Apex Is Live on NinjaTrader Prop: What It Means for Rithmic Traders

Apex Trader Funding is now live on NinjaTrader Prop, NinjaTrader’s platform tier built specifically for prop-firm evaluations and funded accounts. NinjaTrader’s prop site currently features Apex as a partner, including an exclusive 25K evaluation account sold through NinjaTrader Prop and Tradovate Prop. If you trade Apex through Rithmic credentials, nothing about that path changed — NinjaTrader Prop is a separate account track, and which one you’re on determines how you connect. Here’s how the two fit together.

What NinjaTrader Prop is

NinjaTrader Group announced NinjaTrader Prop and Tradovate Prop on October 1, 2025, describing them as platform experiences “to support every stage of the prop journey — from navigating evaluations to pursuing funding,” available through prop firms including Take Profit Trader, Apex Trader Funding, and MyFunded Futures. The advertised toolkit: TradingView chart integration, order-flow tools, market replay, and risk controls — daily loss caps, profit targets, volume controls, plus an account lockout that lets a trader voluntarily pause a single account and a risk-settings lock that stops you from weakening your own limits after they fire.

The desktop side of that push is visible in NinjaTrader 8.1.8 (July 21, 2026), which added a “Prop Account Manual Lockout” feature to the platform itself.

What launched in October as an announcement is now a live storefront for Apex: prop.ninjatrader.com features an Apex-exclusive 25K account promotion, which is what set off the early-August coverage — first reported by Mike Swartz on YouTube, whose video also reported Tradeify and Lucid Trading appearing in the NinjaTrader Prop lineup alongside Apex and Take Profit Trader.

Update, August 14, 2026: the lineup is now much larger than that early coverage suggested. NinjaTrader’s Find a Prop Firm directory lists 22 firms offering accounts through NinjaTrader Prop and Tradovate Prop: Apex Trader Funding, Take Profit Trader, Tradeify, Funded Futures Family, BluSky Trading Company, TradeDay, Lucid Trading, FundedNext Futures, Top One Futures, Legends Trading, The Trading Pit, Elite Trader Funding, Blue Guardian Futures, FuturesElite, Phidias, HolaPrime, AquaFutures, FXify, Goat Funded Futures, LifeUp Trading, EmergeProfit, and TX3 Futures. Ten of those are also in our verified Rithmic connection catalog — for every one of them, the two-track question below applies exactly as it does for Apex. (Corrected August 18, 2026: this read “eleven” when published. FundedNext Futures has since been removed from our catalog — its documentation describes a Tradovate-only route — so the count is now ten. See the census.)

What it means for NinjaTrader and Rithmic traders

The practical question is which account you actually hold, because Apex now has two clearly different NinjaTrader stories:

	NinjaTrader Prop account	Rithmic-credential account
Where you get it	Bought through NinjaTrader Prop / Tradovate Prop	Bought from Apex; Apex issues Rithmic username + password
Where you trade	NinjaTrader’s prop environment (web, mobile, desktop, TradingView charts)	NinjaTrader 8 desktop, R|Trader Pro, or other Rithmic-connected platforms
Risk controls	Built in (loss caps, lockouts, risk-settings lock)	Firm-side rules; platform shows account state
Running several accounts side by side	Within the prop environment’s own limits	Multiple Rithmic logins need a connection layer NinjaTrader doesn’t provide on its own

Three things worth being precise about:

1. NinjaTrader Prop accounts are not Rithmic accounts. NinjaTrader’s launch release says nothing about data feeds, and the accounts live inside NinjaTrader’s own prop environment. If your dashboard gives you a Rithmic username and password, you’re on the Rithmic path; if you bought through NinjaTrader Prop, you’re in the prop platform. Check what you were issued before assuming a setup guide applies to you.
2. The Rithmic path is unchanged. Apex continues to issue Rithmic credentials for its standard evaluation and funded accounts, and those connect to NinjaTrader 8 the same way they did last month — the Apex connection guide documents the current route, including running multiple Apex Rithmic logins in one NinjaTrader instance.
3. This doesn’t change the connectivity census. Our Rithmic connectivity census tracks how firm-issued Rithmic accounts reach NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader Prop is a parallel product line, not a new route for Rithmic credentials — Apex’s census row stands, and the same logic holds for the other catalog firms in the directory lineup.

What to do

• If you hold (or are considering) a NinjaTrader Prop account: you’ll live inside NinjaTrader’s prop environment with its built-in risk tooling — no separate connection setup to think about.
• If you hold Apex Rithmic credentials: nothing changes. Connect as the step-by-step guide shows, and if you run several Rithmic accounts — Apex or any other Rithmic firm — side by side in one NinjaTrader, that’s the add-on path.
• If you’re choosing between them: the trade-off is NinjaTrader Prop’s integrated tooling versus the Rithmic path’s flexibility — your choice of Rithmic-connected platform and multi-account setups across firms.

We’ll update this post as NinjaTrader or Apex publishes more detail on the lineup — the rolling news log tracks the smaller moves as they happen.