Your son-in-law, is this something he’s doing full-time? Wondering if this is something that can be done on the side but it seems the requirements are pretty intense.
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Because he enjoys the high rider challenge.
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so sorry, @ponponwei , i’ve only just seen your question now, 2 weeks after you asked! 
i have answered it here (yesterday, when someone else asked!):-
But that’s a bit of an unusual risk, It comes from having a lot of confidence and believing in yourself and actually pretty interesting.
Read the above, it’s 100% accurate, we run a training academy and the key fact is very few succeed which is why we have algos that do 99% of the work, actually no broker can be trusted, I know stories of top tier brokers deleting stops and blowing accounts, brokers who refused to send capital to originating accounts, which is why usually just let everyone keep 100% of the profits and use small micro accounts with leverage as it generates exactly the same as a funded account.
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Wow. That’s amazing. Multiple streams of income! Good for him. Do you know if he’s planning on doing this long term? I have a friend interested in getting into this hopefully it works out.
HMM I can totally see this happening. Now the question is, how do we know which is an actual prop firm vs a pretend one!
Oh. 
What about those saying they’re making money from it?
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he is, but he won’t stay with the funding company long-term, of course: you have to give up 10% of your profits to them, so nobody’s going to do that for ever, once they have earned enough profit that way to trade their own account independently
this raises an interesting point, too: some people in forums criticise funding companies for not having many traders who have been with them for a year or more, but this “argument” is missing the point that nobody who is really successful is going to stay as long as that anyway, so it’s an argument based on a misunderstanding, really
the point is that funding companies are only a way for people with real trading skills (but lacking capital) to get started, not to trade long-term
by the way, i agree with most (not all!) of what FX_Smoke says above, in response to your good questions, but not quite all - there are some (a few!) funding companies who do genuinely open real, funded, non-demo accounts for their successful traders and can and will prove that, when asked to; some (a few!) are genuine, not “pretend” ones; etc.
but it’s undoubtedly true that most of the “industry” is more or less a scam, and that most of these firms’ profits come from the repeated fees of huge numbers of naive people trying the challenges and failing, and FX_Smoke is quite right to point this out, of course
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lol, you’re right of course - i was a bit harsh, there
i did so much research, during the course of which i found some companies with outright lies on their websites, and many more giving what i thought were terribly misleading representations of what goes on, that i ended up feeling a bit jaded with the whole thing
i do see that for some people it’s a perfectly good and sensible way to get started
i do think, though, that they’re a small minority of the people who actually try these things
i understand the attractions of not risking your own capital, to trade, though, of course
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Ok so I like that there’s something to work with here which is that there are a FEW genuine ones. My question remains which is that, how could we tell the good ones from the bad? Or a more specific one - your son-in-law, how did he discover the prop firm he’s with now? And did he go through several other bad ones before getting to the one he’s currently with?
I’m guessing making ridiculous claims is one of them which I guess is an easier filter to use.
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i think the short answer to that has to be something like “subjectively and unreliably”!
this thread may help (it helped me to quite some extent) but there are more than 800 pages of it, and on reading it (i’d start near the end!) you’re still going to have to decide “who to believe and who to ignore”, i.e. who looks as if they know what they’re talking about and who doesn’t
there is a wealth of experience there, but it’s a huge job to plough through it all, make sense of it all, make judgments about it, and so on
but learning anything online is always going to be like that, isn’t it?
ultimately, most of your decision is based on second-hand information, isn’t it?
but definitely ignore any “information” on “review sites” with affiliate links!!
i think the important things are to ignore anyone with a promotional agenda, anyone who’s an “affiliate” or whatever, anyone “new” and so on
but it’s still subjective
next, after that, you need to immerse yourself in the detail, read the terms and conditions carefully, think about what’s a “catch” and what’s “sensible” and then look at the obvious questions like which are real companies with real names and addresses and phone numbers, and real people, who answers enquiries promptly and accurately, and so on
but it’s a huge job, however you look at it - i spent an enormous amount of time on it
i’ve made other posts here, recently, and suggested what i think are the best three companies to try with, after all the research i did about 6 or 7 months ago, but you’d still be taking my word for it, and there might be things you’d disagree with me about, and so on
so to be honest, there’s just no “easy answer” to what you’ve asked - sorry!!
he looked at only three, after i’d done all the “due diligence and assessment” for him, because he works part-time and i’m mostly retired now, so i had lots of time, and he trusted my judgment (there’s no real reason you should - you don’t know me!)
he checked out three of them, briefly, and then went with my third choice (FTMO) and it worked out well for him
that was the first one he tried, and he passed it with some pretty good luck (he said) and a following wind - he did have real trading skills, though, and had had plenty of success with demo accounts first, and some success with his own (very tiny) live account, otherwise he wouldn’t have paid FTMO to try their challenge
it seems reasonable (i know that’s from “Surge”) but so many do! that’s not a company i’d use, myself, and i wouldn’t have wanted him to use it either, and i said so at the time - it has some disadvantages compared with other alternatives, it seems to me (i’m not calling them crooks, or accusing them of anything terrible or dishonest - they certainly wouldn’t be my choice, though)
i think the best thing you can do is use currency futures, and go with TradeDay
if you really, really don’t want to do that, but to stick with spot forex (a bad call, in my opinion), i think it’s hard to do better, overall, than MyForexFunds, and FTMO remains my third choice … but hey, this is just one person’s opinion
good luck and VERY good wishes if you try one, Ponponwei!!
(my reservations about FTMO, although i fully trust their honesty and integrity, are the time-limit and the fact that they require 10% profit, which seems high to me - as against that, they allow as many free trials as you want, and they have cTrader available for the challenge, which is a big plus, in my view)
Yup for sure.
Like looking up their office address on Google maps!
Ahh no no, the answers you’ve given me so far have already been super detailed and helpful! Thank you!!!
Ha. You do know your prop firms!
My friend told me to look for one with no time limit (which is why he told me that one from Surge is good but he said to also read the fine print).
But iike you said, it’s best to do your own due diligence instead of relying on this person said this and that!
I’m just very curious about how this all works and I’m willing to give it a try perhaps sometime in 2024!
Thanks for naming your top 3! That helps a lot.
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by then, MyForexFunds should have cTrader available, which will make them even better (they’ve been promising it for months, now) and they’re good to start with, IMO
PS @ponponwei , there might be quite a bit on this page to interest you, if you haven’t seen it before!
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Have you or do you know anyone who’s worked with them? (Not that it matters since like you said, I don’t really know you lol but you know, something to consider nonetheless)
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- Users who trade exclusively GBP/JPY tend to give back their profits to the market within 5 trades
Wow.
- Most users who see success on one news announcement, lose their account on the second one.
Absolutely believe this.
That was a very interesting read!
The registration fee isn’t too bad also.
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i don’t; sorry
for sure!
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https://www.forexfactory.com/thread/1067970-prop-firm-hub
In the end, they will all be known as criminal scams, just like myforexfunds.com