The Full Timeline of Apex Trader Funding from 2023 to 2025

I’ve been using Apex for a few years now, and I am still funded with multiple accounts there. I’ve taken several payouts, but I’m still working on scaling up to 20 accounts. I have had no personal complaints, because Apex has done better than what I’d expect from a company dealing with so many clients.

But I see a lot of misinformation about them online, especially on Reddit. There have been a lot of people calling this company a scam, which is wrong. Others say they are one of the worst firms, which is also wrong. I have unfortunately dealt with and seen much worse. Apex is one of the better ones in my estimation, and if your goals are anything like mine, you will probably want to take advantage of the opportunity yourself.

Once you understand what has developed over the past few years, everything should make more sense.

How it Started

Let’s go back to late 2022. ApexTraderFunding had been somewhat quietly growing to be the largest funded futures prop firm out there. I had made an account, but hadn’t tried their evaluation yet. This somewhat newer firm was promoting 20 simultaneous funded accounts and 100% of the first $25,000 of payouts going to the trader, per account.

Coming from OneUp Trader, Leeloo Trading, and TopStep, I had never dreamt of having so many accounts, let alone getting such a massive profit split from each one. At that time, OneUp was the best firm in my eyes. But they only allowed 1 account per trader, and we only kept the first $8,000 of our payouts before getting an 80/20 split. Since then, they’ve increased it to 3, 100% of the first $10,000, and a 90/10 split.

Wanting to scale my trading up, I quickly took advantage of some 80% sales at Apex, and got 2 funded accounts. I was a good trader then, but still far from really scaling. I had never even managed more than 2 accounts at once.

What I learned soon after, through a few discord servers, was that some traders were withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars from Apex. They would sign up for 20 evaluations at a 80-90% discount, place a maximum size trade copied across all 20 accounts, and cross their fingers. Eventually, the entire batch of 20 accounts would pass. Other traders would go in with 25% maximum size, double up when the market went against them, and then add more size, waiting until a trend reversal passed all the accounts.

In short, people were gambling at an epic scale, with no interest in an actual partnership between trader and firm. This continued in the funded accounts, resulting in cycles of 10-20 blown funded accounts, new evals, more blown accounts, and eventually some massive payouts. When you consider people were hearing that you could pay $2,000 for a batch of accounts, withdraw $40,000 in 2 weeks, and repeat the process with no real risk, it makes sense to want to try it, doesn’t it?

How This Was Allowed to Happen

Apex had some lenient rules back then. They didn’t mind what your consistency was like, as long as you weren’t getting a massive profit on day 1 and flipping on days 2-10. They didn’t care how much size you used, as long as it wasn’t egregiously changing day by day. They also didn’t mind if you withdrew most of your initial profits.

Plus, with their huge profit bonuses and sales, hundreds or thousands of people were doing this. As this information spread, even more traders were doing the same. The Discord server ballooned from some thousands of traders to tens of thousands.

Apex was severely understaffed when this growth was taking place. Processing tens of thousands of accounts per day already, with tens of thousands of new members flooding the discord, it was nearly impossible to really apply any discretion to payout requests and maintain any sort of consistency. A misunderstanding or obscure reasoning for a denial ultimately produced thousands of complaints when anything went wrong.

And things went horribly wrong around April of 2024. I didn’t hear this from any of the actual traders, so I can’t imagine what it looked like in those groups that were abusing this system. Apex released some lengthy videos explaining the situation, and said they would have to re-evaluate how they managed their funding process. It turned out that groups of gamblers had milked the system to the point that multiple million dollar funded account balances got blown in the span of a few days.

Think about that – imagine you had passed 20 $50k accounts, accumulated over $1 million USD in profits, and then managed to wipe out all those accounts in a single day. What kind of trader would you have to be to not even withdraw those profits and be a little conservative? These were likely massive groups of automated systems, designed to cheat the biggest, most lenient firm out there, and it worked for who knows how many months.

I don’t know exactly how many millions were lost that week. But Apex alluded to their top accounts, ranked by profits, and said something like half of the accounts were blown almost all at once.

Until that point, Apex was paying everybody, and not even enforcing some of their lenient rules half of the time. This benefitted the traders immensely. But once the community grew to that point, and they investigated things further, they began cracking down on it.

The Aftermath

Apex banned many people during this time, mostly people who had signed up for thousands of accounts or who couldn’t show any sort of consistent, real trading. They temporarily prohibited any sort of DCA (dollar-cost averaging) strategies, which resulted in millions of dollars in denied payouts.

As you can imagine, this prompted hundreds or thousands of complaints. People would come to reddit, facebook, twitter, youtube, and post vague reports of what happened to them, calling Apex a fraudulent company. You can still find those comments sometimes posted on reddit to this day. Apex closed down their discord chat because there were just so many people and so few employees to handle it all, and people let their imagination run wild as they always do.

In late 2024, Apex hired some 100 new employees to help manage the now massive community they were dealing with. In addition, they changed their rules to make things more concrete.

No more leniency on consistency – now it’s a hard 30% rule. No more leniency on whether you flipped for trading days – now it’s 8 days and 5 of them have to show a profit of $50 or more. No more recklessly signing up and burning accounts – traders who do this are likely to get denied or even banned after enough attempts. Perhaps the biggest setback of all is that now Apex is moving traders to live faster, effectively ending any long-term cycles of churning accounts with no intention of actually trading and building a lasting partnership with the firm. But is that not the point of this anyway?

Today, they still pay over 1000 people per week with limited issues, and every trader who has a legitimate strategy there seems to be fine. But if you do not know what you are doing, like the type of people who sign up 50 times to pass once and blame everything but their own approach, it will be tough.

My Advice for Current or Future Traders at Apex

I’ve spoken to many people who trade at Apex or used to trade at Apex. No one seems to want to admit their trading style was the problem, and that it makes no sense for an investor to support someone who fails hundreds of times while trying to get lucky once. I find it strange that so many people seem to feel entitled to backing from a prop firm when they have no consistent strategy. But this is the world of trading I suppose.

If you are serious about day trading futures and want to scale, you cannot blame the ones who are offering you that opportunity to begin with. If you are good enough to pass evaluations consistently, and can read and follow the rules of the firm you’re with, you should have no problem getting a payout. Still, each firm offers its own advantages and disadvantages.

I recommend that you compare these companies carefully (try FundedFilter if you haven’t already), and choose one that lines up with your trading style and needs. If you have enough experience trading already, you may have realized that the rules are just about the same everywhere. They sound like a lot at first, but they don’t really get in the way once you’re good. In fact, some of these rules improved my discipline years ago, and they may do the same for you.

Apex’s sales make them one of the most affordable and straightforward for traders aiming to scale. However, you can definitely find something cheaper sometimes if you’re patient or if you’re still just trying to get started. Be aware though that Apex is not the easiest firm to get a payout from in terms of time. You still have to wait a few months before you can get to unlimited withdrawals. Some firms allow you to withdraw more frequently or remove the cap earlier.

But are they fraudulent, or withholding payouts for unfair reasons? No. Considering everything that happened in 2024, I was surprised the rules were not more restrictive than they are.

I hope this helps you understand why Apex is still seen as controversial today. Feel free to correct me if I made a mistake somewhere, or if I missed something. I don’t have the Apex videos saved myself, but they may still be up on their helpdesk section if you look through their update posts.