Last Friday on the 24th of May (2024), a USA based prop trading firm SurgeTrader announced that they are closing and ceasing all operations permanently. SurgeTrader is a proprietary firm with a fairly wide variety of auditions (challenges) for traders to choose from to get funded.
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Why SurgeTrader Shut Down in a Nutshell
SurgeTrader was founded in 2021 in Naples, Florida by Jana Seaman, wife of Brent Seaman who is the face of the “SEC Charges Florida Man with Operating $35 Million Ponzi Scheme that Targeted Church Members” headlines this past July. Well, who would’ve thought that this would happen. At first glance the firm looks legit if I look past their MetaQuotes license termination, but when I was doing research about SurgeTrader to write this… I could’ve seen this “cease of operations” coming.
The firm had its struggles after MetaQuotes revoked their license, in the past few months SurgeTrader was moving from the famous MetaTrader 4/5 platform to Match Trade. Match Trade was ultimately supposed to provide them sort of a safe haven so they could continue operating, but, AHA! They closed the door on them too. Really quite unexpectedly.
Their Discord moderators have been quiet for a while and the SurgeTrader’s traders are angry. There are many complaints all over about traders not receiving payouts even before the firm closed. I guess Brent wanted to upgrade his Ferrari 488 to the latest model. I don’t blame him. But my heart is with all the traders that had to endure another firm closing. These really are dark times for the prop firm industry.
Prop Firms in a Nutshell
Funding Traders’ CEO Stan has recently been killing it on their YouTube channel with a series of videos titled “Prop Firm Industry Cleansing”. I can’t deny that this statement isn’t true, because it is. There have been countless prop firms, big and small, following My Forex Funds (MFF) closing. There is definitely a cleanse in the prop firm realm going on now, and it’s a good thing. The sketchy, Ponzi-based, payout denying prop firms should not be part of the industry.
Prop firm traders today must have a lot of due diligence when choosing the right firm for them to get funded with. I like going straight to the Trustpilot and Reddit reviews, people there have no filters when discussing the cons of a business.
When looking at prop firms you can forget that it’s a business, with all the nice words and promotions the marketing department is offering traders. The business owners didn’t start a non-for-profit thing. They wanted to make money. That’s completely understandable, so in the past few years when prop firms were only starting to flourish it was tight competition between the prop firms. A race for who is giving the best profit splits, fastest payouts, or easiest challenges.
This strategy easily lured in novice traders to buy the product only looking at the money they’re being “offered” without evaluating themselves enough to see if they’re profitable enough or experienced enough. So, then those traders started the loop of failed challenges, because honestly, all they saw was the result they wanted but didn’t have the right skills to get to their result.
But years passed and traders got better, the number of traders worldwide also grew rapidly (and is still growing today), and suddenly there were more traders passing challenges, some even got very big payouts. Unfortunately, (for the prop firm,) the evaluation/challenge firms rely on the less-skilled traders to fail challenges so the firm can payout the profitable funded traders.
If there are too many profitable traders and not enough people failing challenges the company can risk bankruptcy. This is what we’ve seen happening in the industry in addition to MetaQuotes party pooping on all of the prop firm owners (and traders).
Moving Forward
So, what can fellow traders do now that we’ve understood why challenge prop firms are a bust? I know I know! Join an instant funding prop firm, one that cares about the people, so much so that it even donates to charity, and is known for amazing support on practically any platform you can think of? What?? Where can one find such a prop firm you ask? Try out Overview Funding Program (OFP Funding if you wish) and get out of the blue pill nonsense challenge firms are trying to sell you.
Ready to skip the hassle of evaluations and get started with an instantly funded account? CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW and customize your Instant Funded account with OFP Funding today!
