When a trader asks whether a prop firm is legitimate, they are rarely asking about paperwork. They are asking something sharper: does this company want me to succeed, or does it need me to fail?
That question has a technical answer. It comes down to two terms the industry uses among itself and almost never explains to the people paying: A-Book and B-Book.
B-Book: the firm is on the other side of your trade
In a B-Book model, the firm is your counterparty. Your order does not reach a market. It stops at the firm, which takes the opposite side of it internally.
The consequence is arithmetic. If you lose, the money stays with the firm. If you win, the firm pays you out of its own capital. Your losses are its revenue.
It also explains a pattern that puzzles traders. Why do some firms write rules that seem designed to be tripped over? Why do challenge fees sit where they do? When failure is revenue, a rule that ends accounts early is not a bug in the product. It is the product.
A-Book: the firm earns alongside you
In an A-Book model, the firm passes real exposure to the market through a liquidity provider. It earns from spread, from commission, or from a share of profits that were actually made, not from the money of people who failed.
The incentive inverts. A trader who survives twelve months is worth more than a trader who blows up in three weeks, because the surviving trader keeps generating volume and profit the firm participates in. Consistency becomes an asset instead of a cost.
The part most articles on this subject skip
Here is the uncomfortable half, and we would rather say it ourselves than have you find it elsewhere: almost every evaluation in this industry is simulated, including ours.
Evaluation accounts and funded accounts at A-Book Funded are simulated accounts, with fictitious funds. We write that on every page of this site, not in a footnote. Anyone telling you their $100,000 evaluation account is live money on a real exchange should be asked, politely, for the account statements.
There are three ordinary reasons the whole industry works this way. Putting real capital behind an unproven trader is expensive. It is also slow: real execution introduces slippage and rejects that make an evaluation harder to judge fairly. And a simulated environment is far easier to police against the practices that would otherwise make evaluations meaningless, from latency exploitation to hedging across accounts.
“Simulated or real” is the wrong question to ask a prop firm. The right question is: when I pay you, where does your money come from?
Five checks that answer the right question
None of these requires trusting anybody. All five can be done in fifteen minutes, before paying, on any firm, including this one.
- Read the payout terms before you buy, not after. If the full rule set is behind a signup wall or an account, that is the answer to your question. Rules that decide whether you get paid should be readable by someone who has not paid.
- Look for a version number and a date on the rules. Unversioned rules can be edited after your purchase and applied to your open account. A version and a date make retroactive changes visible, which is why firms that intend to make them do not publish either.
- Look for a commitment that costs the firm something when it is broken. “We aim to process payouts quickly” costs nothing. A stated deadline with a stated penalty is a promise with a price attached, and only a firm that expects to keep it will write one down.
- Check what the firm publishes about itself when it is not flattering. Restricted countries, prohibited practices, what happens to your fee when you fail. A firm that only publishes its strengths has told you which half of the story it is comfortable with.
- Ask support a hard question before buying. “Are funded accounts simulated?” is a good one. The answer, and how fast it comes, tells you more than any review page.
Where we sit, precisely
A vague answer here would be worth no more than no answer, so here is the exact shape of it.
- Evaluation accounts: simulated, with fictitious funds.
- Funded accounts: simulated. Rewards are calculated on your simulated performance, and paid in real euros.
- Tier 3 of the scaling plan, A-Book Trader: the strategy of a qualified trader is replicated on real markets with the company's own capital. This is discretionary: it is not a right unlocked by hitting a number.
- The house platform, A-Book Trader, is wired directly to our A-Book flow, which is why spread, latency and slippage are at their best there. The four third-party platforms run through an external API and carry their own surcharge.
So we are not claiming your funded account executes on a live exchange. It does not, and anyone who tells you otherwise about their own is either confused or counting on you not to ask.
What we are claiming is narrower and checkable: our revenue is built on replicating traders who last, with our own capital, rather than on collecting fees from traders who fail. That is why the rules are published in full, why they carry a version, and why the payout commitment has a price attached when we miss it.
What it actually changes for you
| What you are trying to find out | What to look at |
|---|---|
| Does this firm need me to fail? | Where its revenue comes from: fees, or a share of real profits |
| Can the rules move under me? | A version number and a date on the rule set |
| Will I actually be paid? | A stated deadline, and a stated penalty if it is missed |
| Is my account real money? | Almost certainly not, at any firm. Ask when real capital does enter |
| Is this firm hiding anything? | What it publishes that does not flatter it |
The model does not tell you whether a firm is honest. Honest firms exist on both sides, and so do the other kind. What the model tells you is which way the pressure runs when things get tight, and that is worth knowing before you pay, not after.
