Why Platform Selection is More Important for Prop Trading Firms

Over the past few years, there’s been a sea change in the trading landscape. The explosion of online trading as a lifestyle product has led to an evolution within the retail trading sphere. Retail traders have become a force to be reckoned with on global markets, not just because they now outnumber all other cohorts of market participants but also because they have rapidly become highly educated, experienced, and well-connected.

The online revolution has obviously contributed to this development, greatly increasing access to free information, but it’s really the ubiquity of social media platforms like X, YouTube, and Reddit that has allowed this group to band together and amass a wealth of knowledge and experience that was not previously available.

Enter the retail prop trader

This growth has led to the emergence of the retail prop trading phenomenon. Alert to the growing competence among these market participants, certain financial services firms have opted to try to entice these more experienced retail traders rather than using the old model of attracting complete beginners and generating volumes from them as they learn the ropes.  

Would-be retail prop traders are put through a series of tests, virtual trading simulators, and competitions to determine their suitability. The company then funds the most successful applicants to trade on its behalf and shares the profits with them.  

Platform selection is key

As a technology provider in this space with more than two decades of experience, we’re noticing that platform selection is even more critical in this new model of online trading. The reason for this is that in the old model, brokers were mainly attracting beginners and intermediate traders who didn’t really have much of a basis for comparison.  

This generation of prop trading firms, however, is actively engaged with far more experienced retail traders who have been around the block a few times and who know the ropes. For this reason, the platform you offer your candidates can be a differentiating factor between you and your competitors.  

It can make your offering stand out, attract traders, and keep them trading with you rather than with someone else. It can also increase their chances of success, which is more important to you than to other financial services firms only interested in generating revenues via the volumes traded by their users.  

DXtrade XT

DXtrade XT is a professional trading platform ideally suited for futures prop trading and trading competitions. It was built from scratch to incorporate all the evolution that has taken place in online trading over the past few decades, including new asset classes, methods of analysis, and UI/UX best practices.  

It is a genuinely all-in-one futures trading hub that provides your traders access to all the crucial information they need to make the best decisions regarding the markets they trade.  

It’s also an all-in-one solution for your business. DXtrade XT comes bundled with institutional-grade market data via our subsidiary, dxFeed, which furnishes some of the industry’s biggest trading firms and exchanges with professional market data solutions.  

Furthermore, we offer 24/7 support and dedicated account managers who are always on call and available to help. You can regard DXtrade XT as a complete turnkey solution. In addition to the platform itself and data feed, you will also receive free hosting and CRM integration. What’s more, we can have you up and running in as little as seven days! 

Manage your operations with ease

Devising trading contests and other promotions is easy on paper, but many businesses struggle with managing these initiatives. Staff is often forced to go through laborious and repetitive processes that could have been handled better with the appropriate software.  

With DXtrade XT, you can quickly and easily apply the rules of your various competitions while monitoring the performance of your participants in real time and ensuring that the rules are adhered to.   

The platform also comes bundled with a paper trading environment, which many prop trading firms like to put newcomers through to discern their suitability for a fully funded account. DXtrade XT’s trading simulator allows you to run competitions in a paper trading environment to filter out potential candidates without putting any real capital at risk.  

In addition to these features, the platform is fully configurable, allowing you to set maximum position limits for different account types, a maximum trailing drawdown, limits to the number of available trading days, and maximum allowable simultaneous positions. This can be set on a per-group basis so that you can offer different tiered packages to your subscribers.  

Give your traders more

Your traders benefit from a fully customizable platform that allows them to have their workspace laid out precisely as they want it to be, with whatever combination of charts, indicators, maps, and other supplementary material available to them as they see fit.  

As you might expect, the platform is also equipped with a to-the-minute news feed. In addition, your clients can pull up company summaries and detailed fundamental summaries that include balance sheets, income statements, cash flow, and financial assessment comparisons with other symbols.  

Moreover, the AI integration that makes the above possible is also capable of providing technical analysis breakdowns per symbol, detailing, for example, where a stock’s price is to be found in relation to its major moving averages or relative to indicators such as MACD and RSI. These are genuinely premium features that are available to all users of DXtrade XT. 

Another essential feature particularly relevant to futures prop trading firms is the platform’s trading journal. Explicitly designed with trading education in mind, it allows your users to tag, filter, and add notes to trades and positions, making their entire history of trading activities searchable, easy to reference, and simple to go back after the fact and comprehend what happened when. 

Take it for a spin?

We believe a test drive is needed to understand what DXtrade XT can do for your prop trading business.

Click here to access a demo version of the platform and see for yourself. Alternatively, don’t hesitate to contact our team to discuss the options we offer and what we can do for you.