Apex Trader Funding Review

Apex Trader Funding Inc was incorporated in Texas in July 2021 by founder and CEO Darrell Martin and operates from Austin. It is a futures-only evaluation firm: every evaluation and funded Performance Account is a simulated account, and payouts are paid from Apex's own revenue rather than from real exchange trading. No US financial regulator licenses this activity, so the firm's Texas corporate registration is the only public record of the business.

Scale is Apex's strongest trust signal. It is the most-reviewed futures prop firm on Trustpilot, with a 4.2 score across roughly 20,800 reviews in August 2026, and reports several hundred million dollars in cumulative payouts. Its reputation is mixed, though: 2023 payout delays, mid-stream rule changes in 2024 and an ongoing stream of 1-star reviews about locked accounts are why it rates below FTMO or Topstep on reliability.

Apex rebuilt its product on 1 March 2026. New evaluations are one-time purchases with 30 days of access in four sizes: $25k, $50k, $100k and $150k (the old 75k, 250k and 300k accounts were retired). Profit targets are $1,500, $3,000, $6,000 and $9,000; trailing thresholds are $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 and $4,000; contract caps are 4, 6, 8 and 12 minis (10x in micros).

Each size comes in two versions. The Intraday Trail has no daily loss limit but its threshold trails your peak open profit tick by tick. The EOD Trail only recalculates at the 4:59 PM ET close and adds a daily loss limit of $500 to $2,000. In both, the threshold stops trailing once it reaches $100 above the starting balance. There is no minimum number of trading days and no consistency rule during the evaluation, but there are no resets either: fail and you buy a new evaluation.

Funded traders keep 100% of the first $25,000 paid out per account and 90% after that. To request a payout in 2026 you need five qualifying days (at least $100 profit per day on 25k, rising to $350 on 150k EOD), a balance above the safety net (starting balance plus the drawdown amount plus $100, so $52,100 on a 50k), no single day at 50% or more of the cycle's profit, and a request of at least $500.

The catch is the payout ladder. Each Performance Account allows six payouts, each capped by size and payout number: a 50k EOD account can withdraw $1,500 on the first request and $3,000 on the sixth, a lifetime maximum of $13,000; a 150k Intraday account tops out at $21,500. After the sixth payout the account closes. US traders receive ACH; everyone else is paid through Plane, typically five to eleven business days end to end, automated since March 2026.

Apex runs on Rithmic, Tradovate and WealthCharts data connections, which opens up NinjaTrader, TradingView (through Tradovate), Quantower, Sierra Chart and more than a dozen other front ends; Level 1 data is included and Level 2 depth costs extra through the platform. Positions can be held on CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX futures: equity index contracts such as ES, NQ and their micros, currency futures, energies, interest-rate products and crypto futures.

Two limits matter. All metals futures, including gold, silver, micro gold, copper, platinum and palladium, are suspended on 2026 accounts with no return date. And Apex is futures only: there is no forex spot, CFD, stock or options trading, so traders coming from MetaTrader firms need to learn a futures platform first.

Every position must be flat by 4:59 PM ET; nothing is held overnight or over the weekend. Normal news trading is allowed, including holding a directional trade through a scheduled release, but placing opposing orders on both sides of a release, hedging in the same or correlated contracts and opposite exposure across your own accounts are prohibited. The old 5:1 risk-reward, one-direction and maximum-adverse-excursion rules were scrapped in March 2026.

Automation is the hard line: bots, algorithms, high-frequency systems and anything that trades without a human actively present are banned on all account types, and letting a third-party copy service or another person trade your account ends the account. Copying trades across your own Apex accounts is fine, and up to 20 Performance Accounts can be run at once.

Support runs through a ticket-based helpdesk portal and email at [email protected], backed by a large Help Center that documents every rule, fee and payout table; there is no live chat or published phone line. Turnaround is the weak point: Trustpilot's 1-star reviews in 2025–2026 repeatedly describe tickets that go unanswered for weeks, especially around locked accounts and payout status, and Apex replies to only a small share of negative reviews. Routine questions are usually answered within the same or next business day.