A-Book
A model where the firm passes your orders through to the real market — its revenue comes from fees and commissions, not from your losses.
An A-book model means the firm routes your trade to the market and takes no position against you. It earns from commissions, spreads, subscription fees — the mechanics of servicing the order — rather than from whether you win or lose. Your interests and the firm’s are aligned: it wants you trading, profitable, and still there next month.
The term comes from brokerage. A broker that A-books a client hedges or passes the order to a liquidity provider, so the client’s profit isn’t the broker’s loss. The counterpart is B-booking, where the firm takes the other side internally.
Why this concept shows up in prop trading at all: evaluation accounts are simulated almost everywhere, and that’s normal — the firm is testing you before it commits capital. The interesting question is what happens after you’re funded. Some firms route funded traders’ orders to live markets. Others keep them in a simulated environment and manage the risk internally, paying real money out of firm revenue.
What a genuinely aligned firm looks like, in signals you can actually verify:
- A visible, consistent payout record. Frequent, verifiable payouts to real traders over time.
- Rules that reward good trading rather than quietly penalizing profitability.
- Transparency about execution — a firm that explains its model plainly is telling you something useful.
- Clear fee structures that show where the revenue comes from.
The pragmatic view: in US futures prop trading, the whole industry runs on evaluation fees plus payouts to winners, and the firms that thrive are the ones that pay reliably enough to keep attracting talent. Reputation is the enforcement mechanism, and it’s public.
Judge a firm by its payouts, not its label. Read how prop firms make money, then compare payout records in our directory.