All traders know what they seek in a broker (reliable trading conditions, low spread, fast funding, support), but what makes a good prop firm?
In case you didn’t know, prop firms provide traders with ready-funded accounts (traders do not trade their capital). Traders can keep a share of the profits from trading on the account. It is almost a risk-free proposition, except traders must pay a fee to register for a trading challenge and are only awarded the funded account if they complete the challenge.
The main premise of the challenge is to demonstrate profitability on a demo account without incurring heavy losses. If the criteria are met, the funded account is awarded. The Ultimate Traders review looks at the key features traders want to see when pursuing funded trading and if Ultimate Traders fits the bill.
Pricing
Although the awarded funded account will always far exceed the price of the trading challenge required to obtain it, traders still want good value for money. After all, there is always a chance they will not succeed on their first attempt.
Ultimate Traders’ registration fee for the smallest funded account, $5,000, is $49, while the largest account, $400,000, costs $1,799. The registration fee to account size ratio is excellent. Moreover, the fee is refunded upon the first withdrawal from the funded account for traders who are successful in the challenge.
Profit Split: Ultimate Traders review HIGHLIGHT
Traders will also want to know what profit share they are entitled to. The larger their portion, the more worthwhile undertaking the challenge becomes. Ultimate Traders provides up to 90% profit to the trader, which, upon research, is unsurpassed in the prop trading market. This is one of the most positive findings and the highlight of our Ultimate Traders review.
The 90% split can be requested during registration through the optional inclusion of an add-on. Yet even if the trader does not choose this, they will still receive a baseline 80% profit share as standard.
Challenge Trading Rules
Challenges exist to qualify suitable traders, so the rules must be sufficiently demanding to be effective. However, they must be within reason. Prop traders must be confident that the trading objectives are accomplishable.
For the Classic Challenge, a 2-phase challenge (the most common format of prop trading challenge), the profit target is 10% in phase 1 and 5% in phase 2. This appears to be standard across the industry for 2-phase challenges. The daily and max drawdown thresholds are 6% and 12%. The Ultimate Traders review makes this more favorable than most other firms, allowing only 5% and 10%.
Alternative Challenges
Although 2-phase challenges like the Classic Challenge are the most common in the industry, everybody likes to be offered options. Ultimate Traders provides an alternative to the Speedy Challenge.
As implied in the name, it is a potentially faster route to funding. It differs from the Classic Challenge because it requires the trader to reach the profit target once. It is a 1-phase challenge. The profit target remains at 10% whilst the daily and max drawdown limits decrease to 6% and 4%, respectively. This leaves traders with less room for error and is done to balance out the difficulty. Over two phases, traders demonstrate their ability to produce consistent results. Since the element of consistency is removed when reducing the challenge to a single phase, the trader must instead show astuteness in risk management.
Trading Strategies
Many prop firms are strict about what type of trading they will accept. For example, some firms forbid opening positions close to news announcements, forcing news traders to find an alternative strategy. Others demand that trades stay open for a minimum timeframe to be considered valid, alienating scalpers and high-frequency traders. Some firms dictate that the profit generated should fall within a certain number of standard deviations compared to other profitable days to prove consistency.
Many of these strategic impositions are either impractical or unimportant and mostly take the pleasure out of trading. A good prop firm will allow traders to express themselves in the same way they would with a regular broker. Ultimate Traders permits all trading strategies, including algorithmic trading.
The only restriction they share with other prop firms is the rule of having to close trades before the weekend. However, they provide an option to bypass this rule. Traders who include the “weekend holdings” add-on upon registration can also keep positions open during the weekend – great news for swing traders!
Leverage
In the Ultimate Traders review, we observe that the leverage available for the Classic Challenge is 100:1 for currency pairs, 10:1 for commodities and indices, and 3:1 for cryptos. For the Speedy Challenge, it is 30:1 for currency pairs, 5:1 for commodities and indices, and 2:1 for cryptos. This is more than adequate, and many other prop firms appear far less competitive in this respect.
Quality Broker
A prop firm is not a broker. Prop firms rely on external brokers or liquidity providers to offer a trading platform to their traders. Therefore, traders want to ensure the broker is regulated and offers superior trading conditions. Ultimate Traders’ partner broker is fully regulated and has various instruments and low spreads.
MT4 Trading platform
Metatrader4 is still the industry-leading trading platform, with more users than all other platforms combined. However, not all prop firms can offer it. Our Ultimate Traders review shows that this prop firm is one of those that still offers MT4-based trading.
Since MT4 supports automated trading (possessing its coding language) and Ultimate Traders allows such trading, the prop firm is a great choice for traders operating through bots.
Ultimate Traders review – Conclusion
The Ultimate Traders review seems to tick all the boxes. This prop firm leans on two solid challenges: a range of fairly priced account sizes, generous profit sharing, and flexible trading strategies. These are solid foundations that experienced prop traders will look for before committing to a firm.
In short, the results of our Ultimate Traders review are highly positive.
