Prop Firm & Pine Script FAQ

A futures prop firm funds an evaluation account with the firm's own capital in exchange for a share of the profits. You pay a fee to attempt a rules-based trading test — usually a profit target alongside a maximum drawdown and sometimes a daily loss limit — and a passing result earns a funded account.

Firms typically keep 10–20% of profits and absorb losses up to the drawdown limit. Well-known names in this space include Apex, Topstep, FTMO, MyFundedFutures, Bulenox, Tradeify, and TradeDay.

No firm requires proof of a track record or runs an interview — anyone can buy an evaluation and start trading immediately. That said, the rules are strict enough that traders without a tested plan, discretionary or automated, usually fail during the evaluation.

If you're new to futures, paper trading on TradingView's replay tool and reading your target firm's specific drawdown rules before spending money on an eval is worth the delay.

Availability depends on the firm and its broker, but most major futures prop firms support the standard CME/CBOT lineup: equity indices (ES, MES, NQ, MNQ, YM, RTY and their micro equivalents), metals (GC, MGC, SI), energy (CL, MCL, NG), currencies (6E, 6J, 6B), and agriculturals (ZC, ZW, ZS).

Micro contracts (MES, MNQ, MGC, MCL) matter most for smaller accounts — they're the only way to size a position without risking an outsized share of the drawdown on a single trade.

An evaluation — sometimes called a challenge or combine — is a simulated trading test run on real market data. You trade against a profit target while staying above a maximum drawdown floor, and some firms add a daily loss limit or a minimum number of trading days on top.

Passing earns a funded account, either simulated-but-payable or, at a handful of firms, real capital directly. Some firms run this as a single phase (Apex); others split it into two, like FTMO's Challenge and Verification stages. Multi-phase evaluations tend to cost less per month but take longer to clear.

With a strategy that's already proven itself, 5–15 trading days is realistic if it hits the profit target efficiently without forcing trades. Most automated traders plan for 15–30 days to stay clear of any minimum-day or consistency requirement. Discretionary traders more commonly take 30–60+ days.

Very few firms impose a hard time limit on the evaluation itself, though subscription-billed firms cost more the longer it takes — Apex's one-time eval fee removes that particular time pressure.

Yes — every major futures prop firm permits automated trading. The standard pipeline is a TradingView Pine Script strategy firing an alert, a webhook service like TradersPost receiving it, and that service placing the resulting order at a broker such as Tradovate or Rithmic, where the prop firm account actually lives.

Once it's wired up, the strategy runs unattended for as many hours as it's configured to trade.

TradersPost is trade-automation middleware: it exposes a webhook URL that accepts TradingView alert payloads and turns them into real broker orders. TradingView has no native order-routing to a futures broker on its own, so without a bridge like TradersPost an alert only sends a notification — it can't place a trade.

TradersPost connects to Tradovate and Rithmic, which is what most prop firm accounts run on, making it the most common bridge for this setup. Pricing and plan tiers are set by TradersPost directly.

TradersPost expects the TradingView alert's message field to contain a small JSON object describing the order — ticker, action, and quantity at minimum, e.g. {"ticker":"MES1!","action":"buy","quantity":1}.

You paste that into the alert dialog's message box when creating the alert; the Pine Script's entry/exit logic decides when the alert fires, and the static message tells the bridge what to do once it does. Every strategy we sell ships with the entry and exit templates already formatted.

The pipeline — TradingView to a webhook bridge to Tradovate or Rithmic — is identical no matter which firm you're trading, because the bridge talks to the broker, not the prop firm directly.

What changes firm to firm is the rule set the script has to respect: a daily loss limit (Topstep, MyFundedFutures) needs a session-level circuit breaker built in, a firm with no daily limit during the eval (Apex, Bulenox) needs one less moving part, and a consistency rule (funded Apex accounts, Tradeify's Select path) needs the strategy tracking its own daily P&L against the total target.

That depends entirely on the strategy's edge and how carefully it respects the firm's specific rules — automation removes execution error, not a bad edge.

The most common reasons an automated attempt fails are oversized positions relative to the drawdown cushion, no session filter for illiquid overnight hours, and no daily circuit breaker on a firm that requires one. All three are fixable before the eval starts, not after it fails.

15-minute and 30-minute charts are the most common choice — they generate enough signals to reach a profit target in a reasonable window while staying robust enough to avoid most lower-timeframe noise.

1–5 minute charts can work but carry more spread and slippage cost per trade; 1-hour and 4-hour charts generate few enough signals that a single account can take months to hit its target.

Yes. A webhook bridge like TradersPost supports multiple broker connections, so a single TradingView alert can route to several accounts simultaneously — common among traders running multiple evaluations in parallel to improve the odds at least one clears.

The main constraint is TradingView's own plan tier, since routing alerts to several destinations at once typically needs a paid plan, and each destination account needs to sit on a broker the bridge supports.

TradingView can't fire a new alert without a connection, but any position already open stays open at the broker — it isn't automatically closed. That's exactly why a prop-firm-ready strategy needs real stop-loss and target orders sitting at the broker, not logic that only exists in Pine Script and depends on a new alert to act.

Most webhook bridges can send a stop and target as part of the same order group as the entry, so the broker still holds them if TradingView goes offline mid-trade — confirm that behavior in paper trading before running it live.

