Towards the end of last year, yours truly was enjoying an Asahi and plate of lemon chicken in London’s Chinatown.
Sitting with me was a madman who works in the prop trading industry. Chewing through chow mein, he made the claim that FundedNext was actually the biggest player in the prop industry.
Whether or not this is true, it is something I have heard from a couple of other people in the sector since.
In reality, it’s almost impossible to figure out who the biggest prop firm is. The likelihood is that it’s FTMO or FundedNext, but others – like FundingPips and Alpha Capital – are probably ‘up there’.
One way to look at this would be the payout metrics on Prop Firm Match. The comparison site has a page which purports to track trader payouts from prop firms.
Because payouts represent a proportion of revenues, if you assume that the proportion is roughly the same across firms, it would mean higher total payouts equals higher overall revenues.
There are some problems with the Prop Firm Match system. Firstly, FTMO is not listed there – but maybe that is telling in and of itself. Secondly, I am sceptical of any of these things as I know all of you and I know that if a system like this exists, you will seek to game it for your advantage. Thirdly, the proportion that firms payout is likely to differ, with some firms happy to grind out higher revenues on tighter margins.
Alas, we don’t have many other tools at our disposal. It’s also usually fun to try and reverse engineer what people are doing – so let’s try it.
According to Prop Firm Match’s data, over the last 12 months, FundedNext has paid out $177,158,388 across both its futures and CFD brands, making it the biggest ‘payer outer’ (is that a phrase?) in the sector.
FTMO may not be on the website but it is possible to access its company accounts.
When you sign up with FTMO, it is with a company called FTMO Evaluation Global s.r.o. The most recent financial data from that company is for 2024 and it shows that for the year, the company generated approximately $323.2m in revenue.
The company pays out most of its revenue to another entity for ‘services’. This is likely to be its parent company OMHC.
Looking through OMHC’s accounts, there is one large operating expense, which is equal to approximately $200.4m. However, that figure is likely to include almost all operating expenses, not just payouts to traders.
This leaves us at a bit of a dead end. So if we assume instead that FTMO pays out half of revenue to traders – which would be a high number – it would mean that the prop firm paid out approximately $161.6m to traders in 2024.
As you can see, that is below what FundedNext has (allegedly) paid out based on data from Prop Firm Match. There is the obvious caveat here that FTMO revenue may have grown even more in the last 18 months and so still be ahead of FundedNext.
However, I think there is some potential that FTMO has lost market share. If you look over the last couple of months, the company has started to do things that it would not have usually done.
Firstly, the firm now offers a one-step challenge. Historically the company had only offered its ‘classic’ two-step challenge.
On top of that, the company has also started doing a regular discount on its most popular product. This is the $100,000 account. That account has nearly always been €540. Now the company is consistently discounting it by 19%.
You could look at that and say it’s nothing but then why do anything at all?
When we looked at FTMO’s marketing activity previously it’s almost like being IG in the broker sector. The company is so established as the ‘go to’ brand that a lot of what they do is just remind people that they exist.
Unlike the broker sector, retention is poor and there are no whales. A company like IG can survive on historic whale clients for a long time, whereas FTMO can’t really do the same thing.
When you add in the fact that this is a newer sector then it’s very plausible FTMO’s position as number one is more fragile than it would be in the broker market.
So are FTMO still number one? Maybe. But also maybe not.
