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Last month trading news website FXStreet launched Propinder, a new website for prop traders.
The site is being run in conjunction with Swiset, which provides technology to brokers and prop firms.
Both companies have lots of data on the prop space and trader behaviour, so I figured it would be fun to figure out why FXStreet launched the site and what they have seen so far.
We talked to FXStreet’s Co-CEO Javier Hertfelder to find out more.
Why did FXStreet decide to branch out with this new website?
We’ve been watching the prop space for years, but for a long time it just didn’t feel solid enough to build anything on top of. The growth was there, sure, but underneath it you had firms disappearing, rules changing all the time, and very little consistency in how challenges were actually structured.
That started to change around last summer. Things didn’t suddenly become perfect, but you could see a more stable layer forming. And more importantly, there was still a clear gap. Most of what existed was either basic listing sites or rankings driven by commercial interests.
We weren’t interested in doing another version of that.
The idea behind Propinder is pretty simple. Help traders understand what they’re actually buying before they spend money, and connect them to challenges that fit how they trade. Not what’s being promoted the hardest.
On the firm side, we’re also being quite selective. We’re not trying to work with everyone. We care more about understanding how they operate and building something transparent than just plugging into affiliate deals and moving on.
What role is Swiset playing in it?
We met the Swiset team at an expo a couple of years ago, and the relationship grew from there without much planning. Before Propinder even existed as a project, we were already exchanging data and comparing notes on how traders behave across different challenges.
That work ended up being more important than we expected.
What makes them different is that they’re not just building tools around the industry, they’re building the infrastructure behind it. They actually power how prop firms create and run challenges, track performance, manage risk.
That gives them a level of knowledge most people in the space simply don’t have.
So when we decided to build this properly, it was an obvious fit. They handle the technology, we bring distribution, content, and the relationship with traders.
We kicked things off in January with a bootcamp in Cali. Full team in one place, no distractions. The first working version came together in three days, which still sounds a bit unrealistic when I say it out loud.
Both of your companies have user data on traders. How did that influence the development?
It shaped pretty much everything.
We had already done user research at FXStreet during 2025, plus an early test of the idea in October. So we weren’t starting from zero.
Then we added the joint work with Swiset, which we published last year. That dataset covered close to 10,000 traders across multiple regions, and a few things were hard to ignore.
First, the failure rates. Around 80% on one-phase challenges and close to 90% on two-phase. That’s not an edge case. That’s the baseline.
Second, the timing difference. Traders who pass tend to do it fast. Under four days on average. The ones who fail can spend weeks trying to grind it out before blowing the account. That gap tells you a lot. The successful ones already know what fits them before they start. The others are figuring it out mid-process, usually too late.
And then there’s regional behavior. The 10K challenge is the most common globally, but in the US and Europe you see much more demand for 100K accounts. Direct phase challenges also dominate over two-phase formats almost everywhere.
So the idea that you can present the same options to everyone in the same way just doesn’t hold.
One detail I personally find interesting is what happens after traders fail. We’re seeing a clear pattern where traders who breach accounts because of drawdown rules start actively searching for static drawdown models afterwards. Which makes sense. When you lose a funded account because of how drawdown was calculated, you remember it.
That kind of behavior is exactly what we want to capture.
What matters most to traders when choosing a firm?
If I had to simplify it, most traders don’t fully understand the rules they’re buying into.
And that’s not really their fault. On the surface, most challenges look similar. Profit target, drawdown, account size. It all looks interchangeable.
But once you go one level deeper, it’s not.
Trailing vs static drawdown, how it’s calculated, what happens during news, restrictions on instruments. Those details decide the outcome more than the strategy in many cases.
So for us, clarity around rules is the starting point.
Price is the other big factor. We are seeing that promotional discounts, some offers go up to 40% off, are genuinely pulling attention. Traders notice that kind of deal, and in a market where you might attempt more than one challenge before you get funded, that discount starts to feel very relevant very quickly. Cost is part of the decision whether traders consciously frame it that way or not.
We are still testing a lot of this, but the early signals are quite consistent.
The site has been live for a couple of weeks. What have you seen so far?
The profiling flow is working better than expected. Even with a login at the end, people are completing it at a decent rate, which is a good sign that the value is clear early on.
One thing that became obvious very quickly is how important the affiliate setup is, not just commercially but structurally. It affects what we can show, how we rank things, and ultimately how useful the product feels.
We expected that to matter, but probably underestimated how central it is.
The other open question for us is understanding how much overlap there is between the FXStreet audience and the prop trading audience. It’s not something we’re taking for granted, and we’re actively analyzing the level of coincidence between both. That will play a big role in how we approach growth and acquisition going forward.
Too early to draw conclusions, but it’s the key thing we’re watching right now.
Do you see differences between prop traders and traditional broker traders?
It’s still early, so I wouldn’t overstate it, but one difference shows up in almost every conversation: age.
The prop audience is clearly younger. Not slightly younger, noticeably so.
The other interesting point is the level of interest coming from the US. That part we expected, but seeing it so clearly in the data is still encouraging.
The traditional broker model is heavily restricted there, so prop trading is becoming a more accessible alternative. Fewer barriers, simpler entry.
For us at FXStreet, the US has always been a huge source of traffic but a tough market to monetize given all the regulatory restrictions around the traditional broker model. Prop trading changes that equation, which is why this early signal is particularly interesting to us.