Trailing drawdown means the loss floor moves up as account equity grows, but never back down. On a 50k account with a $2,500 trailing drawdown, the floor opens at $47,500; grow to $56,000 and the floor moves to $53,500 — drop back to that level and the account is done, even though it's still up from where it started.

Most firms measure this off end-of-day balance rather than intraday highs. A few, including Apex, measure it intraday instead, which is meaningfully stricter since the floor can move mid-session on an unrealized high.

Static drawdown fixes the loss floor at account opening and never moves it, regardless of how much profit accrues. A 50k account with a $3,000 static drawdown always has a $47,000 floor — grow to $60,000 and there's still $13,000 of room before hitting it.

This is generally the more forgiving structure for an automated strategy, since the cushion between balance and floor widens with profit instead of staying fixed. FTMO, MyFundedFutures, and FundedNext all use static drawdown.

A daily loss limit caps how much an account can lose in a single session — Topstep's 50k account enforces a $1,000 cap measured from that day's highest equity point; breach it and trading halts until the next session.

In Pine Script this is typically handled with a session-scoped variable that records the day's starting or peak equity, compares current equity against it continuously, and disables new entries once the gap crosses the limit — paired with a hard stop at the broker so a fast move can't blow through the limit before a new alert fires.

A consistency rule caps how much of the total profit target a single day can contribute — it exists so a pass or a payout can't be carried by one lucky session.

Apex's EOD and Intraday Trailing Drawdown accounts cap a single day at 50% of the profit target at payout (the legacy Performance Account line uses 30%); Tradeify's Select path caps a single day at 40%. Coding a same-day profit cap into the strategy — roughly a quarter to a third of the full target — keeps most versions of this rule satisfied without watching the account by hand.

No — Apex has no daily loss limit at any account size during the evaluation, one of the more automation-friendly rules among the major firms. A script only has to respect the overall trailing threshold, not a separate per-session ceiling.

That threshold is measured intraday rather than end-of-day, though, which is stricter than Topstep's EOD-based $1,000 (50k) daily cap or FTMO's 5%-of-balance limit — no daily reset, in exchange for a floor that moves the moment equity makes a new high.

Starter ($19/mo) is built for MES and MNQ, sized for 50k-class accounts. Pro ($29/mo) covers ES and NQ for 100k–150k accounts. The 4-Pack Bundle ($49/mo) runs four strategies across CL, MES, MGC, and MNQ.

For a different instrument or account size, the Custom Build ($250 one-time) is written around whatever's specified — any CME/CBOT-listed futures contract.

The core logic — entries, exits, ATR-based stops — works on any firm that supports futures trading, since none of that depends on a specific firm's rulebook.

What needs configuring per firm is the risk layer: daily circuit breaker threshold (or none, for firms like Apex that don't have one), position sizing relative to the drawdown cushion, and any consistency cap. Each strategy ships with input presets for the major firms, so this is a settings change, not a rewrite.

Yes — every strategy is delivered as a plain, unobfuscated .pine file. Entries, exits, filters, position sizing, and the alert message format are all editable.

The license covers using the script on your own TradingView account; it doesn't cover redistributing or reselling the source to other traders.

It varies by strategy and instrument, and past backtest results aren't a guarantee of live performance — slippage, commission, and live market conditions will differ from a backtest no matter how carefully it was built.

Each strategy's product page publishes its own backtest metrics (net profit, max drawdown, profit factor) and an equity curve so fit can be assessed before buying, rather than a single number here that won't hold across every account size and firm.

Built for full automation through a webhook bridge like TradersPost — once alerts are wired up, entries and exits fire without a manual step.

If a semi-automated approach is preferred (get notified, decide by hand whether to take the trade), that's just a matter of not connecting the webhook and using TradingView's native alert notifications instead — the Pine Script logic itself doesn't change either way.

Checkout runs through Stripe, and delivery is automatic — a secure download link arrives by email with the .pine source file, a setup guide, and pre-formatted alert message templates.

If nothing arrives within a few minutes, check spam before reaching out. The sending address is support@targetfilled.com.

Plain .pine text files. Open TradingView's Pine Editor, paste or open the file, click Add to Chart, and the strategy loads with its input panel ready to configure — no extra software required beyond a TradingView account.

A paid TradingView plan is needed to run live alerts for automation, since the free tier caps how many active alerts an account can hold.

Yes, with every purchase: how to load the script and configure its inputs for a specific firm and account size, how to set up a TradingView alert with the correct webhook URL and JSON message, how to connect a bridge like TradersPost to a broker, and how to confirm the full pipeline works in paper trading before it runs live.

Email support@targetfilled.com. For setup issues, include a screenshot of the strategy loaded on the chart, your webhook/bridge configuration (with API keys hidden), and a description of what's not working.

We can help with alert configuration, webhook setup, and tuning the risk parameters to match a specific firm's rules.

Starter, Pro, and the 4-Pack Bundle are monthly subscriptions — cancel anytime from the account page with no long-term commitment. There's no partial-period refund, but access continues through the end of the period already paid for. The Custom Build and Strategy Audit are one-time, project-based purchases rather than subscriptions.

Across all of them, the guarantee is functional: if a script won't compile, won't load on the chart, or doesn't match its described logic, contact support and we'll fix or rebuild it at no extra charge.