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Earlier this year, I booked some flights via Skyscanner and then quickly realised that I needed to change the timing of them. So I did what a normal person would do and emailed the intermediary that Skyscanner used to get me the tickets.
My responses came from one person called “Peter Parker” and another called “John White”. I didn’t have the pleasure of speaking to Mr Parker on the phone – I suppose he was flying around the local municipality on cobwebs and fighting the Green Goblin. John White turned out to be a woman with a strong South Asian accent. Go figure.
I thought about this recently when one reader shared some of the payout certificates that the prop firm Hola Prime has published.
There are a few curious things about the certificates. Firstly, the numbers skew to female traders in an unusual way. Of the last 21 published certificates, 12 of them appear to be female traders.
This is obviously not impossible but it’s certainly peculiar in an industry that tends to have a client base that is often more than 90% male.
The next thing is how generic-sounding some of the names are. For example, some recent payouts to traders in the US have been to…
- Kimberly Mitchell
- Sophia Thompson
- Ray Bernardo
- Elena Morales
These sound kind of like names you’d get in the board game Guess Who? but I suppose they could be real.
Another striking feature of some payouts is an odd mismatch between the name of the person and the country they are based in.
For example, two traders in Poland received payouts over the last couple of months, according to Hola Prime. You might assume they had names like ‘Zbigniew Brzezinski’ or ‘Ryszard Kapuscinski’.
You would assume wrong. These traders were called ‘Rosalind Spencer’ and ‘Isabelle Dubois’, both of which have more of a Cluedo or Daphne du Maurier feel to them.
A peculiarity of the modern world is that you can Google someone today and typically find something about them. We sadly live in the age of the stalker.
Of course, some people maintain no online presence but this is increasingly rare and difficult to achieve. Most people have some social media profile, for example. Moreover, you’d assume this phenomenon would be more pronounced among prop traders, who skew younger and are thus more likely to be active in the digital world.
To top this off, as there are unlikely to be many people called Rosalind Spencer living in Poland, it should be easier to find them, compared to looking for someone called ‘Ray Bernardo’ living in the USA.
I had a look on Facebook and could not find anyone called ‘Rosalind Spencer’ living in any major city in Poland. Googling yielded nothing either. I also tried LinkedIn. Nada.
There is one person called ‘Isabelle Dubois’ on Facebook, who claims to live in Warsaw. However, her profile appears to be fake, with only two followers and no posts. Also she says she is a 15 year old dancer, so is unlikely to be trading with Hola Prime. I could not find anyone in the whole of Poland with the name ‘Isabelle Dubois’ on LinkedIn either.
It’s a similar story with some other names. For example, one trader called Henok Tekie got a payout recently. Henok is apparently based in the US. I can only find two people who live in the US with this name. They do not strike me as people who would be trading with Hola Prime.
What to make of all this?
Ultimately, payout certificates are a significant trust marker for prop firms so there is strong incentive to publish them.
Hola Prime says it has had its transaction data analysed and approved by Deloitte. However, it also notes that the data was not a full audit and has not published the report. Traders can only request a summary of the report, which the firm will share at its discretion.
So is Isabelle Dubois real? Is there a Ray Bernardo trading XAU/USD and getting $5k payouts?
I don’t know. But I do know one man who can help.
His name is Peter Parker.
