:
- Open Settings → Accounts and find the account you import into.
- Set the Futures commission. That box is your all-in rate per contract, per side — exchange + clearing + platform, e.g. about $2.09 on an Apex micro.
- Save, then import. The preview prints the rate it used.
If no rate is set, the import still works — but it says so in amber, and the trades land with no fees. Set the rate and re-import to correct them.
Exporting from Tradovate
- Click the Accounts tab and select your account.
- Click the gear icon beside it.
- Open the Orders tab — not Performance, and not Positions.
- Enter the date range, click Go, then Download Report.
Only filled orders are imported. Working, cancelled, rejected and expired orders are skipped — they never moved a contract, and importing one would open a position you never held.
TopstepX — nothing to configure
The TopstepX export is one row per completed round trip and it carries its own fees, so there is nothing to set up first.
- Open the Trades tab at the bottom of the page — not the Orders tab.
- Click Export at the bottom right.
- Pick a date range and export. If the file comes back empty, widen the range.
What happens to the times — and why it is different for each
On a prop account this is not a detail. Your firm's trading day rolls at 5:00 PM Chicago, so a trade that lands on the wrong side of that line moves into the wrong trading day — and can show a daily-loss breach that never happened.
- TopstepX writes every stamp in UTC, and says so. Because that is unambiguous, we convert each one to America/Chicago — daylight saving included — before storing it. There is nothing to set.
- Tradovate writes whatever zone the platform is set to display, with no offset in the file. There is nothing to convert from, so we store the stamps exactly as they appear rather than guessing. If your platform is not showing Central time, pick the zone it does show under Tradovate export's time zone in the account's prop rules — do not edit the trades.
What we recompute, and what we take from the file
- P&L is always recomputed from entry price, exit price, size, the contract multiplier and fees. Neither file's own P&L column is read, so no two numbers in the app can disagree.
- Every row is treated as futures, including contracts we do not carry a multiplier for — those resolve server-side rather than silently pricing at ×1.
- Partial fills are kept. A Tradovate position built in three clips imports as one trade with three entry legs.
- Re-importing is safe. Duplicates are detected and skipped.
If the numbers still do not match your firm
Check the fee rate first — it is the most common gap, and on a busy day it is a large one. Then check the time zone. See Tracking a prop-firm account for what else can make the two differ, and remember that your firm's dashboard is the number that counts.