What Is TradeLocker? The Prop Firm Platform, Explained

TradeLocker is a browser-based trading platform licensed to brokers and prop firms, who put their own brand on it and issue it to clients instead of a desktop terminal. If your firm gave you a login to a trading screen that runs in a tab and carries their logo rather than a MetaQuotes one, it is very likely TradeLocker underneath.

How it works

There is no terminal to install and no MQL layer. The platform runs in the browser and everything reaches it over a REST API and a websocket stream, which is the reason it appeared and the reason it spread through the prop firm market so quickly: a firm can hand a new client a working account through a link, with no download, no VPS and no installer to support.

Browser (or the firm's white-labelled app)
    ↕ REST + websocket
TradeLocker infrastructure
    ↕
Broker or prop firm liquidity and account records

Authentication is by email, password and server name, and every request against /trade/* carries an accNum header identifying which of your accounts it refers to — one login can hold several. There is no read-only credential equivalent to the MetaTrader investor password: the platform issues one set of credentials, and a tracker that connects has to hold them.

That is a real difference and worth stating plainly rather than glossing. On ShowMyTrades the password is encrypted server-side with AES-256-CBC before storage and is never returned to the browser, and the connection only ever reads. But the credential model is the platform's, not ours, and it is stricter on MetaTrader.

Why it matters

Prop firm traders have been in an odd position. An evaluation or a funded account is exactly the kind of record worth publishing — it is recent, it is rule-bound, and someone else has already checked it — and until now there has been no way to publish it at all, because no tracking service reads TradeLocker.

The consequence is a whole population of traders whose only proof is a screenshot of their firm's dashboard, which is the weakest form of evidence there is. See what a verified track record is for why that matters more than it sounds.

What the data shows

TradeLocker is the newest platform on ShowMyTrades, live here since July 2026, alongside MT4, MT5 and cTrader.

The figure that matters is not ours, it is everyone else's: no other track record service in this category reads a TradeLocker account at all. For a trader on a prop firm that issues it, the choice is not between platforms — it is between a public record and none.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

A TradeLocker account carries the id prefix tlk- and produces the same public page as any other: stats panel, charts viewer, monthly returns, currency pair breakdown, and the verification badges in the header. Profit, commission and swap come from the platform's own closed-trade history rather than being derived, so the cost lines are the real ones.

Two absences, for the same reason as cTrader: no terminal diagnostics, because there is no terminal, and no magic numbers, because the platform has no MQL layer to stamp them. Where a numeric strategy id is present it is mapped into the magic number field; where it is not, trades land in the Manual bucket.

Common misunderstandings

• "TradeLocker is a broker." It is not, and it holds no money. It is the software your broker or prop firm licensed, the same relationship MetaQuotes has with MetaTrader.
• "My firm built this themselves." Most did not. The white-labelling is thorough enough that many traders never learn the platform's name until they go looking for a tracker that supports it.
• "An EA will run on it." No. There is no MQL runtime. Automation happens through the API, not through a program dropped into a terminal folder.

If your firm runs TradeLocker, TradeLocker tracking covers what connecting one involves and what ends up on the public page.

Related terms