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Yes... the who concept needs work and it will not work... I think, by far... you are getting great rates for data at best... You can look at the futures info on the cheap. But, there is MORE data required to make good trades. Also, there is a degree of "mentorship" that is valuble. There is also some good and bad knowledge you will be bombarded with from the get go of any trading endevor... discarding what doesnt work and that what does.
Out of the 7 years I was reading up on things, I leared a lot through these *companies but, its TOO HARD to be consistent. I also realized this futures market is basically false... The "other side" of everything is this... they see where your money and trades are and the market itself is maniuplated to Shift against you. Therefore, trading in general is a total gamble EVEN WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT SHOULD WORK. In retrospect, the money I paid for subscriptions saved me from playing with a lot of money I would have lost. lol. so, it would have been better just to ignore the entire thing. I have been funded before and guess what? It DOES NOT WORK AT ALL. It is NOT WORTH the money and trading is a waste of time.
Who are "they" who shift the market against you? And if you are long and I am short, how do "they" decide who to shift the market against? You or me? Do you think either of us are important enough that "they" would look to see what we are doing so that they can shift the market against us?
Also, just because something doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it cannot be done. I suck at golf and will never be able to make living of it, but that doesn't mean that it cannot be done.
Skilled Funded Trader and The Funded Trader both just collapsed. Customer accounts locked, payouts denied. Looks like both were illegally using the bucket-shop model and not legally trading the actual instrument on their clients' behalf.
At some point, there will be enough client complaints that the SEC will have to investigate and intervene.
The prop firms that are actually trading on the clients' orders should be fine. The easiest way to know if you're with a bucket-shop is to fund. If you aren't required to register as a professional trader, they're probably not transacting your orders.
If you aren't familiar with the terms, a bucket-shop is basically an unregulated CFD. As a client, you are betting against the bucket-shop. Your profits are their loss. An actual prop-shop ends up functioning like a broker once you fund. They pass your orders through the market and you split your profits with the prop-shop.
Bucket-shops tend to fold when there is a long enough run in a certain instrument. Because client profits are bucket-shop losses, they can't payout anymore. Maybe the runs in Bitcoin and gold allowed enough clients to fund and profit?
Edit: It's looking like the bucket-shops that "trade"/allow crypto and commodities are having the problems. Again, if they don't force you to sign as a professional trader when you fund, your orders are probably going into a bucket and are not being transacted on the market.
Edit: It's the bucket-shops that force you to use their white-label platform (so they can manipulate the spreads) and allow crypto and gold that are currently failing. The futures-only online/funded-prop-shops seem more stable at the moment (they can run the bucket-shop model more safely because equity index futures won't run like cypto or commodities/gold). The safest are companies like Top-Step, who force you to sign as a professional trader when you fund, who are actually trading your orders and who are therefore most likely legitimate.
Apex also uses other providers, but I agree it’s bad form to have your data provider have it issues that cause trade issues.
Are you saying someone is manipulating the Rithmic feed, or just in general that you don’t trust the online prop firms for not adjusting trades? I don’t think any online firm can adjust the spread in ninja or Tradovate, unless you have any proof that someone has been manipulating spread
TPT went under for using metatrader and literally manipulating trades. Also they had a severely mismanaged operation and sounds like some amount of fraud, all of which is entirely different in my book of some data providers not handling high loads
Let's step back for a minute. You say, "your orders are probably going into a bucket and are not being transacted on the market."
First of all, I don't think any of them claim with the "simulated funded account" (Apex's "Performance Account" and TST's "XFA" account) that your orders are going anywhere. It's very simple. They see your orders, and they have simple enough calculations to make decisions on what to do about the aggregate flow in real time. If the underlying net position across all funded sim accounts is relatively neutral, they probably don't take a position. If the underlying net position leans heavy one way (60/40, 70/30, etc.) long/short, they almost have to take that net delta position in order to be able to pay potential profits, as they are obligated to do, otherwise they might be on the hook for profits they can't pay out.
Second, it's *very* easy in a futures market as these are, to see whether your orders are real, if you have any doubt. Just go place an order, and see whether the displayed depth at that level increases by your order size. Easy as can be.
Finally, stock brokers hold inventory of common stock and when you place an order with your broker to buy AAPL, there's a good chance you're buying it from them. They only have guarantees as far as NBBO goes. As long as they are delivering a fair price, they are under no obligation to route your order to the market to fill. It's called "internalization." Brokers offer commission free stock trading because of the pay for order flow model. Your stock trades are being observed and used, and you're getting to trade for free in return. Would you call that a bucket shop? Well, not really, because they still have to fill prices in line with Reg NMS (I think that's the one) such that you are receiving fills at least as good as the NBBO.
