What Happens to My Track Record If I Leave a Prop Firm?

Who owns the record?

State it structurally rather than as an accusation, because it is not misconduct — it is how the arrangement is built. The trades were made in the firm's account, executed on the firm's platform, and recorded in the firm's systems. The artifact showing what you did is theirs. Whether it is displayed, for how long, in what form, and to whom, is their decision.

Nothing in that requires bad faith. A firm that closes, gets acquired, changes its dashboard, ends a programme or simply deprecates old accounts removes your evidence as a side effect of an ordinary business decision. The exposure is structural, so it does not depend on the firm being anything other than a normal company.

What are you left holding?

A claim. "I passed a $100,000 evaluation and traded it profitably for fourteen months" is a sentence, and the person you say it to has exactly the same reason to believe it as they would for any other unevidenced sentence about trading.

Worse, the claim degrades in a way the record would not. Ask what a listener can establish from it: not the win rate, not the drawdown, not the sample size, not whether the fourteen months were consecutive. At a 55% win rate, a 30-trade sample already carries a 95% interval from 37.2% to 72.8% — and a remembered record is not even a sample. It has no n at all.

Does the payout history help?

Partially, and it is the strongest thing most people leave with. A payout proves money moved, which is real evidence that something worked. It cannot show the shape: how much was risked to produce it, how many trades it took, what the worst stretch looked like, or whether one position did the work. Those are the properties a serious assessor asks about, and a payment record answers none of them.

Why does this reframe the whole arrangement?

Because a prop firm is one buyer of your talent, and the record is the thing that lets there be others. A trader with an artifact can be assessed by anyone. A trader whose only evidence lives in a dashboard they do not control has, in effect, one route — and has to rebuild from zero every time it closes.

That is not an argument against prop firms. It is an argument for not letting the arrangement also own the proof that you are worth the arrangement.

What does a parallel record cost?

$15 a month, which is $180 a year, or $360 across a two-year stint. Set against an evaluation fee, a profit share and the time it takes to build fourteen months of results, that is the cheapest line item in the whole undertaking — and it is the only one that survives leaving.

kappi is broker-agnostic. Commits are made from the Chrome extension, so any brokerage works — or your own journal, kept wherever you already keep it. No import, no account linking, no requirement to trade inside someone else's platform.

The one thing that cannot be done is starting late. A record's entire value comes from having existed before the fact, so a parallel log begun after you leave documents nothing about the period you want to prove. This is the rare case where a small decision is genuinely irreversible, and it is irreversible in only one direction.

How do you keep one alongside?

• Record the decision, not the fill. A commit made when you take the trade captures what you intended; an export captures what the platform saw. Only the first survives losing access to the platform.
• Keep it outside the firm's systems. Anything inside them shares their fate, including a journal feature that ships with the dashboard.
• Include the losing periods. A record that only covers the good months is a claim with extra steps, and it fails the first question a serious assessor asks.
• Make it checkable without you. Every sealed commit is hashed into a Merkle tree and anchored to Hedera, so the log is append-only and independently checkable.

There is a professional answer to what a portable record should look like, and it predates all of this. The CFA Institute's Global Investment Performance Standards turn on fair representation and full disclosure, and require performance across every portfolio in a composite rather than the accounts that worked.^[1] A firm dashboard covering one funded account for fourteen months is not that, and a claim about it afterwards is not either.

The composite rule exists because of what happens without it. A record that survives is partly a record that was allowed to: the traders who breached are not showing you theirs, so the ones you do see look better than the group did. That is survivorship bias, measured on fund performance in 1992.^[2] The portability half was solved a year earlier — hash-linked timestamping makes a date checkable by anyone, without the issuer's cooperation,^[3] which is exactly what a dashboard cannot offer.

kappi is a trade recorder: you commit a trade before the fact, it is sealed on your device for a time-capsuled delay you choose, then kappi publishes it on a Merkle-anchored log. It is broker-agnostic and account-agnostic, so the record is yours wherever you trade. $15/month, no free tier.