Industry, legal and operations

A-book

A brokerage model where client orders are passed through to external liquidity providers rather than held internally. The broker earns from spread and commission and takes no position against the client, so its revenue follows volume.

Account sharing

Letting someone else trade your account, or trading an account belonging to someone else. It defeats the purpose of an assessment of an individual, and it is prohibited everywhere in the industry without exception.

Affiliate programme

An arrangement paying commission on sales referred through a tracked link. It is how most prop firms acquire customers, and it explains a large share of the reviews published about them.

AML

The controls a firm operates to prevent its services being used to move criminal proceeds. In practice it means identity checks, monitoring for unusual patterns, and refusing payments that cannot be explained.

B-book

A brokerage model where client orders are held internally rather than passed to a market, so the broker takes the other side of them. Client losses become broker revenue, which is the structural objection to it.

Broker

A firm that executes trades on a client's behalf and holds client funds to do so. It is a different business from a prop firm, with different obligations and a different relationship to the client.

Dispute resolution

The process for settling a disagreement about a breach, a payout or an account decision. It starts with the firm's support channel and is governed by the terms the account was bought under.

Funded trader agreement

The contract governing a simulated funded account: what the trader may do, how performance is measured, how payouts are calculated and on what grounds the arrangement can end.

KYC

The process of confirming who owns an account, using identity documents and supporting information. It is required before money moves, and it is the most common cause of a delayed first payout.

Liquidity provider

An institution that streams tradeable prices to brokers and venues - typically a bank or a specialist trading firm. Their aggregated quotes are what a retail price is ultimately built from.

Market maker

A participant that quotes both a bid and an ask continuously, profiting from the spread between them and carrying inventory risk in return. Market makers are what make an instrument tradeable in size at a predictable cost.

Prohibited trading

Activity a firm bans because it targets the trading environment rather than the market. It covers exploiting errors and pricing delays, coordinated trading between accounts, and third-party account management.

Prop firm

A company that assesses traders and pays them a share of the results they produce, rather than a broker that executes orders for clients. Most modern retail firms run the assessment on simulated accounts.

Proprietary trading

Trading a firm's own capital rather than client money. The traditional form employed traders in-house; the retail form assesses traders remotely and pays them a share of the results they produce.

Restricted jurisdiction

A country a firm will not serve, for legal, regulatory, sanctions or payment-provider reasons. Restrictions can change, and they apply to where a trader actually is rather than what an address says.

Sanctions screening

Checking customers and payments against sanctions lists before money moves. It is a legal obligation on the payments provider as much as on the firm, and it is not discretionary.

Simulated funding

The model where a firm assesses and pays traders on simulated accounts rather than routing their orders to a market. Trading is simulated; payouts against qualifying performance are real money.

Terms of service

The contract between a trader and a firm, covering purchases, account rules, payouts and termination. It governs everything the marketing pages summarise, and where a page and the terms disagree, the terms are what applies.