Risk of ruin is very high if the under funded trader uses 10X-50X leverage. I suspect the prop firm will not let the margins eat into their capital base, so they will cut you off before the trade has time to develop making your risk or ruin even higher.
Equity JBOs generally don’t like overnight positions and will do what they can to not allow you to lose firm money over yours. That does not always happen.
I'm leaving aside the scam-like prop shops who provide "training", especially to people with zero prior qualifications and experience. In theory, training could work and that's what proper hedge funds are doing, but the material they work with is already very well pre-trained. By definition it's not profitable to train someone to simply do what you're already doing since the return on this sort of strategy is halving the profits you already make. So you want people who are capable of creative independent thought, focused on the capital market and who have the education background to succeed. Training these guys could work and it's the sort of thing I have in mind when I proposed investing $50k in a prop shop business. But that's obviously not enough, so I'm looking for partners. Reiterating the idea: Get 10 partners (including me) who invest $50k in R&D and $10k as trading capital. That's $100k of trading capital and $500k as development. And it's not a mistake that I'm estimating 5x more for development than capital. The figures can be swapped only *after* you've got several solid trading strategies, point after which the possibilities for growth are multiple (borrow more capital, work with investment banks, do your own sales trough a hedge fund business). And those $500k are not going to hatch golden chicken in a couple of months, think more like 2.5 years under a normal distribution (extremely lucky to get something in 6 months, can close "early" if it doesn't reach profitability in 54). Ideally, the 10 partners would already bring enough ideas and experience to the table that the whole thing would spark a chain reaction: individually, each Uranium-235 partner would not reach ignition level, but 10x that would do the trick. And this also gives simple to understand explanation why there aren't more successful traders: because even the hardcorest individuals need too much time to gather the critical mass by themselves. At this point I'm a guy with $10k in capital and $50k in comitement over a period of 5 years and with the dev / quant / trader knowledge I've got so far I dare to say, this makes me a rare element. Worst case worst I gotta reach critical mass by myself (and looks like I already did it, though I'll be more certain in 6 months or so). But you also get my explanation why the default approach in this business "come back when you're successful" is utterly retarded and a bunch of skilled, determined and capitalized enough individuals (like me) could seriously challenge the status quo.