We’ve thought for a while that trading has more in common with sport than people probably realise. Not because traders are athletes, obviously. We’re not trying to make it sound grander than it is. It’s more that you prepare, you deal with pressure, you make decisions when it matters and then, at some point, there is a result.
What trading doesn’t really have is the record around all of that.
A footballer can have a bad season and everyone knows they had a bad season. They can recover the year after and that recovery has context because the bad year never disappeared. Trading is very different. A trader can go through months of losses, finally get things together and then the only thing anyone ever sees is the payout screenshot from the good month.
That has always seemed a bit strange to us.
Especially now that prop firms have become such a big part of retail futures trading.
They solved a very real problem. Capital. You don’t necessarily need a massive personal account anymore. Pass an evaluation, get funded and take a share of the profit. For a lot of traders, that changed what was realistically possible.
But the industry ended up incredibly fragmented at the same time.
One trader is at Topstep. Someone else is at another firm. Another person copy-trades accounts across three firms at once. Different rules, different dashboards, different payout structures, different competitions.
There isn’t really one place where those traders exist together.
So, naturally, social media ends up filling the gap.
And we don’t think there is anything wrong with posting payouts. The problem is that social media is showing you whatever was interesting enough to post that day. It isn’t trying to be somebody’s audited trading career.
You see a $20,000 payout. Great.
What happened before it?
Maybe the trader lost three accounts first. Maybe they didn’t lose any. Maybe they’ve been consistently profitable for two years and $20,000 isn’t even unusual for them.
Same screenshot. Completely different trader.
The huge green days are the same. Someone makes $8,000 in one session and it looks incredible. Maybe they do that regularly. Maybe they were down $15,000 for the month beforehand. Maybe they gave most of it back two days later.
You just don’t know.
And that isn’t really the trader’s fault either. There hasn’t been anywhere for the full record to live.
That is basically the problem we started with when building Prop League.
The league part came after.
One League Across Different Firms
Traders from supported firms compete within the same annual season, but underneath that is something we actually think matters more: the accounts are connected and the performance follows the trader.
So if you have accounts at different supported firms, they don’t all live in separate little worlds anymore.
And if you blow one, that account doesn’t conveniently disappear from your history.
We know that sounds obvious, but think about how often that happens now.
Someone goes through several funded accounts, catches a great run on the next one and suddenly that account becomes the story. The earlier accounts might as well never have existed.
In Prop League, they did.
If you lose nine funded accounts and then make a huge profit on account ten, the first nine are still part of the season.
It doesn’t make the tenth account less impressive either. If anything, seeing somebody dig themselves out of a terrible period can tell you more than watching an equity curve that seems to go straight up.
Trading is messy.
Ours certainly has been.
Anyone who has done this for long enough knows there are stretches where you feel like you understand exactly what the market is doing, and then there are weeks where you start questioning things you thought you had already figured out.
We’d rather the record reflected that than pretend everybody’s career looks like a clean chart going from bottom left to top right.
So, What Are Traders Actually Ranked On?
Sim and Live are separate because they’re different enough that combining them never really made sense to us.
Live seats are harder to get. The capital is real. Firms operate those programmes differently. Restrictions can change. Payout rules can change.
You could probably build some complicated formula to try and normalise all of that into one table, but we’re not sure what that would achieve apart from making the scoring harder to understand.
Even the main league ranking is fairly boring in that sense.
P&L matters most.
There are obviously other stats worth looking at. Consistency, drawdown, account survival, whatever else traders inevitably want to dig into. But if the leaderboard needs three paragraphs explaining why somebody who made less money is ranked higher than somebody who made more money, we’ve probably overcomplicated it.
Prop Rating Isn’t Just This Season
Then there is Prop Rating, which came from another issue we kept running into.
A season is useful, but January shouldn’t suddenly erase December.
If somebody has built a strong record over the previous year, we don’t want the calendar changing to make them look like a completely unknown trader again.
Prop Rating looks at eligible verified performance from the previous 365 days across connected sim-funded and live-funded accounts.
So there is some history behind the number.
It also follows you across supported firms, which matters more than it might sound. Traders move around. Firms change rules. People find somewhere that suits them better. Your trading ability obviously doesn’t reset because you opened an account somewhere else.
Some competitions on Prop League will be open to everyone. Others can require a certain Prop Rating. Those can then lead to opportunities with participating firms, including chances to compete for live-funded accounts with larger starting balances.
We quite like that because otherwise the rating risks becoming another meaningless number sitting beside a profile picture.
There are already enough of those.
