Starting a Prop Trading Firm: What Technology You Need, What to Rent and What to Build

A new prop trading firm needs six systems before it sells its first challenge. It needs a trading platform, a system that checks every account against your rules, a site where traders buy challenges and follow their results, payments in and payouts out, identity checks, and records of every order and every payout. At the start, a new firm can rent the platform, the payments and the identity checks. Keep the exact wording of the rules, the payout decisions and the data about your traders in your own hands. That is where firms differ, and where disputes with traders start.

What does a prop trading firm sell?

This article is about firms that sell evaluations, often called challenges. A trader pays a fee and trades an account under fixed rules: reach a profit target without losing more than a set amount in a day or in total. A trader who passes gets a funded account and a share of the profits it makes.

Some firms run these accounts on simulated money. FTMO's rules page, read on 29 October 2026 like the other sources here, says that all the accounts it provides are “demo accounts with fictitious funds”. When accounts are simulated, every payout to a trader comes out of the firm's own money.

What technology does a new prop firm need?

Six systems, whether you rent them or build them:

• A trading platform where traders place orders and see their accounts, with a price feed behind it
• A rules system that checks every account against your rules: profit target, daily loss, maximum loss, minimum trading days and any banned practices
• A trader area on your site: sign-up, buying a challenge, account logins, progress, certificates and payout requests
• Payments for challenge fees, and a way to send payouts to traders in their countries
• Identity checks on traders before they are paid, and checks against sanctions lists
• Records of every order, every rule decision and every payout, kept long enough to explain any of them later

Behind these sits accounting: what the firm owes every funded trader today, and how much money it holds to pay it.

Which parts can a new firm rent?

Platform vendors sell packages for prop firms. DXtrade describes its prop trading technology as “Built for trading contests and evaluation programs”. Its risk settings include “max drawdown (EOD trailing, real-time trailing, or static), max daily loss, position limits”. It says a firm can “Launch in a week with a low cost of entry into the business.”

Match-Trade's prop trading product comes with a CRM for prop firms: dashboards for traders, public leaderboards, automated onboarding, payments and an affiliate system. Its price depends on the number of accounts: “Additional charge for the accounts exceeding a default package is based on tiers”. Its FAQ says firms should run identity checks, by hand or with an automated service such as Sumsub.

For payments and identity checks, ask each provider before you sign whether it works with prop firms and in which countries.

What happens if you lose your platform?

A rented platform is a licence, and a licence can end. Finance Magnates reported in March 2025 that several prop firms had lost access to the MetaQuotes platform in February 2024. The reason, it wrote, was “issues related to serving clients from the USA without necessary regulatory approvals.” One of them, Funding Pips, told the publication that its 2025 return to MetaTrader 5 “was possible thanks to obtaining their own direct license.”

Before you sign, find out whose licence your accounts run on: yours, your broker's or a reseller's. Ask how accounts, balances and trading history move to another platform if that licence ends.

Why do the rules have to be exact?

Every detail of a rule changes which traders pass and which are stopped. FTMO's page shows how much detail one rule needs. In its two-step challenge, the daily loss limit is 5% of the starting capital. It is recalculated every day at midnight Central European time from the account balance at that moment. The limit applies to equity, which FTMO defines as “Balance + Open Positions P/L ± Swaps – Commissions”. The overall limit is a fixed 10% below the starting capital. In its one-step challenge, the overall limit trails the highest end-of-day balance instead.

Because equity includes open positions, the rules system has to check accounts while trades are open, not once a day. If the platform shows a trader one number and the rules system judges another, your support team will spend its time on disputes. Write each rule as a formula with a worked example, the way FTMO does, and make sure the system you rent or build applies exactly that formula.

Where do the money problems start?

Challenge fees arrive the day a trader signs up. Payouts to the traders who pass come later, and their size depends on how well they trade. A firm that spends its fees on marketing before it knows what it owes can run short when traders have a good month. Calculate every day what you owe funded traders, and keep a reserve for it.

What you tell traders also has to match what your systems do. In August 2023 the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sued Traders Global Group, which ran My Forex Funds. Its complaint alleged that the firm, “not a third-party ‘liquidity provider’”, was the counterparty to substantially all customer trades. It also alleged that the firm used software to delay customer orders or fill them at worse prices.

In May 2025 the federal court in New Jersey dismissed the case with prejudice and sanctioned the CFTC. The agency's acting chairman said it had made “multiple false statements to the Court”. The allegations were never decided. The case still shows what a regulator looks at: who takes the other side of traders' orders, and what the software does to an order between the click and the fill.

If your accounts are simulated, say so plainly, as FTMO does on its rules page, and keep records that show what happened to every order. Ask a lawyer in each country where you plan to sell challenges.

When is it worth building your own system?

Building your own does not have to mean writing a trading platform. It can mean building the layer around a rented one: the rules system that reads positions from the platform, the trader area, payouts and accounting. It pays off in these cases:

• Your rules are part of what you sell, and the platform's settings cannot express them, such as a consistency rule of your own or checks across several accounts of one person
• You offer traders more than one platform and want one set of rules and one set of records across all of them
• Per-account fees have grown larger than the cost of a team that runs your own system
• You want to be able to change platform without losing accounts, balances and history
• You want payout decisions and trader data to stay in systems you control

Until one of these is true, a rented package is usually the faster start.

What should we ask a firm that builds or connects these systems?

• How often does the rules system check each account, and does it judge equity or balance?
• What happens to the checks when the connection to the platform drops, and how are traders told?
• Can one rules system cover accounts on two different platforms?
• How do you find the same person or copied trades across several accounts?
• How is each payout approved, recorded and matched against what the firm owes?
• If we change platform, how do accounts, balances and history move?
• Can you show this working in a system that runs today?

Where does amBrain fit?

amBrain, which publishes this blog, describes this part of its work in one line: “amBrain builds platforms for proprietary trading firms: evaluation challenges, trading rules and accounting.” It has been building software since 2019 and works in three formats: full delivery, a dedicated team, or engineers embedded in your team. Its line on ownership is “The client keeps full ownership of the product and the code, except our reusable components.”

This article is not a case study and describes no client work. It does not say which prop firms amBrain has worked for, and it gives no prices or timelines. It is not legal advice either. If amBrain is on your shortlist, give it the same questions as any other firm.