PickMyTrade + Apex Trader Funding Setup Guide

PickMyTrade vs TradersPost for Apex

Both services do the same core job: accept a TradingView webhook and place an order in Tradovate on your behalf. The differences come down to interface, pricing model, and a few feature distinctions:

If you are new to automation and just want to get signals flowing to one Apex account quickly, PickMyTrade is the faster path. If you need detailed webhook logs or run across multiple broker types (Tradovate and Rithmic), TradersPost has more flexibility. See the TradersPost setup guide for that path.

Step 1 — Connect Tradovate to PickMyTrade

Start at pickmytrade.trade and create a free account. Once you are logged in:

1. Navigate to Brokers in the left sidebar and click Add Broker.
2. Select Tradovate from the broker list. PickMyTrade supports Tradovate's live and demo environments.
3. You will be redirected to a Tradovate OAuth authorization page. Log in with your Apex (or Topstep) credentials — these are the same credentials you use to log into the Tradovate platform.
4. After authorizing, PickMyTrade will show a list of the accounts attached to that Tradovate login. Select your Apex eval account specifically. If you have multiple eval accounts, you can add them all here — PickMyTrade will let you route signals to any of them from a single bot.

Step 2 — Set up your trading bot in PickMyTrade

PickMyTrade organizes automations as "bots." Each bot maps one TradingView signal source to one or more broker accounts.

1. Go to Bots → Create Bot.
2. Give the bot a name (e.g. "MES EMA Crossover — Apex Eval").
3. Under Symbol, enter the Tradovate contract identifier. For Micro E-mini S&P 500 use MES; for Micro E-mini Nasdaq use MNQ. PickMyTrade resolves the front-month contract automatically.
4. Set Quantity to the number of contracts per signal. For a $50K Apex eval, most traders start with 1 MES or 1 MNQ contract to stay well within the position limit.
5. Under Order Type, select Market for simplicity during testing. Limit orders are available but add slippage risk if the market moves before the limit fills.
6. Under Linked Accounts, select the Apex eval account you connected in Step 1.
7. Save the bot. PickMyTrade will generate a webhook URL for this bot — it looks like https://pickmytrade.trade/api/webhook/<your-token>. Copy it.

Step 3 — Get your webhook URL and wire TradingView

With your bot's webhook URL copied, go to TradingView and wire the alert:

1. Add your Pine Script to the chart. Right-click the chart and select Add Alert (or press Alt+A).
2. Set the Condition to your strategy or alertcondition name.
3. In the Notifications section, enable Webhook URL and paste your PickMyTrade bot webhook URL.
4. In the Message field, paste the PickMyTrade signal format. PickMyTrade uses a simple JSON structure:

{
  "passphrase": "your-bot-passphrase",
  "ticker": "{{ticker}}",
  "action": "{{strategy.order.action}}",
  "quantity": {{strategy.position_size}}
}

The passphrase is set inside your PickMyTrade bot settings — it acts as a security key to prevent unauthorized signals from being sent to your bot. Set it to a random string and keep it private.

For alertcondition()-based scripts, create two separate TradingView alerts — one for long entries with "action":"buy" and one for short entries with "action":"sell". Both point to the same PickMyTrade webhook URL.

Testing before going live

Never skip this step. A single misconfigured alert on a live eval account can hit a daily drawdown limit before you even realize there is a problem.

Tradovate provides a demo (paper trading) environment that mirrors the live platform. To test:

1. In PickMyTrade, switch your bot's linked account to the Tradovate demo account instead of the live eval account. Demo accounts are available within the same Tradovate login.
2. Fire the TradingView alert manually using the "Test" feature in the Alerts panel (or wait for a real signal on your test chart).
3. Check the PickMyTrade bot log to confirm the webhook was received and the order was sent.
4. Check Tradovate's order history to confirm the fill appeared at the expected price and quantity.
5. Run at least 5–10 complete trades (entry and exit pairs) in paper mode across different sessions before switching to the live eval account.

Prop firm compliance — what to check

Automation does not exempt you from prop firm rules — it enforces your strategy's behavior 24/7, which means any rule violation in your Pine Script will happen automatically too. Before going live on your Apex eval, verify your script has all of the following:

• Session filter set to RTH only. For futures, Regular Trading Hours are typically 8:30 AM – 3:00 PM CT. Many prop firms, including Apex, prohibit overnight position holding on eval accounts. A session filter closes and blocks new entries outside of RTH automatically.
• EOD flatten. A hard close of all positions at a fixed time before market close (e.g., 2:55 PM CT). This is your backstop in case the session filter fires but a position was already open.
• Trailing drawdown awareness. Apex's Intraday Trail product (the one most Apex traders run) has no daily loss limit at all — the risk that matters is the $2,000 intraday trailing threshold on a 50k eval. Size trades so no single loss meaningfully closes the gap to that floor. If you're on Apex's EOD Trail product instead, it does carry a $1,000 daily loss limit — check which product your account uses before assuming either way.
• Bar-close entries. Set calc_on_every_tick=false in your strategy declaration. This prevents intrabar noise from triggering orders and ensures backtested results reflect what live trading actually produces.
• No news-time entries. Major economic releases (CPI, NFP, FOMC) cause extreme slippage and can wipe a daily limit in seconds. A news filter or manual kill switch for those sessions is good practice.

Free Pine Script snippets for all of these — kill switch, session filter, EOD flatten, daily loss limit — are at propfirmpinescripts.com/snippets/.

Running on multiple Apex accounts

One of PickMyTrade's best features for prop firm traders is multi-account routing. Once you have passed one Apex eval and want to scale across several accounts, the setup is straightforward:

1. In PickMyTrade, add each additional Apex eval account under Brokers using the same Tradovate OAuth flow. Each account gets its own entry in the broker list.
2. In your bot's Linked Accounts settings, check the box next to each account you want to include. A single TradingView alert will then route the same signal to all linked accounts simultaneously.
3. Set the quantity per account independently — you might run 1 MES on a $50K eval and 2 MES on a $100K eval from the same bot and the same TradingView alert.

For a detailed walkthrough of the multi-account strategy — including how to stagger evaluations and manage correlated drawdown across accounts — see the multi-account prop firm guide.