The Firms Become More Visible Too
Something we didn’t really appreciate at first is that once you start doing all of this, you also end up learning quite a lot about the firms.
Not because Prop League needs to review them.
Actually, we’d rather we didn’t.
Right now, people choose firms using a strange mixture of evaluation prices, payout rules, Trustpilot, YouTube reviews, affiliate links and whatever argument is currently taking place on X.
Some of that information is useful.
Some of it is obviously marketing.
What we would genuinely like to know is much simpler.
What happens to the traders?
Do people tend to keep accounts longer at one firm?
Does one firm move a much higher percentage of traders from sim to live?
What happens after they move to live?
Do their results improve? Get worse? Basically stay the same?
Maybe eventually the answer is that there isn’t much difference between firms at all. That would be useful to know too.
The live side is particularly interesting because getting moved onto real capital is normally talked about like you’ve reached the promised land.
Then sometimes traders get there and discover that it’s a different environment.
Different restrictions. Different payout rules. Sometimes less freedom.
If one trader says that on X, we have no idea what to make of it.
Maybe they’re completely right.
Maybe they blew the account that morning and they’re just furious.
But if you can look across a much larger set of accounts and see the same pattern happening repeatedly, that is harder to ignore.
The firms would end up developing reputations based partly on what actually happens to their traders.
We think that is far more interesting than Prop League publishing some “Top 10 Prop Firms” article every six months.
Mentors Are a Slightly Different Problem
Mentors are another area we’ve gone back and forth on.
People tend to judge trading mentors by asking whether the mentor themselves is an amazing trader.
Which makes sense to a point.
But we’ve never thought it tells you everything.
A tennis coach doesn’t need to beat Novak Djokovic at tennis. That would be ridiculous. Being able to perform and being able to make somebody else better are two different things.
Trading isn’t exactly the same, obviously, but we think the principle still holds.
If someone has spent years selling a programme on the basis that they help traders improve, we’re very curious about what happened to the traders they helped.
Not whether every single student became profitable. That’s never going to happen.
People ignore advice. People overtrade. People change systems every three weeks. There is only so much a mentor can control.
But if somebody has worked with hundreds of traders, there should eventually be a pattern somewhere. Right?
A mentor profile on Prop League can be linked with the verified progress of traders they’ve worked with.
We’d rather see that than twenty testimonials saying the course “changed everything”.
Maybe both matter.
But right now we mostly have the testimonials.
Good Traders Shouldn’t Have to Become Influencers
There’s another part of Prop League that we probably care about more than we expected to when we started and that is giving good traders a way to be seen without having to become good at social media.
The two things have become oddly connected.
There are brilliant traders with huge audiences.
There are also brilliant traders with about 400 followers who post once every three months.
Some use anonymous handles. Some sit in private Discords. Some don’t seem interested in building an audience at all.
They can basically disappear from the wider industry.
We don’t see why they should.
If somebody quietly trades well for three years, that should count for more than their ability to make a good X thread.
They can compete under a handle on Prop League if they want. Their real-world identity doesn’t have to become part of the public profile.
No, You Won’t Be Ranked 10,568th
We also don’t want the other extreme where being transparent turns into public humiliation.
We really don’t think anyone benefits from opening their profile and seeing:
10,568th.
So only the top 100 traders in each league get an exact numbered ranking. Below that, people sit within performance bands. If you don’t have enough history yet, you’re simply not ranked. As the league grows each season, we’ll expand the number of traders who receive an exact ranking too.
The trading record still needs to be honest.
There just isn’t much value in making the presentation cruel for the sake of it.
The Transfer Market Comes Later
We keep coming back to the part after the leaderboard, though.
Once the record exists, it can be searched.
And that changes things.
A prop firm looking for traders no longer has to rely entirely on who is visible on social media.
A trader looking for more capital has something they can point to.
A mentor can show what happened to people they actually worked with.
Sponsors can potentially find someone before they already have 100,000 followers.
We’ve been calling that the Transfer Market internally.
It came from football, unsurprisingly.
We don’t know exactly what that part looks like years from now and we don’t particularly want to pretend we do. But the underlying idea makes sense to us.
If talent has a record, talent becomes easier to find.
At the moment, a trader’s career is scattered everywhere.
An old account at one firm. Another account somewhere else. Payout certificates. Broker statements. Screenshots buried three years down an X timeline. Accounts they don’t even trade anymore.
And then they change firms and publicly it almost feels like starting again.
That seems backwards.
Prop firms made capital accessible to a huge number of traders.
What they didn’t create was a common record of what everybody actually did with it.
That’s the part we’re trying to build.