Monthly Payout Model™

Measure

Gross payout money leaving the firm to traders during a current month, expressed as a USD-equivalent monthly run-rate rather than a specific calendar month's settled accounts.

Scope

Firm-level payout volume across the firm's payout arrangements, including simulated-funded payouts where that is the firm's operating model. It is not the volume of any single payment provider or payout rail.

Not estimated

Payout transaction counts, payout requests, payout recipients or persons paid, funded-trader counts, cumulative or all-time payouts, challenge fees, refunds, firm revenue, firm profit and net cash flow.

Relationship to other metrics

Payouts are a money flow. Populations are counted separately in Estimated Active Traders™ and Estimated Funded Traders™. A payout figure divided by a population is a derived ratio, not an observation.

Public coverage of this model is the tracked Forex prop market and the tracked Futures prop market. Crypto, stocks and multi-asset cohorts are not covered by the published payout model. Firms confirmed closed are excluded from current values and current aggregates.

Semantic role is never inferred from a field name. It is derived from the stated amount, unit, wording, reporting period, source, scope and date. Where an analyst has classified an observation under this framework, that classification is recorded with the observation and is applied only after the unit tests above have passed.

Central value

A precise, current, firm-scoped monthly or trailing-30-day payout amount becomes the central value, with a range that allows for month-to-month payout timing rather than measurement error.

Evidenced floor

A rounded or “over $X” monthly figure is treated as a floor, not an exact total. The central value sits at the evidenced amount and the upper bound allows for the unstated remainder.

Partial bound

Where only some payout rails are publicly visible, the visible settled amount is used as observed. It is never scaled up to an assumed full-rail total, so such firms may be understated rather than overstated.

Freshness limit

Firm-specific monthly evidence beyond a defined recency window is demoted to calibration and validation. It no longer overrides the current value.

Attribution

Firm-published evidence is a company statement, not an independent measurement. On public pages such figures carry PTC Estimate because the published value is still a modelled estimate informed by that statement.

Construction

Estimated Active Traders™ for the firm × a payout-per-active-trader parameter for the firm's market. Nothing else enters the central value.

Separate calibration

Forex and Futures are calibrated independently, because payout intensity per active trader differs materially between them. There is no single blended industry coefficient.

Calibration basis

Each coefficient is derived from a small set of firms whose payout money and active population can both be established, combined so that no single firm dominates. The coefficients are model calibration parameters — they are not observed industry averages, and their values are not published.

Parameterisation

Coefficients, band factors, evidence-admissibility windows, confidence weights and publication thresholds are stored as versioned model parameters, snapshotted with each production run rather than hard-coded per run.

Override

Admissible current firm-specific payout evidence always takes precedence over the modelled result in the role that evidence supports. Weaker evidence corroborates the modelled value instead of replacing it.

No fallback coefficient

A firm outside the two calibrated markets receives no published payout estimate. No global or borrowed coefficient is substituted.

Period, currency and scope are never inferred when the source does not state them. Evidence that cannot be classified is excluded rather than assumed.

Confidence inputs

The strength of the payout evidence basis, the confidence of the upstream Active Trader estimate, the calibration quality of the firm's market, the age of the evidence that set the value, and scope and rail completeness. These combine into a single score reported as High, Medium or Low.

Structural caps

High confidence requires current firm-specific payout evidence. A purely modelled payout value cannot reach High, and modelled Futures values are held below modelled Forex values because the Futures payout calibration rests on a thinner evidence base.

Evidence-led ranges

Built around the evidenced amount. Precise current evidence produces the narrowest range; a rounded figure produces an asymmetric range that extends upward from the evidenced floor; partial-rail evidence produces a narrow range around what is actually visible.

Modelled ranges

Compound two sources of uncertainty: the range of the upstream active-trader estimate and the dispersion of the payout-intensity calibration for that market. They are consequently wide, and wider for Futures than for Forex.

Interpretation

Ranges are model uncertainty bands reflecting evidence quality, calibration dispersion and payout timing volatility. They are not sampling confidence intervals and carry no probability statement.

• The Forex total, the Futures total and the combined modelled total are each the sum of the central monthly estimates of the modelled firms in that scope. No separate market-level model is applied.
• Firms confirmed closed are excluded. Cohorts outside public coverage — crypto, stocks, multi-asset — are excluded from both the totals and the firm list.
• Aggregate uncertainty ranges are not published. Summing firm ranges would assume independent errors, which PTC does not claim, so summed bounds are retained as an internal diagnostic only.
• The annualized figure is the current monthly estimate × 12 and is labelled Derived. It is not trailing-twelve-month payouts, not an independently modelled annual estimate, not a forecast, and not industry revenue.
• Any other figure computed from a payout aggregate — a share, a per-trader ratio, a concentration measure — is likewise derived rather than modelled.

• Payout timing is lumpy. A firm's actual payouts vary between months, so a monthly run-rate can over- or under-represent any specific month.
• Payout disclosure is voluntary and uneven. Most tracked firms publish no usable current payout figure, so most values are modelled rather than evidence-led.
• Firm-published payout evidence is self-reported. PTC checks it for internal consistency, scope and recency, but does not audit it.
• Payment-rail visibility is incomplete. Where only part of a firm's payouts is publicly settled and visible, that firm's estimate reflects what is visible and may understate the total.
• Modelled values inherit the uncertainty of Estimated Active Traders™, including its own calibration and disclosure limits.
• Payout-intensity calibration rests on a small number of firms in each market. The Futures coefficient is the more fragile of the two: removing individual calibration firms moves it materially, and its plausible range is wide. This is why modelled Futures payouts are range-first at best and are generally withheld at firm level.
• Coverage is the tracked prop market, not the whole industry, and the published payout model covers only the Forex and Futures cohorts.
• A current monthly run-rate is not a historical annual payout figure and should not be compared with firms' lifetime or cumulative payout claims.

Methodology version

Every estimate carries the model version that produced it. A change to the coefficients, band factors, evidence rules or publication thresholds is a new version, not an edit to existing values.

Production runs

Each run is recorded with its date, the firms processed, the outcome and a full snapshot of the parameter values in force, so any published figure can be reproduced against the parameters that produced it.

History

Superseded estimates are retained rather than overwritten, so the sequence of values for a firm remains inspectable.

Baseline

Published industry figures are read from a locked baseline period rather than from a live recalculation, so headline totals do not move between page loads.

Cadence

Refresh is analyst-initiated. PTC does not represent this model as being recalculated automatically on a fixed schedule.