A Prop. shop is a place where "Transactions made by a securities firm that affect the firm's account but not the accounts of its clients.". Some prop. shops demand desposit, some doesn't. A matter of policy. Actually, the whole discussion here is that Swift does not require any deposit in order to trade. Therefore it is not your money if your lose it all either as a trainee or trader. However, if you are a trader and it happens that you lose more than you made in a particular month, your pay-cheque of last month may be held by the branch manager as someone on this thread claimed. Only a rare portion of traders at Swift trade NT/LU. You are right, scalper exists in the market, which is not that "underground" and I suppose a lot of people know. Why everybody dislikes prop.? I guess because most of the traders at a prop. are very non-professional comparing to traders at a financial institution. Not to say that there is no good traders there. Put it this way, a prop. shop is like a fast-food chain, and that a financial institution is more like a gourment restaurant (non-bookie). They require very different skills. A prop. shop provides liquidity to the market, and it is not hard to get a trader position at a prop. shop (Swift's requirment is very very low). On the other hand, traders in an i-bank have very advance quantitative and computer programming skills from top-tier University. Yet, they both do the same thing: Trading!!
ok, ic. may I ask, what kind of training do they give you? standard stuff or some inhouse developed system? do they assign you a mentor?
Tums, at swift its kind of like teaching someone how to play poker......you teach them the rules.....the main theories behind the game....but then that person has to put in the hours and hours mastering the game..... and really...how do you teach someone to be a good trader....i have tried to teach people the way i trade to make money and it seems that they cant do it....but as soon as they figure out their own way to make money then they are successful..... and as anyone in trading knows...no-one really likes to give away their trading "secrets" cause its such a cut throat business....so its more teaching (enforcing) people to manage their risk and letting them learn on their own through trial and error......so if your looking for a place where someone stands over your shoulder going...do this...do that......then Swift aint for you. so Swift spends the 10 minutes teaching you the game....then gives you the oportunity to spend your lifetime mastering it! But i would like to know what kind of training other firms supply cause every one seems to knock swifts "training" so other firms must be doing a better job of offering training and if there is something i can do to help my traders out more i would like to know. Any suggestions would be more than welcome.
interesting... ok, say you are hired at Swift. They give you that 10 min of training. Now you know what is MSFT and which button to push if you want to buy, and which button to push if you want to sell. Then what? do they say, here's a "mil" ... go trade and make some money?
no of course not... they start you out trading 100 share lots... if you show progress over time then you get to trade more shares gradually... your bp goes up over time. mnx
Tum, the 100s or small size share lot is not intend for you to make alot of money, you will be grant bigger size as your performance improve, traders at swift usually wouldn't have to worry about lack of BP as long as they can show ability to make $ or at least abililty not to lost alot of money in the begining. Cheers,
do they have special software to help them with their trading decisions? momentum indicators? sentiment indicators? skew? etc? i.e. do they have access to anything information that is not easily obtained by a retail trader?