If you trade a funded or evaluation account with a firm like Topstep, Apex, MyFundedFutures or FTMO, Ledger of Alpha can track that account against the firm's own rules — the profit target, the daily loss limit and the drawdown floor — worked out from the trades you import.
This is a second opinion on your own numbers, not a substitute for your firm's dashboard. Everything here is reconstructed from the trades in this account. If a trade is missing, or its fees or times are wrong, the figures here will be wrong too. Your firm's dashboard is the number that counts.
Setting one up
- Go to Settings → Accounts and find the account.
- Under Prop-firm rules, choose Set up.
- Pick your firm's programme to pre-fill the rules, then check every one against your own dashboard — they all stay editable.
- Choose Track this account.
A header then appears on your dashboard for that account, showing how much of each allowance is left. Prop-firm accounts are part of Pro, and they do not count against your ordinary account limit — you can run several evaluations and funded seats alongside your normal accounts.
The presets are dated on purpose
Firms change their programmes often. Each preset says the date its numbers were read from that firm's own help centre, and if a field could not be found there it is left blank and marked check rather than guessed. A blank marked check means “we could not source this — look it up”; a blank with no mark means the firm genuinely has no such rule. If a preset is more than about three months old the setup form asks you to re-check it.
When the evaluation starts
An evaluation starts flat, at the firm's account size. If you track an account that already has trades, the rules start today: earlier trades, and positions you opened before today, are left out of the floor, the target and the trading days. The form says so, and Count earlier trades too clears the date if the evaluation was already under way. You can change it any time under Rules start on.
Fixed (October 2026): a position opened before the start date used to be counted in the headroom anyway — an old open position in profit made the gap to the floor look bigger than the firm's. Only positions opened on or after the start date count now.
The page also tells you when a seat is set up in a way that will mislead you: an account whose starting balance differs from the firm's account size (Match the account fixes it), or trades synced from a brokerage into a prop account. A prop firm's trades come from its platform's export, so synced trades are read against the firm's rules as if the firm had them.
The three kinds of maximum loss
- Static. The floor never moves. Start at $50,000 with a $2,000 limit and the floor is $48,000 forever. We reproduce this exactly.
- Trailing (end of day). The floor follows your highest closing balance, updated once per trading day. Topstep and Apex's EOD accounts work this way. We reproduce this exactly too.
- Trailing (intraday). The floor follows your highest equity during the day, open positions included — Apex's intraday accounts work this way. This one we estimate, and the header says so.
When a limit is reached: a pause, or the end
Firms treat the daily loss limit differently. At FTMO, reaching it ends the account. At Topstep and Apex it pauses trading for the rest of the trading day and the account carries on. The rules form says which under Reaching the daily limit; a seat that reaches a pausing limit reads Paused for today, never Limit exceeded.
The consistency rule differs too. On a Topstep evaluation a best day over the share raises the profit target (best day ÷ the share) — the Profit target tile shows the raised figure. On a funded account such as an Apex Performance Account it holds payouts until the best day is within the share. Neither fails the account.
Why an intraday floor says “Estimated”
An intraday trailing floor moves with your account's highest value at any moment of the day, including while a position is still open. A list of finished trades does not record that moment, so it cannot be reproduced. What we do instead is reconstruct it from each trade's maximum favourable excursion — how far that trade ran in your favour before it closed — which is the quantity the floor is made of.
It is a good estimate and it is honest about being one. It can land slightly high or slightly low, so we will never tell you an account has been breached on an estimated floor — the most it will ever say is that you are near it. Treat the estimate as a warning light, and your firm's dashboard as the verdict.
“My daily loss doesn't match the firm's”
Almost always the trading day. A prop firm's day does not start at your midnight: for futures firms it starts at 5:00 pm America/Chicago, so a trade taken at 6pm on Wednesday belongs to Thursday's trading day. FTMO and most CFD firms reset at midnight CE(S)T. Set this under When the trading day starts.
The firm's day is worked out in the firm's own time zone, wherever you are: your trades are read in your Trade Timezone (Settings → Chart) and converted, daylight saving included, and “today” is the firm's today, not your computer's. So the second cause is a Trade Timezone that does not match how your trades were entered — check it first. A Tradovate file is stored exactly as written; if your Tradovate platform does not show Central time, pick the zone it shows under Tradovate export's time zone. Getting either wrong puts a trade on the wrong side of the reset, which can show a daily-limit breach that never happened.
Third: fees. Some exports leave commissions out — Tradovate's order export puts them in a separate Cash History file — and a futures book without fees makes your remaining room look bigger than it is. Importing a Tradovate file applies your account's futures rate instead and tells you it did; Importing from Tradovate and TopstepX covers both platforms, including what happens to their timestamps.
Evaluations and the funded account they earn
Keep them as two accounts, because that is what they are at the firm: different sizes, different rules and different money. Set the funded one up as its own prop account when you pass.
What we will never do
Ledger of Alpha records and measures. It does not tell you whether to take a trade, it does not predict whether you will pass an evaluation, and no figure here is advice. It reports what your own trades add up to against the rules you entered.
Getting told before you look
A prop account can also alert you when it gets close to one of these lines — see Prop-firm alerts for the three of them, what the hourly sweep can see, and how to switch them off.
Several seats, and what they have cost
Running more than one account, or chaining an evaluation to the funded seat it earned? The Prop page puts every seat side by side and adds up the fees and payouts — see Am I up across all my prop attempts?