FX is the primary example of a bucket shop market. It's unregulated, and the broker makes their own market and can completely trade against you and are under no obligation to do anything. That's why some brokers have big price spikes and others don't. Because it isn't a centralized market.
That's *not* futures. When you place your order, it is routed to the exchange and sits on their order book. The exchange matching engine matches it to another order. It does not sit at your broker for them to pick off or trade against. So, when you do "graduate" to a live account at a funded trader firm, you are indeed at that point "in the market." I'm not sure whether some futures brokers qualify as broker dealers and could thus trade their own book based on your order flow. But a funding company would have little incentive to do this, as they eventually get a split of your profits, so, why would they want to trade against you? Also, the aggregate size of all live funded traders across all funding companies is not likely market moving anyway. It's nothing compared with flows from funds, options hedging, and other serious money. So, a funding company doesn't have the size to really impact a liquid market much anyway, I would bet.
At some point, the order must transact. Whether internally or through the market, by end-of-day, the order must transact. If there is no transaction, it's a bucket-shop. This is why CFD's don't exist legally in the USA market.
The funding companies, the ones actually transacting orders, make something like 99%+ of their profits from account churn, not from trader profits. The entire business model is not based on sharing profits with funded traders. It's based on making money from subscriptions and resets.
The funding companies, the ones that are operating like CFD bucket-shops make all of their profit from account churn. If the trader wins, it's a loss against the bucket-shop because the orders never transacted on the market.
You've nailed the problem exactly. That's why these companies are going bust right now. If they actually transacted the order, the prop companies' risk is limited to the daily draw down / liquidation amount of the account (which is notoriously small). Instead, they're just bucket-shopping the order and not properly hedging their risk. In a large run like with Bitcoin and gold, they can't cover clients' winnings. If they had actually transacted the winning orders, the profits from the trade would be shared with the client. But because the order was never filled, the bucket-shop is responsible for paying the clients out of the bucket-shops funds. Because there's been such an extended run with Bitcoin and gold, too many clients are winning and the bucket-shops are unable to pay and are closing down.
So, yes. There are definitely a few different issues we're talking about here.
1) I do not believe Apex or any US-based, or for any matter anyone using rithmic is willfully manipulating the bid-ask spread.
I do "believe" there are offshore funding companies/simbrokers doing this though, and this is going to come out way sooner than people think.
2) My whole point, is that eventually, when you are one of these companies, and you have traders on sim, that is 100% fine. But for them to continually blow out and lose because of a known issue with the bid-ask spread not executing trades properly, we have a serious problem
This is 100% not okay, and for the most part, over the last few years, multiple funding companies have gaslit traders (their own customers) into believing it was their (the customer trading on Sim) fault for putting in a market order, when it fills so far away that it would have been literally impossible, because there was no print, and no way that should have happened.
This is the real problem with this industry right now, traders getting blown out of accounts and having to spend money because of a known data error where they are refusing to fix it, and profiting off of it, and playing dumb.
This is a serious problem, and I know dozens of people this has happened to.
The real question is, do they have the data at these companies on how the slippage is affecting their bottom line,
This is odd language. "Put in a short"? "Opposite entry"? Apologies if English is not your first language.
Either way, this is likely a platform error, or almost certainly, an error you made. If you think you have some proof, please post it. Again, not picking on your language above, but when you say things like "I'd put in a short", I know what you mean, but the language and lack of specificity leads me to believe you may not have sufficient technical knowledge to accurately assess what you perceive to be a problem.
I just had an email from them (E2T) saying "Starting April 1st, we're reducing the evaluation period for all new subscriptions* from 15 to just 10 trading days."
Together with their current 40% discount on the TCP50 or whatever it's called, that does perhaps sound a little tempting?
But to be honest, I have never really quite understood the attraction of short numbers of trading days required for evaluation purposes. I think this is partly because of my habit of asking myself how many days of trading I would want to see someone perform before backing them to be trading with my money, if I were a backer (lol, I am as far away from being that as you can get!), and partly because it seems to me that if you are going to make it worthwhile being backed by one of these funding firms, you are going to have to be able to do it for the long term, in other words "steadily" anyway, so why is it a big deal to have to do quite a few days to start off in the first place?
If you see what I mean.
And if you make allowances for "to start off" and "in the first place" saying the same thing twice.
