How to check

Prop firm or broker: we checked 14 licences and 6 contracts, and only one side of that comparison holds your money

A broker with a retail permission holds client money under rules, with a compensation scheme behind it. A prop firm sells access to an assessment, and four of the six contracts we read say the funded stage stays simulated. The two products are sold in the same search results.

Last verified 7 September 2026 · how we check

Search for a way to trade futures with someone else’s capital and the results mix two products that have almost nothing in common. One is a brokerage account. The other is a paid assessment. They are priced similarly, marketed similarly, and governed by completely different things.

We have now read the licences behind one and the contracts behind the other, so this comparison runs on documents rather than on impressions.

What we checked on each side

Brokers. We swept the FCA register for every UK-authorised firm in our reviews and read one field on each: the customer type carried on its permissions. That field decides whether the licence covers an ordinary client at all.

Result	Firms
Permissions include Retail (Investment)	11
Professional and Eligible Counterparty only	2
No longer authorised	1

The eleven are CMC Markets, FP Markets, OANDA, Pepperstone, Plus500, Swissquote, TF Global, Tickmill, Vantage Global Prime, XTB and Eightcap. The two that cannot take a retail client are Exness (UK) and Vantage Capital Markets, a second Vantage entity that operates a wholesale venue. IC Markets (EU) Ltd shows No longer authorised, effective 11 December 2023, which is the ordinary post-Brexit outcome rather than an enforcement event.

Prop firms. We read six contracts in full. The findings are set out in our comparison; the two that matter here are that four of the six state the funded stage remains simulated, and that all six make the fee non-refundable.

The difference that decides everything

	Regulated broker with a retail permission	Prop firm
What you open	a client account	access to an assessment
Who holds the money	the firm, under client money rules	nobody holds your money; there is none
Market exposure	real orders on a venue	simulated at four of six firms
If it fails	compensation scheme, up to £85,000 under the FSCS for eligible UK claims	no scheme, no regulator, no claim
Your payment	a deposit, still yours	a fee, non-refundable at all six
Getting paid	withdrawal of your own balance	a discretionary reward

That fifth row is the one people misread. A deposit is your money in someone else’s custody. An evaluation fee is their money the moment you pay it, and every one of the six contracts says so in terms.

The left column is what a licence buys. The right column is what a contract buys. Both are legitimate; they answer different questions.

Neither column is an accusation

A prop firm selling a simulated assessment is running a lawful business, and the better ones say exactly what it is. TradeDay’s contract is the outlier that funds a live futures or options account at the funded stage. Super Funded’s says the opposite in capitals: funded accounts remain simulated only. Both are honest documents; they describe different products under one word.

The regulated side is not automatically safer either. A licence tells you which rules apply and who to complain to. It says nothing about price, execution, or how a firm behaves in a dispute, which is the limit we set out in what a register cannot tell you.

Leverage tells you which side you are on

One number separates the two products faster than any document, and it is on the marketing page.

A broker holding a retail permission under the FCA, CySEC or ASIC is capped at 30:1 on major FX, with lower limits by asset class, and it cannot advertise past that to a retail client. The full ladder is in leverage limits by regulator.

A prop firm has no such cap, because on a simulated account there is no position to margin. Super Funded’s FAQ states 1:50; others advertise far more. Neither figure is a regulatory number, and neither is comparable to the broker’s.

So when a page advertises 1:500 to a retail audience, it is telling you one of two things: the account is simulated, or the entity taking your money sits outside the three regimes that cap it. Both are checkable in a minute, and which one it is decides whether the rest of the page is about custody or about a scoring system.

What happens when either one closes

We have documented five firms that stopped operating, and the pattern separates the two sides cleanly.

At the firms without a regulator, the outcome was whatever management chose. The best of the five, FundingTicks, refunded every active account including losing ones, and framed it precisely:

Any payments made are processed in good faith and as an act of goodwill, without any admission of liability, fault, wrongdoing, or obligation of any kind.

That is the ceiling of what an unsupervised wind-down offers: a voluntary payment the firm was careful to state it did not owe. The others left an email address. The full set is in what happens when a firm closes.

A licensed broker failing is a different process, with an administrator, a timetable and a compensation scheme behind eligible claims. Slower, often disappointing, and structurally unlike a homepage notice.

Which one you actually want

If the question is capital, a prop evaluation is the product, and the thing to read before paying is the payout clause rather than the profit split. Our comparison of six contracts sets out what those clauses say, including one that states there is no correlation between paying the fee and being eligible to be paid.

If the question is trading your own money, a broker is the product, and the field to check is the customer type on its permissions. Eleven of the fourteen we swept carry Retail (Investment). Two do not, and both are marketed to retail traders.

If you are doing both, keep them separate in your head. The evaluation fee is an expense with no recovery route. The brokerage balance is an asset with a defined one.

How to run this check yourself

For a broker, open the regulator’s own register, find the firm by its company number rather than its name, and read the customer type on the dealing permissions. Retail (Investment) is the words to look for. That single field is what separated the eleven from the two above, and it took one sweep to produce.

For a prop firm, there is no register to check, and searching one is the wrong instrument. The contract is the only document, so read clause by clause: what the funded stage is, whether the fee is refundable, and what conditions sit on a payout.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

The register results come from a sweep of 14 FCA records run through our own tooling on 7 September 2026, reading the customer type carried on each firm’s permissions. The contract findings come from the six prop firm agreements read between 25 August and 1 September 2026, each quoted on its own page.

We have not held an account at any firm on either side, tested a withdrawal, requested a payout or made a claim against a compensation scheme. The £85,000 FSCS figure is the published limit for eligible claims against UK-authorised firms and says nothing about whether a particular claim would qualify, which depends on the entity, the product and the circumstances.

Sources

Figures were checked on 7 September 2026 and change over time — confirm current terms with the provider. Nothing here is investment advice; see therisk disclaimer.