Account and prop-firm terms

Alltra uses the word "account" for a place trades happen and the word "platform" for a place money moves through, and it uses "platform" a second way for the technology a broker runs on. Those distinctions are load-bearing rather than pedantic, so this article separates them before defining anything else.

What an account is

• Trading account — a balance-bearing account your trades belong to, whether it syncs from a broker or you type into it by hand.
• Account type — one of four: Live is real money, Simulated is paper or demo, Evaluation is a challenge in progress, and Funded is an evaluation passed. The link-account wizard labels the second one Demo rather than Simulated — two words, one type.
• Account category — a separate axis of three. Prop is the firm’s money — an evaluation you are trading, or a funded account. Bank is your own money held at a brokerage or a bank. Reserve is cash you keep aside and do not trade from directly.
• Starting balance — what the account began with, so growth is measured from the right place rather than from the first day Alltra saw it.
• Auto Sync / Manual — how fills arrive — pulled from the broker, or entered by you. It is a property of the account, not a judgement about it.

Firms, platforms and the two meanings of the word

• Prop firm — a business that sells an evaluation and, once you pass it, funds an account and pays you a share of the profits. Topstep, Apex and FTMO are firms.
• Platform (the technology) — the trading technology an account actually runs on — Tradovate, Rithmic, MetaTrader, cTrader, NinjaTrader. Firms white-label these, so a great many prop firms share one platform between them, and that is why linking a prop-firm account sends you to a broker’s sign-in page.
• Platform (in the Portfolio) — a completely separate idea with the same name: a relationship you assert by hand so its money can be tracked. Nothing connects and nothing syncs. There are five kinds — prop firm, broker, payment, bank and other — and Alltra treats all five identically, because from the ledger’s point of view they are all just money in and money out.

The reason for the second meaning is that the money side of prop trading does not map onto trading accounts at all. You pay a firm for an evaluation before an account exists, a payment provider holds the payout on its way to you, and none of that is a balance anyone syncs. Registering it as a platform is what makes those flows countable.

Selecting which accounts a page describes

• Account scope (the picker) — the navbar tick-list that decides which accounts every figure is computed over. It is remembered as a preference rather than carried in the page address, so it survives a reload and follows you between surfaces.
• All — do not narrow. It is re-resolved every time the page loads, so an account linked in another tab is included immediately rather than needing to be ticked.
• None — you unticked everything. It genuinely means no accounts, so the dashboards are legitimately empty — this is the most common reason a page looks broken and is not.
• Account group — a named set of up to 25 accounts — all your evaluations, or everything at one firm. Creating one saves it against your account; what it does not do yet is come back, because the drawer has no read for your groups, so a group is a set you have recorded rather than one you can select with. Three rules are enforced on the resulting set rather than on what you changed: at least one member, a name unique among your groups, and one shared source, so an auto-synced account and a manual one cannot sit in the same group. Membership is replaced wholesale when you edit it rather than added to.

The money vocabulary

These are the transaction types the Portfolio ledger uses. Each one carries a fixed category, and the category is what decides whether a row counts as earnings, as a cost, or as neither.

• Payout — money a firm actually sent you. Income, and it can never be negative. It is deliberately not the same thing as profit made on an account, which may never be withdrawn at all.
• Profit — a trading result logged against a platform. The one type that can be signed either way, because a losing session has to be representable.
• Eval reset — paying again to restart a failed evaluation. An expense, and for many traders the line that quietly decides whether a year worked.
• Fee, Tools, Subscription, Market data, Software, Education, Tax — the other seven expense types, all negative. Between them they cover the recurring costs that never appear in a P&L curve.
• Deposit and Withdrawal (transfers) — money moving between two places you already own. These count as neither earnings nor expenses anywhere in the Portfolio — counting a withdrawal as a cost would turn every payout you actually banked into a matching loss.

• Net — a transaction’s amount plus its fee — what actually reached or left the account. A $450 payout that arrived as $425 leads with $425, and the amount and the fee sit beneath it.
• Reference — the human-readable id minted for every transaction, in the form TXN-0001. They are gapless and in order, so a row can be named in a support message.
• Success, pending, failed — whether money has settled, is in flight, or never moved. Only rows marked Success count toward any Portfolio total.
• Included / excluded — a preference rather than a status, and it does less than the word suggests. Unticking a platform drops it from the Dashboard’s list of accounts, the flow split beneath the hero, the Prop and Personal chips and the drawer’s Included count. It does not take its money out of the balance, the headline tiles, the cash-flow chart, the Transaction Breakdown, either calendar or the Budget — those count a movement because it is filed against a platform, not because that platform is ticked. The Portfolio article says the same at more length.
• Tracked — the lifetime net across every platform you have logged against — archived and unticked ones included. It is the same figure the Dashboard’s balance reads, so the drawer and the page behind it cannot disagree.
• ROI, in the Portfolio — earnings minus expenses, divided by expenses — cost recovery rather than a return on deposited capital. You do not deposit into a prop firm, you buy an evaluation, so that is the ratio worth knowing. It is unknown rather than zero when you have spent nothing.

One consequence worth stating: the navbar account picker does not narrow any Portfolio figure. Every money total there is computed over rows belonging to platforms, and a platform is not a trading account, so there is nothing for the picker to filter.