Ranking Methodology

Entry

A firm becomes eligible once it is part of the Tracked Market and carries enough documented evidence for the signals a given index requires.

Comparison universe

Firms are classified into comparison universes (for example by primary asset focus, such as Forex or Futures, and by market profile). Where an index compares commercial structure, the comparison is made inside the firm's universe rather than across the whole market, so unlike business models are not scored against each other.

Small universes

When a universe holds too few observations to support a stable comparison, that signal falls back to the wider tracked population instead of producing a score from a near-empty cohort.

Separate leaderboards

Asset-specific leaderboards (for example Largest Forex, Largest Futures, Largest Crypto) are published as separate rankings rather than as one merged list.

Exclusion

Firms with insufficient signal coverage are excluded from an index rather than ranked on partial evidence. Firms recorded as closed are shown as historical and are not treated as current market participants.

Publication gate

Eligibility to be calculated and eligibility to be published are separate. A firm can be scored internally and still be withheld from a public leaderboard.

PTC abstracts individual data providers in public documentation. Source families and their reliability treatment are described in Data Sources.

Primary method

For the composite signal framework, each signal is converted to a cohort-relative percentile rank on a 0–100 scale, with tied values receiving the same rank. Position within the cohort — not raw magnitude — determines the contribution.

Cohort-relative

Percentile ranking is always computed inside a cohort: the tracked population for market-wide signals, or the firm's comparison universe for commercial-structure signals.

Clipping / winsorization

No winsorization is applied. Rank-based normalization already bounds the effect of extreme values, so outliers are not trimmed or capped.

Directionality

Each signal has a fixed direction: higher raw values map to higher normalized values. No signal is inverted without being defined that way in the model.

Non-discriminating signals

A signal whose cohort values are entirely tied carries no comparative information and is excluded rather than assigned a mid-scale value. A cohort with a single observation is treated as insufficient.

Other index scales

Single-signal and size-based leaderboards are published on their own scales and are not all bounded to 0–100. Where a public surface shows a 0–100 figure for such an index, it is a relative score computed against the leading firm in the same index and snapshot, and it is labelled as such.

Headline PTC Score

Only the PTC Power Index™ composite is publishable as a headline 0–100 PTC Score. Sub-indexes, visibility measures and size composites are explicitly not published as a headline score.

• Composite indexes combine group-level scores using fixed weights that sum to 1.00 within a stated methodology version.
• Inside a signal group, available signals are combined as an equally weighted mean of the signals that produced a valid observation.
• Where weights are intentionally public, they are stated on that index's ranking page alongside the leaderboard.
• Where weights are treated as proprietary model parameters, they are not disclosed. Weight values are versioned with the methodology rather than changed silently.

• Higher is stronger on the signals that index measures — and only on those signals.
• A 0–100 figure is a normalized analytical scale, not a percentage, a probability, a grade or an audited value.
• Scores are not comparable across indexes. The same number on two different indexes reflects different inputs and different scaling.
• Scores are not comparable across cohorts. A firm ranked inside a comparison universe is positioned against that universe, not against the whole market.
• PTC publishes no significance threshold. Small differences between adjacent firms should be read as broadly similar positioning rather than as a material gap.
• Rank position is often more robust than the score value, because rank is unaffected by the scale of the leading firm.

Zero vs missing

An observed zero is a real value. An absent, unavailable or not-yet-collected value is missing. Where a source records zero to mean 'not collected', the value is treated as missing.

Effect of missing data

A missing signal is excluded from the calculation and reduces the firm's coverage for that signal group. It does not push the score down.

Coverage minimums

Each signal group requires a minimum number of valid signals before a group score is produced. Below that minimum the group is reported as not calculated rather than estimated.

Coverage and confidence

Coverage is carried alongside the score and informs the published confidence treatment described in the Confidence Framework.

Cadence

Update frequency varies by index. Snapshots are dated to a month, but not every index is regenerated on the same cycle. Published cadence per dataset is listed in the Update Schedule.

Snapshot membership

The set of firms published in an index can differ between snapshots as coverage and eligibility change. Firm counts per index are therefore not constant over time.

Historical comparability

Comparability across snapshots is not guaranteed. Because scores are cohort-relative, a firm's score can move when universe membership changes or when input coverage changes, even if nothing about the firm changed.

Methodology versions

Index methodologies and their parameters are recorded with a version identifier so a published snapshot can be tied to the methodology that produced it. Historical snapshots are not retroactively rewritten when a methodology is revised.

Version breaks

A methodology revision can impair comparison with earlier snapshots. Where an index changes version, scores before and after that change should be read as separate series.

• Rankings cover PTC's tracked and eligible universe, not every prop firm in existence.
• Third-party and public datasets can contain gaps, lags and inconsistencies, and coverage differs between firms.
• Rankings are analytical measures computed by PTC, not audited company figures or verified performance records.
• Relative scores can change when the comparison universe or the available evidence changes.
• Methodology revisions may affect comparability with earlier snapshots.
• Rankings are not investment advice, not a recommendation, and not a guarantee of any firm's future conduct, solvency or payout behaviour.