Start a prop firm with cTrader today
One of my strange guilty pleasures about 18 months ago was getting way too into two YouTube channels run by US watch and diamond dealers – TraxNYC and Roman Sharf.
If you ever wandered around London’s Hatton Garden or visited the diamond district in New York, it’s kind of like getting a behind the scenes insight into how they work, seeing how they buy and sell, and the general day to day life of running one of those businesses. There are also strong aesthetic and general vibe similarities to the CFD world.
Obviously it’s over-dramatised in a lot of ways but it’s also (for me anyway) very entertaining. And the other thing is that it’s all marketing. Both of the guys running the channels talk about this all the time and how the ‘shows’ they have made are actually just a way of getting more sales for their brands.
On the Sharf channel, one of the things they did was run something like a reality show, where a bunch of people worked as sales exec interns. The concept of the show was that one of them could then become an employee at the end.
When I first watched this, I was thinking it would be cool to make some kind of broker equivalent, not necessarily with the same story but just some kind of ‘behind the scenes’ series.
If you look at many brokers, they have switched (or tried to) into becoming something like media companies. The idea is that if you become a media platform, you also have a marketing channel. This is not an entirely new concept – DailyFX was around for ages, for example. Options broker tastytrade also started out as a media platform and then became a broker, something IG is now trying to replicate with its YouTube channel.
However, I don’t know if the ‘behind the scenes’ thing would work that well at a broker. You need characters, you need people who are good at media, and you also need it to not be that corporate. Watching a bunch of possibly on the spectrum, CFA-holding FX dealers talking to compliance might just feel more like something from The Office. The corporate angle, and broker’s desire to seem like ‘legit’ financial institutions only compounds the problem.
Props do not have this hurdle to overcome for whatever reason, potentially because some of them appear to be operated by literal roadmen. They are also not corporate and they have done a good job of ‘cracking’ modern media.
For example, ThinkMarkets joined X (or Twitter as it would have been then) more than 15 years ago and has 9k followers. Today its prop brand ThinkCapital has 12k followers, having launched 12 months ago. I also look at stuff like Discord, YouTube, live streams on X and props are doing a much better job than brokers are.
For example, if you look at Alpha Capital’s YouTube channel, it looks better produced than IG’s and they tend to get more views. You could argue that IG doesn’t have the ability to interview the sort of trading influencers that Alpha Capital does, but that doesn’t explain the aesthetic difference and there is no reason IG could not come up with an equivalent. Plus, tastytrade does this exact thing in the US. One of the first videos they ever made was with Timothy Sykes, who is like the American Greg Secker. They also interview ‘real’ options traders all the time.
Anyway, this is all a very, very long-winded introduction to talking about a new project that Alpha Capital is doing. This is called Alpha Prime and the idea seems to be that there is a live, physical trading floor in London, which you can come and work in, and they will have a bad ass office with big TVs that have Bloomberg playing on them – etc etc.
When I first read about this I seem to recall it was marketed as a ‘real’ trading floor and a way to do something akin to a-booking the best traders. Then a trading influencer – Claudia Rea – posted that she was in the office and learning about Alpha Prime. She wrote on X that she was attending as “part of the Alpha Prime Graduate Programme.” She also said she’ll be making a vlog about it.
This to me suggests it is probably just a marketing concept. If you think about how much it costs to rent an office and hire a few people to work there, then also hire a camera crew + editor, you could make it into something like a TV show. And given how much some props are making, it could easily be within the company’s marketing budget.
You then have other options. Influencers can come there and make content, which gets you more views. Alternatively you can run something akin to the watch trader reality show I described above. You bring in a bunch of noobies and make a story around one or more of them becoming ‘pros’. That can be long-form but you can also then take clips from it and use them for shorts.
Something like this has been done before. Many of you will remember Lex Van Dam, the Dutch trading educator, making a BBC show back in 2009 called ‘Million Dollar Traders’. This was a three episode show where he (allegedly) put up £1m and gave 12 ‘regular’ people the chance to become pro traders.
Another figure who emerged out of that was educator Anton Kreil, who appeared on the programme as the traders’ ‘manager’. He had a YouTube channel for a while but really blew up about seven years ago when he paid a movie editor to follow him around for a while and make something akin to a documentary, which was released as a bunch of different videos.
The difference between 2009 and now is cost and accessibility. Today you can get good camera equipment and editing for a very low cost. A lot of the TraxNYC channel content appears to be filmed on iPhone with a plug in mic. Plus many, many more people now watch long-form clips online and there is no barrier to entry. Van Dam had to convince the BBC to put his show on prime time TV. Alpha Capital can just upload it to their YouTube channel.
So is Alpha Prime just going to be something like a TV show? I don’t know. But it would be a cool idea if it is.