Trading Journal for Prop Firm Traders

Why do most traders fail prop firm challenges?

Ask a trader who just failed a challenge what went wrong and you will rarely hear that they misread the market. You hear that they were two losses down, sized up to make it back, and hit the daily loss limit on a trade that was never in the plan.

They knew the limit. They could have recited it. Every product in this category — and there are at least eight of them targeting prop firm traders directly — will track that limit for you, show you the remaining buffer, and colour it red as you approach. Some do it very well.

None of that changes whether you respect it in the moment that matters. A meter tells you where the line is. It has nothing to say about the fourth trade of a bad afternoon, which is the trade that actually ends challenges.

That is the specific gap this page is about. If your problem is analytical — you need to know which setup carries your edge — the rest of this will not help you much, and there are stronger analytics products. If you already know your rules and break them anyway, keep reading.

How does the Companion actually work?

The Companion is a living entity that exists in ten phases, from Dormant at the bottom to Awakened at the top. It is not a score card, not a chart and not a badge. It runs on experience earned from rule adherence, and it is the only part of Tradeventure that a prop firm's own dashboard has no equivalent for.

Every trade you log is checked against the rules you set. Then:

The asymmetry is the design. One catastrophic breach costs more than a fortnight of disciplined trading earns, which is roughly the real arithmetic of a challenge. A good week does not survive one bad afternoon, and the entity says so before your account does.

What stops you gaming the Companion?

Deleting a trade that already earned experience, or moving it into a folder that is not tracked, freezes the entity for twelve hours. Changing your rules twice in the same day freezes it for twenty-four. Positive experience stops accruing during a freeze while penalties still land, so tampering is strictly worse than leaving the record alone.

This matters more than it sounds. A discipline record you can edit is not a record of anything — and the temptation to quietly delete the revenge trade is at its strongest in exactly the week you most need to see it.

The Companion runs on the free plan across phases 2 to 5, so you can find out whether the mechanism does anything for you without paying. Experience accrues identically on every tier; only the phase that gets displayed is clamped.

Is Prop Firm Mode free, and what does it track?

Prop Firm Mode is a paid feature — the free plan allows zero prop firm accounts, which is a hard limit in the code rather than a nudge. Basic allows one, Pro three, Founder unlimited. Stated plainly here so it is not a surprise at setup.

Each account is configured with:

The three drawdown types are the ones that decide whether the number you are watching is the number the firm is watching. Static holds the floor at your starting balance forever; end-of-day trailing lifts it behind your closing balance; intraday trailing lifts it behind your peak equity, including unrealised profit. They behave very differently on the same account, which is worked through with numbers in static vs trailing drawdown.

Why configure rules instead of picking a firm preset?

This is where competitors have a real, quotable number and we do not. Several advertise 36, 50 or more firm presets. We ship a handful, and one of them carries an in-app warning that we cannot track that firm's intraday trailing model accurately enough to be relied on.

A preset is genuinely faster.If your firm is on someone's list, picking it from a dropdown beats typing eleven fields, and if setup speed is what you are optimising for you should weigh that honestly.

What configuration buys instead is coverage. Because every field above is set by hand, Prop Firm Mode works with any firm that exists — including one that launched last month, one that just changed its drawdown model, and one that is in nobody's preset list because it is too small to be worth adding. Presets are convenience. Configuration is the guarantee that you are not waiting on a vendor to add your firm.

Prop firms also change their rules, and a preset that was right last year is worse than no preset at all, because you will not check it. Every figure you enter here is one you had to look up.

Which is why the presets we do ship say when they were last checked. Each one names the specific program it describes — firms run several with different numbers — shows the date we read it off the firm, and tells you to confirm it before you rely on it. If we have not re-checked one in six months, it says so in amber rather than presenting a stale number as a current one.

Which platforms can you import trades from?

Exactly these, and nothing else.

That last row is the important one and it is why this page says forex and CFD rather than prop firms in general. Much of the competition in this category is futures-first, built around Topstep, Apex and MyFundedFutures. Those accounts are usually traded through Rithmic or Tradovate, and we do not import from either. You would be typing every fill in by hand, which nobody sustains for a whole challenge.

If that is you, take one of the futures-first journals. We would rather lose the signup than the trust.

When is another journal the better choice?

Not a formality. There are traders for whom this page should end with them using something else.

Do you want to know whether you would have passed?

Retroactive evaluation — replaying your existing history against a firm's rule set and reporting whether you would have breached — is a real feature that at least one competitor has built properly. We have no version of it. Prop Firm Mode tracks a live account forward from the moment you configure it. If that backtest is the thing you are shopping for, this is not a close call.

Do you run several challenges at once?

Each account is tracked against its own folder. There is no combined dashboard showing six challenges side by side in one view, and products exist that are built specifically for that. Our tiers cap at one, three or unlimited accounts depending on plan, but the view is per-account either way.

Is setup speed what matters most to you?

