TSOPEN is built to run on funded futures accounts, where the money in the market belongs to a proprietary trading firm and not to you. You buy the evaluation yourself, directly from the firm. The system then trades it under that firm's rules, and if it passes you trade the firm's capital and keep a share of what it makes. Your own savings never go into a futures contract.
A prop firm has capital and wants people who follow rules. You have a system that follows rules and no interest in putting your savings in the market. The evaluation is how the two of you meet.
The firm sells you a test account with a profit target, a drawdown limit and a rulebook, and you buy it from the firm directly. A 50k evaluation runs around $100, and discounts are close to permanent. You are buying a chance to prove you can follow rules, not a subscription and not a share of anything yet.
You connect the evaluation account to NinjaTrader 8 and let TSOPEN work its 8:30 AM ET window. One trade a day, stop and target placed at the instant of entry, nothing held overnight. That is the exact behavior evaluations are written to reward.
Hit the target without breaking a rule and the firm converts you to a funded account of the same size, usually with its own separate rulebook for the funded stage. Nothing about how the system trades changes. The money behind it does.
Profits leave the account on the firm's cadence, up to the firm's cap per payout, and you keep the majority under the profit split. The transfer goes from their account to yours. That is the whole loop, and then it repeats.
The slower version: funded accounts explained and passing an evaluation with a bot.
Here is the piece most sites leave out, and it is the one that decides whether your budget is realistic. A funded account is not something you own forever. It is closer to a season pass with a finite number of uses printed on the back.
Firms cap two things: how much you can take in a single payout, and how many payouts an account gets before it retires. On a 50k plan, a limit somewhere around $2,000 per payout is typical. Multiply one cap by the other and you have the honest ceiling on what a single account can ever deliver. It is a specific number, it is knowable before you pay, and it is not large.
So an account ends one of two ways. It earns its way through the permitted payouts and retires, which is the good ending: you buy another and start again. Or a bad run takes it out against the drawdown rule, which is the bad ending: you buy another and start again. Same answer either way. Replace the account, keep the system.
That replacement cost is the real running expense of this route, so here it is with the numbers attached. In the last 7 months of the backtest, moving $43,322 gross on a $50,000 account took roughly 7 accounts. At about $100 an evaluation that is ≈$700 in fees against ≈$41,000 net once commissions are out. Not a rounding error, and not a catastrophe. A line item, the way a delivery business budgets for tires.
Hypothetical performance. These figures come from a NinjaTrader 8 Strategy Analyzer backtest on a $50,000 account: a simulation over historical data, not the record of a live account. Past performance, real or simulated, does not guarantee future results.
Once a system has proved itself on one account, nothing stops you sending the same trade to several of your own funded accounts at the same time. The signal is identical, the entry is identical, the stop is identical. The only variable is how many accounts receive it, and that is where the arithmetic of this route stops being modest.
Most firms allow this between accounts belonging to the same person, and several sell or permit copier tools for exactly that purpose. Now the fine print, because this is where people get hurt.
Take the recent stretch of the backtest (7 months on one $50,000 account) and replicate it across five accounts of the same size, one contract each. The arithmetic, in the open:
That is a backtest figure multiplied by five. No real account produced it, nobody ran five accounts to get it, and the same multiplication applies to the losing months, which the backtest also has. Treat it as arithmetic, not as a forecast, and run your own version in the calculator.
Four of them. We do not sell, supply or fund evaluations, and we have no agreement with any of these companies. You open the account yourself, directly with the firm. Below is what each one is known for, in our words rather than the words on its own landing page. What we deliberately do not publish is anybody's terms.
The biggest and the oldest name in US futures prop trading, with the account volume and the operating history to match. Evaluation discounts run close to permanently, it allows a lot of accounts per person, and it permits copying one trade across accounts that belong to you.
Smaller and newer, and built with rule-driven traders in mind. Transparent rules written to be read rather than survived, an end-of-day drawdown instead of a trailing intraday one, and an explicit policy allowing bots and copiers.
Affordable plans with a simple structure and very little friction to get going. A common first stop for someone who wants to find out whether the whole process suits them before committing more money to it.
A solid reputation on payouts, which is the thing that matters once you are past the evaluation stage, and account structures that let you group your own accounts together. Useful when one account has stopped being enough.
Terms change constantly: targets, drawdown type, payout cadence, accounts per person, whether automation is permitted at all. Everything above describes reputation, not anybody's rulebook. Check the numbers on the firm's own page on the day you pay, and read how to choose a prop firm before you do.
None of that makes the route a bad one. It makes it a route with terms, and terms can be read before you spend anything. Our reason for pointing at it is narrow: TSOPEN trades once a day, with a fixed stop placed at entry and no overnight exposure, which happens to be the behavior these evaluations are built to reward. What can still go wrong is on the risk page, and the rules themselves, one at a time, in funded account rules explained.
The calculator takes your account size, the number of accounts and the contracts each one trades, then does the arithmetic with commissions and evaluation fees taken out. Same backtest figures as this page, so nothing changes between the sales copy and the math. TSOPEN itself is $997, paid once.
Something here does not add up, or you want to know how a specific firm handles a specific rule? Open a ticket. It gets a reference, and a person answers it.