This desk exists to analyse prop firms from a trader-survival perspective, not a marketing one. The priority is straightforward: examine funded-stage rules, complex rule structures, execution reality, and trust signals that directly affect whether a trader can sustain a funded account long-term.
Funded-stage auditsHidden rule extractionExecution and broker trustRankings maintenanceStructured review publishing
The Prop Firm Secret Research Desk writes and maintains reviews, updates structured data, recomputes firm scores, and keeps the public rankings aligned with the live scoring system. It is not a signal service, broker referral desk, or challenge-selling funnel.
Editorial standard
1. Fine print wins
If the homepage says one thing and the ToS says another, the legal or rule text becomes the authoritative interpretation.
2. Funded stage is the truth
Drawdown, profit split, funded pressure, and survivability are based on funded-stage conditions, not challenge marketing headlines.
3. Public evidence only
Broker, registration, Trustpilot, and rule claims must be grounded in public evidence that can be inspected or cited.
What gets checked in every serious review
Rule pressure
Funded drawdown type, max loss, and daily loss structure
Open-loss or floating-loss layers
Best-day, consistency, or one-sided-risk pressure
Minimum trading-day requirements and payout friction
Trust reality
Broker backing and named liquidity-provider evidence
Registration evidence, jurisdiction quality, and legal entity clarity
Operating history versus domain-age mismatch
Trustpilot scale, not just rating
How a firm review is maintained
01
Identity and structure
Confirm domain, canonical slug, logo/favicon source, legal entity trail, and whether the firm is broker-backed, liquidity-backed, or effectively virtual only.
02
Funded-stage extraction
Extract plans, funded drawdown, profit split, payout cadence, restrictions, and all trader-facing rules that affect long-term account retention.
03
Hidden-rule audit
Review the ToS, FAQ, help center, and legal pages for open-loss layers, payout discretion, best-day restrictions, dual-company structure, and similar material conditions.
04
Score recomputation
Recompute the live AI Score from the current methodology, refresh structured outputs, and push the updated result into the public rankings feed.
Conflict and disclosure stance
What this desk does not do
It does not score firms based on challenge discounts or marketing hype alone.
It does not treat challenge-phase values as main display truth for funded survivability.
It does not override legal disclosures with optimistic homepage copy.
What this desk is optimized for
Finding what firms bury.
Explaining rule pressure in plain trader language.
Keeping live rankings, detail pages, and methodology aligned.
If you have a factual correction, updated rule page, verified registration source, or broker/liquidity evidence that changes a review, send it to hello@propfirmsecret.com. Useful submissions include the exact source URL, the changed clause or rule text, and the date the source was accessed.
Why funded-stage data only?
Most prop firm comparison sites lead with evaluation or challenge-phase numbers: max drawdown of 10%, daily loss of 5%, profit target of 8%. These numbers are real — but they describe the test, not the job.
What actually determines whether a trader survives long-term is the funded-stage ruleset: how the live funded account behaves, what the drawdown structure looks like on a real balance, what payout conditions apply, and which hidden rules can invalidate earnings that were already made.
The decision to lead with funded-stage data means some comparisons are harder to make at a glance — many firms advertise challenge rules prominently and bury funded rules in sub-pages. But it also means the review reflects what a trader is actually signing up for when they pass and receive funding.
"The challenge is the price of entry. The funded rules are the actual contract."
The 4 hidden rule categories
Every serious review runs a specific sweep for four rule categories that firms frequently understate, bury in ToS footnotes, or omit from their public FAQ entirely. These categories have caused the highest rate of unexpected account closures or payout rejections across the industry.
1. Open P&L / floating-loss layers
Some firms apply an automatic account close or breach trigger based on unrealised (floating) loss — not just closed trades. This means a trade that is currently open at a drawdown, even if it eventually recovers, can trigger a breach before it closes. These rules appear under labels like "Guardian Shield", "equity protection", "soft breach", or "hard breach".
2. Qualifying trading day thresholds
Beyond simply requiring a minimum number of trading days before payout, some firms require each counted day to include a minimum profit percentage — for example, "a qualifying day requires at least 0.5% gain". Days where you trade but don't hit the threshold don't count. This can silently extend payout wait times by weeks.
3. Best Day Rule (restrictive variants)
A Best Day Rule caps the percentage of total profit that can come from a single trading day. If more than the allowed percentage came from one day, the entire payout may be delayed, reduced, or denied. Rules at 40% or below are flagged as CRITICAL — a trader can do everything right across a full month and still be denied if one good day was "too good".
4. Consecutive losing day caps
Some firms impose a limit on how many consecutive losing trading days are allowed before the account is restricted or closed. This rule is rarely mentioned in marketing materials and does not appear in most firm comparison tables. It disproportionately affects discretionary traders and those holding through volatility.
Who this site is for
Prop Firm Secret is built for traders who are about to spend real money on a prop firm challenge — and who want to know what happens after they pass, not just what the challenge looks like.
Before you buy
Use the firm detail pages to check funded-stage drawdown, profit split, payout cadence, and any hidden rules that apply specifically to the funded account — not the evaluation.
Comparing firms
Use the leaderboard and the home comparison table to rank firms by AI Score, filter by book type or trader style, and identify where the rule pressure concentrates.
After you're funded
Come back to the detail page for your firm to check if the rules have changed, whether any red flags have been added since you joined, and whether the payout terms are still what you agreed to.
This site is not for traders looking for discount codes, referral links, or challenge-pass strategies. Those things exist elsewhere. This site is for traders who read the fine print.
Coverage and data freshness
38Firms tracked
4Hidden rule categories audited per firm
100Max AI Score (funded-stage only)
DailyTrustpilot auto-refresh cycle
Each firm record includes structured data on funded drawdown, daily loss limits, profit split, payout cadence, broker backing, Trustpilot standing, Facebook managing country, hidden rule count, and AI Score across five main factors: Rule Fairness, Payout Reliability, Trader Support, Firm Behaviors, and People's Trust.
Trustpilot data is refreshed automatically via a background worker that queries the Wayback Machine CDX API. Facebook managing country is verified periodically through a dedicated lookup API. Rule and plan data is updated manually whenever a firm publishes a significant terms or pricing change.
How the AI Score is structured
The AI Score is a composite score out of 100 derived from five weighted factors. It is designed to reflect how survivable and trustworthy a firm is from the perspective of a funded trader — not how easy the evaluation challenge is or how aggressively the firm markets itself.