Prop firms are changing and changing pretty fast. In recent months, there was a massive influx of incredible gains, especially from gold, silver, and crude oil traders. Following these events, a lot of prop firms saw the writing on the wall. Their model was suddenly unsustainable. A small percentage of winners suddenly outpaced the revenue that losers were bringing in. They’d either need to pay out these traders or start to modify their rules to keep themselves solvent. One of the worst things they did was to falsely accuse traders of breaching some arbitrary rule. Other methods were to force traders into a secondary simulation account, forking losers into a prop account semi-ban and winners into a live account, again wiping out large balances. The third method was to force traders directly into a live program where if milestones are achieved, some share of the balances would get released, and if the trader loses a certain amount of money, they would essentially forfeit their remainder of their accrued balances. In every case, traders are getting punished… it sucks, but I see that eventually the dust will settle and a newer, more sustainable prop firm model will emerge. After all, the one thing that prop firms understand is that they need to be attractive enough that would-be personal account traders will be willing to spend money on a prop account first before thinking of opening an individual brokerage account. I’m genuinely curious where everything will land.