Typing eleven fields takes a few minutes and requires you to have your firm's rules to hand. That is a real cost. If you would rather pick your firm from a dropdown of fifty and start, that is a defensible reason to choose differently.

Do you need deep analytics?

Some products in this category ship hundreds of report types. We ship a focused set — expectancy, drawdown, per-instrument breakdown, discipline streak. If your bottleneck is analytical rather than behavioural, more reports will serve you better than a discipline entity will.

Do you want a product with a track record?

We are new. We are not going to quote user numbers we do not have, or borrow social proof from a screenshot. The free plan exists so you can judge the thing itself rather than the claims about it.

What else is worth reading on prop firm rules?

This page is the hub; these go deeper on the parts that decide challenges.

• FTMO rules explained — every limit on both the 2-Step and 1-Step, including the static-versus-EOD- trailing split between them.
• The5ers rules explained — all five programs side by side, and why hitting the daily loss pauses one and terminates another.
• E8 Markets rules explained — four single-phase products separated by drawdown model, and the firm most often described wrongly by comparison articles.
• FundedNext rules explained — static drawdown on three Stellar products, trailing on the fourth, and which two rules actually end an account.
• Static vs trailing drawdown — the same account under both models, with the numbers.
• Prop Firm Challenge Calculator — profit target, daily loss and drawdown buffer for your account size. Free, no signup.
• Position Size Calculator — turns a risk percentage and a stop distance into a lot size. At 1% per trade against a 5% daily limit you can be wrong five times before the day is over.

If you are still comparing journals, we wrote honest comparisons against TradeZella, Edgewonk and Tradervue, each with a section on where the other product wins.

How do you get started?

The free plan is 50 trades a month, two folders, the journal, your rules and the Companion across phases 2 to 5. No card. It does not include Prop Firm Mode — that needs a paid tier, and we would rather you read that here than discover it after signing up.

What free is genuinely good for is answering the only question this page is really asking: does a thing that degrades when you break your own rules change how you trade? Log a fortnight of real trades against real rules and you will know.

Create a free account, or read the FTMO rules first if you have a challenge starting.

Frequently asked questions

Is Tradeventure free for prop firm traders?

Partly, and the part that matters here is not. The free plan allows zero prop firm accounts, so Prop Firm Mode is a paid feature — a hard limit in the code, not a nudge. Free gives you 50 trades a month, two folders, the journal, your rules, and the Companion across phases 2 to 5, which is enough to find out whether the discipline mechanism does anything for you before you pay. Paid plans allow one, three or unlimited prop firm accounts depending on tier.

Which prop firms does Tradeventure support?

Any of them, because Prop Firm Mode is configured rather than selected from a list. You set the daily loss type and percentage, the max drawdown type — static, end-of-day trailing or intraday trailing — the profit target, minimum trading days, the consistency rule, and the reset time with its timezone. A handful of firms have presets to save you the typing, but the configuration is what gives coverage: a firm that launched last week and appears in nobody's preset list is set up the same way as FTMO.

Does Tradeventure work for futures prop firms like Topstep or Apex?

The rule tracking does; getting your fills in does not. We import from cTrader, MT4, MT5, XTB and TradingView, and sync live from cTrader. We do not import from Rithmic or Tradovate, which is how most futures prop accounts are actually traded, so you would be entering trades by hand. If you trade futures through those platforms, a futures-first journal will serve you better and we would rather say so here than after you have paid.

Can Tradeventure tell me if I would have passed a challenge?

No. Retroactive evaluation — replaying your existing trade history against a firm's rule set to see whether you would have breached — is a real feature that some competitors have and we do not. Prop Firm Mode tracks a live account going forward. If that backtest is what you are shopping for, we do not have a weaker version of it, we have none.

What is the Companion and how does it relate to a prop firm challenge?

It is a living entity in ten phases that runs on rule adherence rather than profit. Every trade is checked against the rules you set for that folder. A disciplined trade earns 3 experience and following your stated strategy earns 2 more; a minor violation costs 3, a serious one 15, and a catastrophic breach such as blowing your daily loss limit costs 50. Over a challenge the entity visibly degrades when you stop respecting your own limits and recovers when you start again. It is the part of a challenge that a drawdown meter cannot show you.

Can I delete a bad trade to make the Companion look better?

No, and the attempt is penalised. Deleting a trade that has already earned experience, or moving it into a folder that is not tracked, freezes the Companion for twelve hours. Changing your rules twice in the same day freezes it for twenty-four. The point of the mechanism is that it cannot be edited into looking good, because a discipline record you can rewrite is not a record of anything.

How many prop firm accounts can I track at once?

One on the Basic tier, three on Pro, unlimited on Founder, and zero on the free plan. There is no combined multi-account dashboard that shows several challenges side by side in one view — each account is tracked against its own folder. If you are running six challenges at once and want them on a single screen, that is a genuine gap and other products build for it specifically.

Feature claims on this page describe Tradeventure as it shipped in September 2026 and were checked against the source, not the marketing copy. This page is educational and is not financial advice.