👀 Your weekly prop trading roundup is here

Hi everyone, it’s Kieran. It was another wild week in and out of the markets.

Seascrest Markets formally MyFundedFX has thrown in the towel and announced that they are closing their prop trading business. They are transitioning fully to their CFD brokerage operations.

Elsewhere, Topstep, Apex, Alpha and MyFundedFutures restricted trading on the metals markets, as the bleed from this historic metals rally continues to bite.

📢 Firm Announcements via promojunction.io

• Tradeify resolved Tradovate and NinjaTrader login issues, reversing breaches and removing negative trades for impacted accounts.

• FTMO officially launched its new 1 Step Challenge, introducing a single phase evaluation with up to 90% profit split.

• Apex Trader Funding temporarily halted trading on select instruments due to elevated market volatility while monitoring conditions.

• Top One Futures confirmed ProjectX accounts will migrate to Tradovate starting February 9, with affected accounts reissued at the same stats following the transfer.

• Blue Guardian Futures announced its ProjectX to Tradovate migration begins this Friday, requiring all open trades to be closed before transfer.

• Funded Futures Family now allows copy trading on evaluation and funded accounts and launched WealthCharts as a new trading platform option.

• LucidTrading began distributing 1099 tax forms by email and confirmed CME market data access has been fully restored.

• FundedNext Futures confirmed trade adjustments are being processed following the recent Tradovate outage and that CME access restrictions have been lifted.

• InstantFunding reduced prices across its One Phase Challenges and is testing lower consistency and profit target requirements this week.

• HolaPrime rolled out multiple platform maintenance windows and updated risk rules on its 1 Step Pro accounts to trailing drawdown and higher consistency.

• AquaFutures introduced temporary position limits on metals contracts in response to heightened volatility.

• FundingTraders suspended multiple accounts for loyalty abuse and terms of service violations.

• Alpha Capital Group launched in app live chat support for faster trader assistance.

• Crypto Fund Trader implemented site stability upgrades following a surge in platform traffic.

To get announcement alerts for your favorite firms, head over to promojunction.io.

From Payout Junction, here are the firms who paid out the most over the last 7 days 🏆️.

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

🕜 Red Folder News

Here are this week’s red folder news events. A thin looking calendar however some big hitters scattered throughout the week. The rescheduled Non-Farm payrolls report will drop on Wednesday, as well as US Retail Sales on Tuesday, and US CPI (Inflation) on Friday.

📈 Markets

Seasonality about to get wild

On a 20 year lookback, the S&P 500 has typically seen a big pop this week followed by a big retracement which takes out the lows of the year. That sounds like an entirely plausible narrative considering the volatility we are currently seeing. Its difficult to have conviction for a move in either direction imo.

Biggest shorting on record

Goldman Sachs report that last week saw the biggest shorting on record. There was definitely a change in tone as Microsoft and Amazon’s AI spend came massively under question. Smart money running for the exits, or capitulation?

Mag 7 dispersion

Mag 7 stocks used to move up and down together. That has now changed and the market is picking winners and losers. Considering these stocks make up a historically high proportion of the equity indices, this could be a considered a significant structural shirt.

The end of US exceptionalism?

We are getting well ahead of ourselves here but interesting to note that the top of previous bubbles have marked major turning points for US stocks v The rest of the world. If this is to play out again, it would be a very..very long way down from here 👀 

Oh and one final word of warning

Last week saw the first weekly outflow from gold since November 25. Maybe, just maybe, the tide is turning there too. Gonna be an exciting week, so let’s lock-in.

Hope you have a great week!

Kieran

Enjoy trading related newsletters? Try the Market Journal 👇️ 

Monitor prop firm payouts LIVE on Payout Junction 🔥 

Real-time prop firm discounts, flash deals and announcements 👇️