Hi, please would someone here explain to me briefly, in simple terms, the main differences between CFD and Futures prop firms?
I’m asking just about the differences between the two kinds, not about anything they share in common, and I’m asking to decide which to try, as a new customer.
Thank you!
Hi and welcome to Babypips 
This thread may be of interest to you based on your question:
Thank you very much, @MartialChartsFX . Your post there, and the one after it with the 5 links, are enormously helpful. I’m really glad I asked, now! 
Thanks very much - it may be of interest to many other people, too!
(There’s some really helpful information in this forum, but it isn’t always the easiest thing in the world to find it?)
The more I read on this subject, the less I understand why anyone would want to do a CFD prop firm challenge rather than a futures one.
There aren’t any good reasons, only bad ones.
Many people really don’t understand that the futures ones are genuinely and verifiably funding people with real money on a real exchange and that once they’re funded, the only way those companies can make any profits themselves is if their clients trade profitably. In other words the incentive of the futures ones is for people to be successful, not to lose like the incentivization of the CFD ones.
Some people have been brought up on CFDs and wrongly imagine that trading futures instead would be a whole new learning-curve for them.
There are far more CFD prop firms around, so people see them more often. They also pay affiliates to promote them in forums, websites, review sites. Even here at Babypips there are paid promoters of unpleasant scams like AxiSelect, FundedNext, Monavis and firms who just can’t get many customers in other ways and therefore pay people by the post/thread for favourable forum comments. It’s deceptive, obviously, but it’s how they do business.
They’re unregulated anyway, so it’s comparatively easy for them to disappear, if they get into trouble, and for their owners to start up again the next day under a new name. This often happens. The CFD ones come and go. The futures ones are longstanding and respected: some have been around for about 15 years and even won government-sponsored industrial awards.
Just one quick, specific example of the dishonesty of the CFD ones: AxiSelect claims dishonestly that the brokerage that owns them is FCA-regulated. It isn‘t true, though. AxiSelect is actually owned by an offshore branch of Axi that isn’t FCA-regulated, not by their entirely separate UK company which is. They lie about that detail, just like the people who promote them here and elsewhere on the web. They get away with it because there’s no real regulator to keep them honest.
One major differnece I can tell you is that CFD prop firms are those where you don’t really own any underlying asset like forex, commodities etc. and futures prop firms are those who provide standardized agreements to buy/sell an asset say gold or silver at a future date.
This is just totally wrong.
You’ve apparently confused “futures prop firms” with “futures”/“futures brokers”.