👀 Largest Payout in Prop Firm history, September Seasonality

Hi guys, it’s Kieran! It’s the Labor day holiday in US today but the markets are open, so let’s get to it.

📢 Prop Firm Industry News

Yesterday the largest payout in prop firm history appears to have been approved by ApexTraderFunding, $1.9 million. WOW. This appears to be genuine 😲 

In other (possibly related!) ApexTraderFunding news, they are now requesting video recordings of traders before approving payouts, so be prepared for that if you are trading with them.

Over at Payout Junction last week we added Arctic Funding to the platform. You can now monitor their payouts live, as well as 26 other firms!

From Payout Junction, here are the firms that have paid out the most over the last 7 days:

🔥 Follow Payout Junction on X - https://x.com/payoutjunction

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

🕜 Economic calendar

Here are this week’s red folder news events. It’s the Labor day holiday in the US today, and some markets are closing early, but there’s quite a few events to look out for over the rest of the week, including non-farm payrolls on Friday.

📈 The Macro View

August up 2.3%

The S&P 500 closed August up +2.3% on the month (up 18.4% YTD) — leaving behind the short-lived Japanese stock market crash, and geopolitics/recession fears which triggered a -6% pullback in the index earlier in the month.

Net flows into global equity funds remained strong in the week ending August 28 (+$14bn vs +$20bn in the previous week). The last 4 weeks have seen $55bn coming into equities. Not bad for a volatile summer month.

On the Sentiment Front

From Extreme Fear to Greed in just a few weeks. Oh how quickly sentiment can change.

S&P 500 Seasonality

September tends to be a very mixed month. The end of year rally usually kicks off end of October, so September often tries to flush out weak hands before that.

This is an election year, with a lot of geopolitics going on, so of course, anything can happen, but the set up here with markets at highs and sentiment in greed territory, is perfect for a good old fashioned fakeout at some point this month. So keep this chart in the back of your mind.

VIX 

This chart of VIX seasonality (Volatility index) shows that over a 20 year lookback, we tend to see a big volatility spike this month, into October. The S&P 500 trades inverse to this, so if VIX spikes, it means the S&P500 is going down and fear levels are high. So as always, keep an open mind and stay risk managed!

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

Kieran

Pipfarm ‘EXTRA LIFE’ promo!

My recommended prop firm, Pipfarm, are offering a very cool promo for September. If you hit the Max Daily Loss, you get a free retry! Think of this as an extra life! On top of that, you will also get 15% off any challenge using the promo code PTWEEKLY. You can check out their programs here or click the banner below.

🔥 Follow Payout Junction on X - https://x.com/payoutjunction