👀 FastTrackTrading's insane payout volume, China buying Gold, A September warning

Hi guys, it’s Kieran! Another week in the markets is upon us, so let’s get into it.

📢 Prop Firm Industry News

The biggest industry news of the week is Ascendx has migrated to a new entity, and is now a regulated broker. They have changed their name to Quant Tekel (kind of a weird name, but ok). They are totally revamping their offerings and say that clients will soon be able to deposit live funds.

This opens up some interesting potential synergies between their prop firm and brokerage. Although FTMO have done something similar we have not really seen any interesting new concepts from them yet, so I will be tracking QT closely to see what they introduce going forward.

Over at Payout Junction we listed a new firm ‘Fast Track Trading’ who are causing a huge splash in the industry with their instant funding Futures model. They have been processing payouts through Rise for only a couple of weeks and have already paid out $4.4 million 🤯 

They have also just signed a new COO, Sage, from MyFundedFutures, who helped build that firm into one of the best futures firms in the industry. I’ll be keeping a very close eye on them. You can track their insane growth on Payout Junction.

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Monitor prop firm payouts LIVE on Payout Junction -https://payoutjunction.com/.

🕜 Economic calendar

Here are this week’s red folder news events. Lots going on this week, so be extra careful if you are trading with firms with news restrictions. US retail sales Tuesday, FOMC Wednesday, Unemployment claims Thursday and the BOJ monetary statement on Friday rounds off a very busy week.

📈 The Macro View

Welcome to the 2nd half of September. The worst calendar period of the year.

It was a big green week for the S&P 500, but it’s possible longs could be getting sucked in at just the wrong time. The second half of September has seen historically the worst 2-week returns, since 1950.

The first outflows from equity funds in 5 months.

Despite the big up week in the S&P500, Deutsche Bank report a rare weekly outflow from equity funds. Certainly nothing alarming yet, but notable none the less.

People’s Bank of China (PBOC) are buying a lot of Gold.

Gold is up 23% YTD, so questions must be asked about how sustainable a continued rally can be from here. Well, in terms of buyers, there is one major player that has been bidding this up continually. China. They are buying gold at any price offered and building their reserves significantly.

Are Retail buying gold?

In terms of Retail holdings of gold (ETF holdings), growth has been non-existent. In fact, retail Gold ETF buying has been falling steadily for years and even this huge YTD rally has registered barely an uptick.

So the question is, what will happen to the Gold price if retail start buying? Something to ponder if Gold keeps grinding higher. Sooner or later the Retail FOMO must kick in. Then, anything can happen…

That’s it for this week. Have a good one and stay safe out there!

Kieran

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