It's not only about futures. Nowadays, you can day trade almost any instrument through a CFD company with the same leverage as a prop firm. They even pay you interest if you short! Both offer about the same leverage in stocks, indices ETFs CFD. 10X to 20X... For CFDs, you keep all your own profits. No middleman fees & prop firm gurus to interfere. So whats the advantage of trading thro' a chopshop when you can trade with a bucketshop?
I dont understan what you are saying. Post examples of the exact leverage and comission. COmpare with the props. I imagine prop have a better offer.
CFD are very expensive. 0.02 per share on US shares. 0.1% on european shares on igmarkets.co.uk, wich has the best offer. excellent for trading on the daily, but useless for day trading. leverage is 20X, or even more if you have stops. thousands of stocks available.
To the best of my knowledge, Americans cannot trade CFDs. You'd probably have to form an offshore company, etc to get around these rules. Probably not worth it for most. Stick to options and futs.
I would hope most are trading the insturment that they know the best not what gives them the most leverage.
I am also considering joining a prop firm, your post may change my mind. If trading futures is the alternative to getting leverage in a prop firm, why go through the trouble of Series 7 and other tricky stuff? My problem is I never traded futures before. I guess it is the same as trading the index, only bigger in scale, right?