Investors watching the prop trading sector learned this month that two firm executives are willing to criticise prop trading consistency rules in the industry, but only up to a point: both defended the versions their own companies use. Adam Bock, Head of Eightcap Challenges, named profit consistency as the rule he would remove from the broader industry. Archie Cade, Founder and Director of TTTMarkets, separately criticised some competitor versions while defending his firm’s own approach. Both spoke in July interviews published by ResponsibleTrading.com.
What Prop Trading Consistency Rules Actually Do
A consistency rule, in prop trading, caps how much of a trader’s total profit can come from a single trading day when requesting a payout. The idea is to filter out lucky one-day windfalls and reward traders who generate returns steadily across many sessions.
Eightcap calls its version Profit Distribution. Under the Eightcap Challenges terms, newer One-Phase accounts are capped at 30% from any single day, and newer Two-Phase accounts at 35%. Accounts opened before 11 February face lower thresholds: 25% for One-Phase and 30% for Two-Phase. Bock told ResponsibleTrading.com that Profit Distribution is the rule that generates the most disputes at Eightcap, but that the company keeps it to encourage consistent strategies and risk management (the practice of identifying and limiting potential losses before they occur).
Those One-Phase and Two-Phase challenge accounts range in size from $5,000 to $200,000 and offer a profit share of up to 90%. The separately structured Day Trader Challenge, which carries entry fees from $5 to $500 and session lengths of one to eight hours, offers 100% profit share along with multipliers of 2x, 5x or 10x.
TTTMarkets applies its own consistency requirement on at least its 1-Step funded accounts. Cade said account reviews look for one-off trades, coordinated hedging, and other prohibited activity. Where a consistency issue is identified, he said the typical outcome is an adjustment to the payout rather than an outright rejection. He drew a line between that approach and competitor rules that he said were ‘structured more to catch traders out.’
Eightcap’s Exit and Return, and What Bock Now Says Came First
Eightcap cut its brokerage relationships with prop firms in early 2024. The trigger, Bock now says, was restrictions imposed by MetaQuotes on brokers providing MetaTrader platform access to prop-linked US accounts. Eightcap’s ‘primary objective was to protect our core business,’ he said. He described concerns about the sector’s marketing, unrealistic promises, and lack of trust as a separate, philosophical reason for the withdrawal.
The company says it provided infrastructure for more than 300,000 challenges across 40 prop and education brands between 2021 and 2024. It returned with its own simulated trading products in November 2025.
Eightcap Challenges is run by Eightcap International Ltd, the group’s Seychelles entity, which holds a licence from the Seychelles Financial Services Authority. Eightcap says its wider group holds regulated licences in Australia, the United Kingdom, Cyprus, the Bahamas, Seychelles and Mauritius, though those licences belong to separate legal entities. The Challenges website states plainly that its products are not issued under any regulated brokerage or investment permissions held by the operator. Asked how an unregulated challenge product sits alongside those licences, Bock said: ‘We don’t view it as a gap, but as a runway.’
He also told ResponsibleTrading.com that challenge fees are held in a segregated trust account and that successful participants are paid from an Eightcap liquidity pool. FinanceMagnates.com stated it could not independently verify either claim.
Prop Firms Push Into Brokerage as the Lines Blur
TTTMarkets began a limited CFD brokerage rollout in January. According to TradeInformer, the company had built to more than 20,000 prop users before the launch, with Cade targeting more than 50,000 customers in 2026. Cade noted in the July interview that around 95% of TTTMarkets clients are still trading prop firm challenges. The firm’s brokerage offering covers more than 500 instruments with raw spreads from 0.0 pips, running on MetaTrader 5 and a browser-based WebTrader, according to the company’s own CFD trading page.
Other prop operators have moved in the same direction. The founders of The5ers introduced the CySEC-regulated TSG brokerage in late 2025. FTMO completed its acquisition of OANDA in December. The Trading Pit launched a Seychelles-regulated CFD operation in February, according to a TradingView/FinanceMagnates report, rather than March as stated in some earlier accounts. Eightcap came from the opposite direction, adding simulated challenges to an already-established brokerage group.
On the regulatory outlook, Cade said ‘sensible regulation would be a positive for traders’ and expects future rules to address capital, liquidity, governance and transparency rather than prohibit retail prop trading outright. A FinanceMagnates.com industry survey found 70% of participating traders in favour of regulation.
One figure Cade declined to give: the percentage of TTTMarkets traders who remained funded for more than six consecutive months. He said the company had hundreds of traders who had maintained funded accounts since 2025. For traders assessing any prop firm, that retention rate, when firms eventually publish it, will be one of the cleaner tests of whether prop trading consistency rules protect traders or simply protect the house.
