Sim funded vs live funded: are my payouts from real trades?

Two kinds of funded account

On a sim-funded account you trade in a simulator. Your orders don’t go to an exchange, so nothing you do touches a real market; the firm tracks your simulated profit and pays you a share of it. A live-funded account holds the firm’s own capital in a real brokerage account, and your orders go to the real market and get real fills.

The names vary. Topstep calls its simulated funded stage the Express Funded Account (XFA) and its live stage the Live Funded Account (LFA), while MyFundedFutures uses “Sim Funded” and “Live Funded”.

What the firms say about their own accounts

Firm	In their own words
Topstep	“The Express Funded Account® (XFA) is the simulated funded-level account you earn after passing your Trading Combine.” (help centre)
FTMO	“all accounts we provide to our clients are demo accounts with fictitious funds and any trading is in a simulated environment only.” (site notice)
MyFundedFutures	“All MFFU accounts operate in a simulated environment.” and “All trades are executed on a demo basis and do not involve real capital.” (home page)
Tradeify	“You’re trading on simulated capital, so the money in your bank account is never on the line.” (home page)

We checked each quote on 30 September 2026.

Where the payout comes from

In Topstep’s words, “Topstep pays you real money based on your simulated trading results.” (help centre) No simulated trade reaches a market, so that money can’t come from market profit. It comes from the firm’s own revenue, which includes the evaluation fees traders pay.

Payouts also depend on the firm’s rules. MyFundedFutures says payouts “are based on simulated account profits and are subject to rules compliance, trading day requirements, and firm review.” (home page)

On a live account the capital belongs to the firm. Topstep describes the money in its LFA as “Topstep’s prop firm capital” (help centre), and MyFundedFutures explains that “A live account involves a real brokerage account and trades on the live markets” (help centre).

How many traders reach live capital

Topstep, Tradeify and MyFundedFutures, all futures prop firms, publish these numbers on their home pages. We checked them on 30 September 2026. Each firm counts in a slightly different way, so compare the rows with care.

Firm	Period	Passed the evaluation	Funded traders who got a payout	Moved to live
Topstep	January–December 2025	16.8% of Trading Combines	33.3%	0.71%
Tradeify	August 2025–July 2026	17.2% of evaluation accounts	28.5%	3.0%
MyFundedFutures	Not stated	19.97% of evaluation participants	39.2%	4.2%

Topstep states its figure as “0.71% of individual participants trading in an Express Funded Account were called up to a Live Funded Account.” MyFundedFutures notes that “All results occurred solely within a simulated environment and are not indicative of future results.”

The My Forex Funds case and the word “simulated”

On 28 August 2023, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sued Traders Global Group, which traded as My Forex Funds, and its founder Murtuza Kazmi. The CFTC announced the case on 1 September 2023 (press release).

According to the complaint, Traders Global offered customers a chance to use “Traders Global’s money to trade against third-party ‘liquidity providers’”. The complaint alleged that Traders Global was in fact “the counterparty to substantially all customer trades”, the party on the other side of them, and that “substantially all of the payments come from fees paid by other customers”. By its count, more than 135,000 customers had paid “at least $310 million in fees”.

These were allegations, and they were never proven. On 13 May 2025, Judge Edward S. Kiel granted the defendants’ motion for sanctions against the CFTC and dismissed the complaint with prejudice, so the same claims can’t be brought again. A court-appointed special master had found that the CFTC “took deliberate steps down a path of obfuscation and avoidance” (report). In July 2025 the court awarded the defendants $3,148,484.22 in legal fees and costs, and the case was closed on 14 July 2025 (docket).

The case changed how firms describe their accounts. On 29 September 2023, Finance Magnates reported that “Many prop trading platforms have changed their website’s wording after the charges filed in the US against My Forex Funds”. My Funded FX, for example, changed “Manage Capital” to “Manage Simulated Capital.” Today Topstep, FTMO, MyFundedFutures and Tradeify all use the words “simulated” or “demo” for their accounts.

How to tell which kind of account you have

Start with the wording. Search the terms for “simulated”, “demo”, “virtual” or “fictitious” near the words “funded account”, and check the stage name: “Express Funded” and “Sim Funded” are simulated stages, and “Live Funded” is the live one.

It also helps to ask whose account it is. A live account is a real brokerage account holding the firm’s capital, while a sim account is a login to a simulator. Live accounts carry real market costs, too: MyFundedFutures charges its live traders for a “CME Professional Data Subscription”, “Round-Trip Commissions and Fees” and a “Platform License or Subscription” (help centre). And some firms don’t allow automation on live accounts. Topstep says “automated strategies are not possible at this time in the Live Funded Account.” (help centre)

Where a firm publishes statistics, its move-to-live rate tells you how rare live funding is.

Which ROMER stages send real orders

ROMER, a funded-trader program for algorithmic and high-frequency traders run by Entity Capital, LLC, is still in development, with a waitlist and a closed beta first. No real orders go out until an algo is funded:

Stage	What happens	Real orders sent?	Minimum length
Stage 1	A simulated evaluation	No	10 trading days
Stage 2, “shadow-live”	Your algo runs at full speed on the live market	No	10 trading days
Funded	The best algos trade Entity Capital’s own capital on the real exchange	Yes	Not applicable

Traders are independent contractors paid a share of profits, and a funded trader keeps 80% of real profits, though funding isn’t guaranteed. Bots, algos and HFT are allowed at every stage, funded included, and algos run on our hardware inside the exchange’s data centre.