PropShop Trader’s New Model: Rocky Start, Interesting Pivot
Full disclosure up front: I’m an investor in NeuroStreet, the parent company behind both PropShop Trader and the Tickblaze platform. So take everything here with whatever size grain of salt that earns me. That said, you know I’m not going to sugarcoat things, and this story has plenty of texture.
Let’s Talk About the Rollout
When PropShop launched, they came out swinging with 20 account options and pricing aggressive enough to make Apex nervous. I suggested that might be a little ambitious for a firm still finding its footing. They went ahead anyway. Shocking, I know. Doesn’t anybody know that I’m a big deal?
What followed was a pretty quick retreat from 20 accounts down to 10, and eventually a complete overhaul of the futures model they launched with, which happened to be the model most of their early traders signed up for. To their credit, they grandfathered most traders through the transitions and paid out a significant amount of money to a lot of traders in a short period of time. The problem is that the majority of those payouts went heavily to the kind of traders they probably didn’t want to attract in the first place, which is the same trap Apex and others have fallen into. Tell me you don’t want gamblers while building a structure that recruits them.
I don’t want to discount that a small numbers of traders doing things the right way got completely screwed, and that it is fair to say that the model change does have rug-pull characteristics. If you were a trader that followed my recommendation to try PropShop, traded slow and responsibly, and then had any amount of profit withheld, I apologize and I know it sucks.
I should also note that Tickblaze had its own growing pains during this stretch. It’s a powerful platform originally built for quants that had to be reverse-engineered for retail traders, so some friction was expected. It’s come a long way, but it’s fair to say that PropShop was recommending a platform that was still working out the kinks at the same time traders were depending on it. Not ideal timing.
The Pivot to Stocks and the Explanation That Doesn’t Quite Add Up
PropShop says they had to gut their futures model in order to offer stocks, citing legal advice as the reason. I’ll give them partial credit here because they are doing something genuinely different, running both asset classes through the same entity on the same platform, which most firms avoid by just keeping them separate. But framing it as a legal necessity while most other firms simply run parallel structures? A little convenient. You can decide what to do with that.
I’ll be covering the stock side in a separate post. Short version: I think prop trading equities makes sense for a very specific and very small slice of traders. I remain, now and forever, a futures fanatic. If you want to learn to speculate and day trade, futures is still the answer in my book.
So What Does the New Model Actually Look Like?
Here’s where I’ll give PropShop some genuine credit. The benchmark system they’ve landed on is legitimately different from what most prop firms are doing, and for a specific type of trader, it might actually be the thing that finally works.
The core idea is simple. Instead of chasing a big sim payout, you work through benchmarks. On a $50K account, that means hitting $125 a day for five qualifying days and $625 total per benchmark. Do that six to eight times and you move to a real prop account with a signing bonus. No home runs required, no consistency rules, no payout caps once you’re live.
The daily loss limit in live accounts is $500 on a $2,500 drawdown, and there’s an MAE rule that caps your single-position risk at half your drawdown. These aren’t obstacles, they’re guardrails that force the kind of discipline that actually keeps traders around long term.
The part I find most interesting is the reset structure. If you’ve built up four benchmarks and blow up, you don’t start over. You pay a reset fee, keep your benchmarks, and pick back up where you left off. For anyone who has watched months of work disappear overnight at another firm, that’s not nothing.
Who This Is Actually For?
This model is not for the trader looking to flip a quick payout and move on. It’s built for people who have struggled to stay disciplined inside the pressure cooker of a traditional prop evaluation, and who need a structured, lower-stakes framework to build the right habits before touching real capital.
If that sounds like you, PropShop’s new model is worth a serious look. Code: TDG will always provide the best discount running. Just go in knowing the history, and knowing that they’re still a relatively young firm finding their way. While it hasn’t been a smooth ride, the foundation looks more solid than it did at launch. Whether they build on it the right way remains to be seen.
Have questions about prop firms or futures trading? Drop them in the comments or reach out directly.
