How to track a prop-firm challenge without a spreadsheet
Every challenge comes down to the same handful of numbers. Here's what they are, why a spreadsheet keeps failing at tracking them, and what checking them automatically actually looks like.
The rules that actually decide whether you pass
Strip away the marketing pages and every prop-firm challenge — FTMO, Apex, TopStep, MyFundedFutures, and the rest — is really just a handful of numbers checked against your account, continuously:
- Profit target — how much you need to make before you're funded, usually a percentage of your starting balance.
- Max drawdown — the floor your account can never cross, either fixed (static) or moving with your equity (trailing).
- Daily loss limit — a separate, tighter cap on how much you can lose in a single day.
- Minimum trading days — a floor on how many days you have to trade, so a single lucky day doesn't count as a pass.
- Consistency rule — a cap on how much of your total profit one single day is allowed to represent, so the challenge isn't passed on one outlier trade.
- Scaling / position-size limits — a ceiling on how large a position you're allowed to hold at once.
Different firms mix and weight these differently — some skip the consistency rule entirely, some use trailing drawdown instead of static, some measure the consistency rule against your profit target instead of your total profit so far. The rules are firm-specific, but the shape of the problem is always the same.
Why a spreadsheet keeps failing at this
A spreadsheet can hold the numbers. What it can't do is watch them. Every rule above needs to be checked against your live account state, after every trade — not reconstructed at the end of the week from a broker statement. In practice, that means:
- You update it after the fact, so you find out you were close to a daily-loss breach after the day is already over.
- Trailing drawdown is genuinely fiddly to compute by hand — it moves with your equity high-water mark, not your starting balance — and a small formula mistake compounds silently for weeks.
- Switching firms, or running more than one challenge at once, means rebuilding the whole sheet from scratch with a different rule shape.
What "checked live" actually means
Birr Journal's Challenge Tracker is built around exactly the six numbers above. You pick your firm and plan, the rule set for it is pre-filled, and every rule — profit target, drawdown (static or trailing), daily loss, trading days, consistency rule, scaling limits — is checked against your synced or manually-logged trades as you go. You see how close you are to a breach before it happens, not after your challenge is already over.
Firm rules change, and this app treats every pre-filled template as a starting point you can edit, not something silently trusted — if a firm updates its terms, you update the field, and the tracker keeps checking against the number you actually agreed to.