Funded Trader Model™ Methodology

What is estimated

A funded trader is a person currently holding at least one funded account at a tracked prop firm. Simulated-funded accounts are included, because most tracked firms operate simulated capital, and PTC does not attempt to separate simulated-funded from live-funded populations. The unit is people, not accounts.

Model relationship

Estimated Funded Traders™ is built directly on top of Estimated Active Traders™. For each modelled firm, PTC takes the Active Trader Model™'s own low, central and high figures and applies a funded-stock ratio calibrated separately for the Forex and Futures markets. Active Traders is an upstream scale reference for the funded-trader scenario, not independent corroboration: a change to a firm's Active Trader estimate flows directly through to its Funded Trader estimate.

Evidence hierarchy

PTC evaluates disclosed evidence for each firm against a defined hierarchy, strongest first:

A disclosed count of people currently holding a funded account — a direct anchor for the central estimate.
A disclosed count of currently funded accounts, convertible to people through a stored, versioned accounts-to-persons assumption — a partial anchor.
A disclosed count of people paid out within a stated recent period — a floor on the lower bound only. Everyone paid in a period necessarily held a funded account in that period, but this is a flow, not a current stock, so it never sets the central value.
A disclosed registered or customer population — usable only as an upper-bound ceiling.
Cumulative or lifetime funded/paid populations, and monetary payout figures — background context only. PTC does not treat currency amounts or payout-transaction counts as person counts.

In the production data behind the current baseline, no tracked firm carries a disclosed current-stock funded-person or funded-account count. One firm has a disclosed payout-person floor that raises its lower bound. Every other modelled firm is a scenario estimate with no firm-specific override.

How the estimate is constructed

For a firm with no qualifying evidence, PTC builds a low/central/high scenario by multiplying the firm's Active Trader low/central/high figures by a funded-stock ratio for its market (Forex or Futures). These ratios are calibrated separately per market and stored as versioned model parameters; the underlying coefficients are not published here.

Where a firm has qualifying evidence, it can move the estimate within this hierarchy: a disclosed current funded-person count replaces the central estimate outright; a disclosed current funded-account count replaces it after the accounts-to-persons assumption is applied; a disclosed payout-person floor can only raise the lower bound, never the central value; and a disclosed registered or customer population can only lower the upper bound, never raise it. If a floor would sit above the modelled central value, the central value is raised to meet it — a scenario estimate is never allowed to sit below evidence of people who were actually paid.

Evidence constraints and guardrails

A firm's funded-trader estimate can never exceed a market-specific ceiling share of its own Active Trader upper bound.
A firm's lower bound can never fall below demonstrably paid people, where that evidence exists.
Evidence that already anchored, floored or capped a firm's upstream Active Trader estimate is excluded from the funded-trader calculation, so the same disclosure can never validate itself twice across the two models. This rule is active today: a small number of firms in the current baseline have upstream-bound evidence suppressed for this reason.
No modelled figure is treated as self-confirming: a scenario estimate remains labelled as a scenario even where it happens to sit inside a disclosed range.

Confidence and uncertainty ranges

Every published estimate carries a confidence score built from four inputs: the confidence already assigned to the firm's upstream Active Trader estimate, the strength of the firm's own funded evidence, the overall quality of evidence available for calibrating that market, and whether the firm has any supporting funded or payout evidence at all.

A firm can only reach the High confidence band if it has current-stock evidence at the top two tiers of the hierarchy — a disclosed funded-person or funded-account count. Because no tracked firm currently has that evidence, no firm in the current baseline reaches High confidence; published figures sit in the Medium or Low band. This is a direct, structural consequence of the evidence available today, not a separate editorial choice.

The published low–high range reflects both the uncertainty inherited from the Active Trader estimate and the width of the funded-stock ratio scenario. It is a scenario range, not a statistical confidence interval.

Publication policy

PTC models Funded Traders™ for every firm with a modelled Active Trader estimate — 91 firms in the current baseline. A firm's estimate is only shown individually once it clears a minimum presentation threshold; firms below it are still included in the aggregate totals but not listed by name. Of the 91 modelled firms, 72 currently clear that threshold.

Among firms that are shown, PTC presents Medium-confidence values normally and Low-confidence values range-first, with the central figure marked as approximate. Because no firm currently reaches High confidence, and most published firms sit in the Low band, most currently published figures are shown range-first today — a reflection of the current evidence base, not a fixed rule that funded-trader figures are always range-first.

Aggregate construction

The published Forex, Futures and combined totals are the sum of the central estimates across every modelled firm in that market, including firms below the individual presentation threshold. PTC does not currently model Funded Traders™ for Crypto, Multi-asset or Stocks firms, because the upstream Active Trader Model™ is itself only modelled for the Forex and Futures markets today; there is no separate exclusion at the funded-trader layer.

Coverage and limitations

Firms below the presentation threshold are counted in totals but not listed individually.
Simulated-funded and live-funded accounts are not separated; published figures include both.
Funded stock changes quickly as accounts pass, fail or reset; a snapshot at one point in time is not an annual total.
Coverage reflects PTC's tracked market, not the whole prop trading industry.
Because the estimate is built directly on top of Estimated Active Traders™, any revision to that upstream model changes the funded-trader figures directly; the two are not independent checks on each other.
Most of the published range today is a calibrated scenario rather than a firm-specific measurement, because very little firm-level current-stock evidence exists in the tracked market.

Version and update governance

PTC does not run Funded Trader Model™ estimates on a fixed calendar schedule. Each publication comes from a deliberate, dated model run tied to a specific methodology version. The figures behind the current baseline come from the run dated 2026-08-01, locked into the 2026 Q3 publication baseline. When PTC runs the model again, the new run is versioned separately and the prior baseline is retained as history rather than overwritten.