Start your prop firm in 5 days with cTrader
A couple of months ago I was walking through Limassol eating kebab from i sytziá tou mávrou.
I sat down and some cats were walking around me as I finished off my gyros.
It was late and from the shadows of a dark alleyway, a man in ragged clothes stumbled out. His eyes looked bloodshot and his clothes were all torn. He was sniffing a lot and smelled of stale bourbon.
“Hey man,” he said, sniffing and scratching his chest. “Listen, can I ask you something?”
I kept eating my gyros.
“Listen dude, I’ll level with you,” he said. “I run a prop and I’m looking to get access to MetaTrader.”
I ate a fry with tzatziki and chewed it slowly.
“Come on man!” He shouted. “I’ll call it Platform 5, they won’t know!”
I took a sip of Diet Coke.
“We can do rev share!” he said
“Just get cTrader bro!” I shouted back
He fell to the floor and started crying.
“They won’t let me put a plug-in to slip my clients,” he whimpered.
I shook my head and walked off to Manoushe. Knafeh time.
Ok so most of that story didn’t happen but readers of this newsletter will know that over the past 18 months there has been something like a back and forth between props and MetaQuotes, with the latter seeming very averse to that line of business.
Although that does not seem to have changed completely, there are some signs the tech provider is easing up on its prior rug pull ways of dealing with props.
The main problems that props have had is they can’t get access to the platform if they are not licensed.
For brokers, there has also been some push to associate the core brand with the prop offering, via a joint URL.
As we looked at not too long ago in Prop Weekly, there are problems here too because of regulation and advertising.
Basically if you have the same URL as your broker, it may be damaging from a regulatory point of view and mean you have to restrict access in certain countries.
At the same time, if you are linking to your main URL, it means you have the same rules governing your advertising activity. Again, this can cause problems with the big ad networks because of their own, internal rules.
Is this changing? The basic point seems to be it’s getting easier but you need to have some kind of broker entity.
We can see that from the fact that a lot of props went to unregulated places offshore and set up companies.
For example, last month prop firm Instant Funding got MetaTrader back. They don’t appear to have any brokerage offering at all. However, they did set up an entity in St Lucia, which could – in theory – provide brokerage services.
FundingPips and FundedNext both got ‘licences’ in the Comoros on the famous island of Moheli. Now they are offering MetaTrader again.
It’s plausible one is out there but I haven’t seen a pure play prop with no broker entity get MetaQuotes products.
The point seems to be that if you get an entity, which could feasibly be a broker, then you can also offer MetaTrader to your clients as a prop.
In theory, this should lead to some of the same marketing problems that brokers face when working with Google and Meta.
However, what you could do here is set up the site so that the trading services are offered by the offshore entity and then a separate ‘marketing services’ provider does all the ad spend for it. That way the prop’s marketing activity doesn’t get blocked by Google. This is common in the brokerage space for several firms that do a lot of offshore business.
More interesting is the URL switch. As noted in that prior article, props were pushed to have the same URL as their broker entity if they wanted to offer MetaTrader.
However, several broker-backed props are now back on their own URL.
For example, FXIFY’s URL was previously linked to FXPIG, the wider brokerage group that it’s part of. That has now changed so that it’s back on its own one.
The site has FXPIG’s branding meaning it’s plausible there is still a need to have that there, so there isn’t a total separation.
Overall it just seems like you can offer prop trading more easily as long as you have some kind of brokerage entity.
Why the change?
As the recent OANDA – FTMO deal shows, there is serious money to be made from this industry.
It’s also a sign that prop is probably here for the long-term or, at least, as ‘long-term’ as you can get in a short-term industry.
So why would you sit on the sidelines and miss out on that?