You're making it sound like this happens all the time when reality is that this is the exception more than it is the rule.
"So, you're telling me that in instances where a trader went to a prop firm, put up money in order to buy leverage, that they let him lose more than his initial deposit? Impossible." You're kidding, right? Say a guy puts up 5k and has 500k BP. Say he's done a few hundred thousand shares for the day, and he's long 1000 GOOG right before Cramer says it's overpriced [or, whatever]. So, he loses 6 points in 2 minutes, and his cost for the day is 1500 on the shares... he could have lost 7500 for the day. And, that's not a real exaggeration. But, I remember a few years ago... what was it, COCO? CECO? Some guy went negative 150k, or so.
I tried to edit my post about the CECO/COCO (can't remember)... that was INTRADAY. Yeah, that was extreme, but over the years, I've seen lots of traders go negative by a few grand, and a handful of guys go negative in a big way. It was usually intraday, too.
I'm not going to belabor the issue, but suffice it say that we disagree. Any DECENT prop firm would be able to monitor, in real-time, the exposure and P/L of its traders. 'Nuff said.
" Any DECENT prop firm would be able to monitor, in real-time, the exposure and P/L of its traders." I fully agree. Notice, I made no mention of the quality of the firm at which I saw this. Sorry, back to the thread topic...
"So, you're telling me that in instances where a trader went to a prop firm, put up money in order to buy leverage, that they let him lose more than his initial deposit? Impossible." Absolutly not. At many futures prop shops, loads and loads of the traders are £10-100k down. The firms don't care about the losses until a certain point, which is certainly not zero. Think about it, futures traders paying ~£1 a lot in and out, trading 200 lot clips 20 times a day generates £4000 a day, plus the desk rent. They don't care about the accounts, which are down like this for months on end. I know traders who have accounts that have never been positive, but keep plugging away, basically waiting for bombs to go off to smash all their available size long on the bund.
The other thing that really makes a huge difference is that if you have a bad couple of months at a prop shop, and best case break even after costs and desk, you can't draw any money. Unless you have some reserves, but then you start dwindling those as well. The real questions here are... 1. Just how bad do prop shops look on a CV when trying to move to a banks trading desk. 2. How do you go about getting a job at a bank trading, if you aren't a Phd or programmer.
Has anyone here been looking at Prestige more, or moved over there? Please feel free to PM me if you like, I would like to know more about them, as I am interested in them as well. Thanks, gordo
We run a small desk of 15 traders at Prestige, SMB Capital, LLC. My partners and I have been trading for collectively 23 plus years. A little over a year ago we shopped for the best place to run our group. We met with as many firms as we could. We chose Prestige. And we have been happy with them. They offer a competitive rate, a reliable and customizable platform, a nice office, excellent leverage, and accommodating management.