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Prop Firm Match is one of the most impressive companies to have launched in our industry over the past couple of years.
From zero they’ve gone to build a huge affiliate site and done a lot of add-on tech that isn’t typical of most of the sites operating in their niche.
The latest product they’ve launched is called Prop Firm One and it acts like an aggregator where you can trade all your prop accounts in one place.
What’s interesting about this is that the concept behind it is kind of unique to the prop firm space.
No doubt there are lots of people who trade on multiple brokers, but the idea that you can trade multiple accounts at the same time seems more ‘prop-y’ than something that happens with brokers.
Anyway, there are three things that struck me about this so I figured we’d go through them.
Will MetaQuotes hate this?
The first point to note is this is just a front end platform. You are able to trade your accounts from Prop Firm One but it’s not like they have all the backend infrastructure to make that work.
So far you can trade cTrader and MetaTrader 5 accounts using the technology, although they’re planning on adding Match-Trader and DXtrade.
Within the platform itself, there TradingView charts that you can trade on.
Without wanting to be a nark, I wonder if this will just get shut down by MetaQuotes. As we all know, they are not big fans of anyone using a different front end to make trades with their technology.
So will this be allowed to continue? Or will MetaQuotes go into ‘shut it down’ mode? We’ll have to wait and see.
Scam hub
One of the reasons that people do want the ability to trade on multiple accounts is because it makes it much easier to do fraud against props.
Although some may be more sophisticated, it does seem like a large chunk of the prop scammers are just doing a simple two way trade.
You go long at one firm, short at another, and then cut the loser and keep the winner. You structure this to work in line with the prop’s challenge rules and optimise for what has the best fee / potential payout ratio.
Now imagine that you can see all of this activity in one place and copy trades across accounts. That would be great if you were one of these people. But also not so great if you’re a prop?!
This makes you wonder why you would sign up to the platform if that was the case, unless…
Is Prop Firm One just anti-fraud?
The other option is that this becomes a way of Prop Firm Match helping props catch scammers.
If you are a scammer and you use the technology, then Prop Firm Match can easily see if you’re making two way trades.
That then becomes an interesting ‘edge’ for them as a tech provider.
They could go to props and sell some kind of additional anti-fraud by telling props who is doing two-way trading.
There is obviously a potential risk if they do this and the trader’s know as you end up in a situation where Prop Firm One is seen as impartial.
If this becomes a popular piece of tech for scammers, Prop Firm Match is strongly incentivised to use it for anti-fraud.
Or not?
Of course, I could also be wrong and Prop Firm One really is just an aggregator. If that is the case then long-term it will be harder to make this product work.
That’s because retail people just don’t like paying for stuff. If you look in the UK over the last 5 – 10 years, a lot of fintechs launched which were about things like aggregating your banking accounts, helping people save money or undertaking some kind of financial analysis.
A lot of these products were actually good, it’s just people don’t want to pay for them. I don’t know TradingView’s financials but I would be extremely surprised if they are making even close to the same in revenue from retail subscribers as they are from B2B partnerships.
Prop Firm One costs $44.99 per month for a Premium subscription and $79.99 per month for a Pro subscription. To put that in some context, ShareScope, which I think is an amazing tool for a retail or pro investor in the UK, is only £382 annually – so less than the cheaper option at Prop Firm One. Haters will disagree but I honestly find ShareScope more intuitive for equity analysis (and some other stuff) than Bloomberg. And yet it costs less than Prop Firm One?
Unless more features are on the horizon, which is entirely possible, I don’t get why you’d pay the Prop Firm One fees unless you were a scammer or a small percentage of the trader space that is just really into this kind of tech. B2B deals ultimately pay more and I wouldn’t be surprised if Prop Firm One moves in that direction, whether it’s for anti-fraud or some packaged set of services.
