I have no experience with CFD companies so i just compared it with the pricing and target vs DD ratio with futures firms such as Topstep, Earn2Trade, Apex, etc. At your $50K account you have $2.5k DD and $5K target (for your turtle account), while other companies have $2.5K DD and just a 3K target, so the DD vs target is much better there and yours is $450 while those are mostly around $160. Your "Hare" account is $220, so closer to those firms, but still more expensive with the same DD vs target.
Forex is different you cant compare it to the futures companies i looked into the leader in that space typically they are alot more expensive i can't think of the name now and decided that paying almost $1k to trade forex didnt make sense.
Sorry for the delayed reply, been a crazy busy 2 weeks. TS gives $50K "buying power" which is not the same as a $50K account. Our $50K Hare account has 1:50 leverage which means you get $2.5 Million "buying power". If you take TS as an example: You need to pay a monthly fee of $165 for a $50K buying power, our $50K Hare account ($2.5 Million "buying power") is one time $330 which is refundable with your first payout. TS on a $50K account the max drawdown is $2K = 4% Traders With Edge is 10% or $5K. TS on a $50K account the target is $3K or 6% of "buying power" so the target is bigger than the drawdown. Traders With Edge Target is $5K or 10% of the account balance excluding leverage. Traders With Edge has an equal target vs drawdown while TS the target is 50% greater than the drawdown.
Regarding the buying power, not a fair comparison since the nautical value of 5 (max allowed contracts at TS $50K account) NQ contracts is $1.152 million, so i could say TS gives $1.152 million in "buying power" making the difference much smaller. With other futures companies that allow more contracts on the $50K account the difference is close to non existent. Also, you cannot compare the $50K Hare account to the $50K TS account since the $ target is nearly double ($5K for the Hare account, $3K for the TS account), you need to compare the $25K hare account to the $50K TS account and all of a sudden the "buying power" argument is gone since there is barely any difference (with other companies such as Apex that allow 10 NQ contracts they even take the advantage over Edge regarding buying power on accounts that have a comparable $ target). So comparing the target and DD to buying power isn't fair if you don't take nautical value into account, certainly not when you compare accounts with different $ targets/DD's. You say with Edge traders have an equal target vs DD, but that isn't true for all accounts. All Turtle accounts have double the target of the DD, same for Instant.
Yes, they are a lot more expensive under the "buying power" argument, but when you calculate the nautical value of futures contract's you will find out that's a non argument.
How do you make money? is it a percentage of the pnl? Is it on the commissions? how does your firm benefit you? You’ve amply explained how it benefits the mechanic who doesn’t have enough funds to trade on his own. To be clear I’m not saying you shouldn’t make money. You should. In finance good relationships are the ones where everyone earns and the best is when everyone understands how the others earn and are okay with it.
Great questions, I am a big believer in understanding how others are benefiting, because it's then you understand what's really going on. Sure we make some money from the challenge fees, mostly it just covers some operational expenses. We also do a profit split with the successful traders. This is much more scaleable medium to long term and it's the whole reason we built this business. The goal is to attract top talent, or emerging talent and grow them into remote fund managers. We don't make money on commissions, spreads or swaps as we are't a broker. We don't even take rebates.
Thanks. How does a short term trading test prove they have an edge. Or is your goal to burn through a lot of traders to find those few unicorns (like citadel and millennium do)?
Their goal is to make money off people failing and to reduce their risk so significantly when someone does succeeds that it's not worth it for a successful trader to even enter the game. It's the ugly side of capitalism. People profiting off a service that is a negative externality and doesnt bring a better service or more optimal living situation to the world. It's all about their profits. Has nothing to do with the traders.