PTC Research
Independent research and analysis of the global proprietary trading industry.
The most recent published PTC Research publication.
PTC Data Studies™ · PTC-DS-2026-02
What Drove Prop Trading Momentum in October 2026?
What drove prop trading momentum in October? PTC examines 15 Growth Index leaders, five firm cases and the evidence behind their measured growth signals.
The Economics of $10K Forex/CFD Evaluations
An evidence-led comparison of entry fees, deferred payments, activation costs, drawdown rules, payout conditions and fee refunds for small Forex/CFD prop evaluations.
Key finding:Low entry fees do not necessarily minimize the cost of activation or the conditions for receiving a trader reward.
Current PTC coverage of the global retail proprietary trading firm universe.
Recurring PTC research programs covering the forces shaping proprietary trading.
Periodic assessment of the state, scale and direction of the proprietary trading industry.
Explore →Firm launches, closures and operational-status changes across the industry.
Explore →Regulatory developments, perimeter analysis and business-model exposure across major markets.
Explore →Deeper analysis of prop trading markets across major global regions.
Explore →Quantitative studies built on PTC's own collected and modelled datasets.
Explore →Subject classifications across PTC Research. Every publication carries one topic.
Regulation, legal frameworks, financial promotion and business-model exposure.
Explore →Market structure, infrastructure, platforms, firms and industry development.
Explore →Trader capital, funding economics, evaluation structures and capital efficiency.
Explore →Competitive dynamics, concentration, firm positioning, growth and market evolution.
Explore →Every published PTC research report, most recent first.
PTC Data Studies™ · PTC-DS-2026-02
What Drove Prop Trading Momentum in October 2026?
What drove prop trading momentum in October? PTC examines 15 Growth Index leaders, five firm cases and the evidence behind their measured growth signals.
The Economics of $10K Forex/CFD Evaluations
An evidence-led comparison of entry fees, deferred payments, activation costs, drawdown rules, payout conditions and fee refunds for small Forex/CFD prop evaluations.
Inside the founders, ownership structures and corporate groups shaping the global prop trading industry
PTC maps the founders, legal entities, holding structures and corporate groups behind major retail prop trading brands, and separates verified ownership from partnership, infrastructure and service relationships.
Power, Growth and Market Presence: what changed, what was relative, and what the evidence can actually explain
PTC analyzed the transition from the final July 2026 ranking snapshots to the August calculations across PTC Power, Market Presence and a 41-firm Growth group that can be compared reliably. August contained genuine improvement, genuine deterioration, relative rank moves, unexplained changes and apparent gains that do not survive a comparability check.
On-Chain Funding, Capital Protocols and the Evolution of the Prop Firm
PTC maps the emerging crypto prop-trading market and separates live execution, simulated accounts, on-chain payouts, published reserves and protocol-native capital allocation.
The Retail Prop-Trading Industry at Mid-Year
PTC’s mid-year assessment of the retail prop-trading industry, combining reconciled external evidence with H1-valid proprietary PTC data on evaluation structures, funding environments, branded-search concentration and country-level demand.
Formation, exits and consolidation across the retail prop-trading industry
PTC verified 14 qualifying new-firm launches in H1 2026 against one strict full-firm closure in the researched event set. The study also finds that several apparent “closures” were actually product, sub-brand or business-line changes rather than complete firm failures.
Why payout requests become contested — and what documented cases reveal
PTC examines documented H1 2026 payout disputes to identify why payouts become contested, including trading-rule interpretation, KYC and identity reviews, processing delays and account investigations.
Futures vs. Forex/CFD Prop Economics
PTC examines when proprietary trading offers a stronger economic proposition than trading personal capital, comparing futures and Forex/CFD funding structures through effective risk capital, evaluation costs, payout economics and strategy compatibility.
Regulatory perimeter, business-model exposure and the 2026-2027 watchlist
No bespoke EU regulatory category currently exists for retail prop trading firms. PTC examines how regulatory exposure varies across simulated evaluations, live-funded trading, broker-integrated programs, crypto and financial-market recommendations.
January–July 2026
PTC examines documented trading-infrastructure outages, how trader remediation differs across the prop-trading ecosystem, and the industry's significant disclosure gap.
Concise trader-facing analysis drawn from published PTC research.
A trader-facing brief drawn from PTC Market Structure research PTC-MS-2026-03: what on-chain infrastructure in crypto prop trading proves, what it does not, and which questions decide whether a funded account is live, simulated or hedged.
A platform outage does not automatically mean your losses will be restored. PTC found automatic remediation, case-by-case resets, explicit non-compensation policies — and many situations where the answer is simply not publicly documented.
Based on PTC Market Infrastructure™ research
What documented H1 2026 payout disputes tell traders about why payouts get delayed or denied—and what to check before you trade.
