“You
have a lot of prop firms… not even allowing gold to be traded anymore,” that
is how Philip, co-founder and CEO of Rhodium FX, described what he says is a
growing structural problem quietly spreading across the retail prop trading
industry.
Speaking in
a Thentick podcast interview, he argued that the gold market’s record-breaking
run is doing something the industry never prepared for: making ordinary retail
traders consistently profitable, and the economics of many prop firms simply
cannot absorb it.
The
observation cuts to a core tension that has been building for months. As gold prices
pushed to successive all-time highs, retail traders who had long struggled to pass
evaluation challenges suddenly found themselves on the right side of a single,
powerful trend. For prop firms whose business model depends on a majority of
traders failing or churning out before reaching payout thresholds, that is a
significant problem.
Philip, who
spent several years as COO of Dominion Markets before founding Rhodium, said
the response from many firms has been blunt: simply removing gold from the list
of tradeable instruments. The same volatility that prompted some prop firms to delist the metal also forced liquidity providers to act, with Scope Prime widening spreads following CME margin rule changes.
“We’re
seeing owners make money real quick and they pull a rug on the whole on the
whole system,” he said.
You can
watch the full interview on YouTube. The article continues below the video:
2-5 New Prop Firms Opening
Every Week
The gold
issue does not exist in isolation. Philip pointed to a market that has grown
faster than its underlying infrastructure can support, with new entrants
flooding in at a pace that raises serious questions about long-term viability.
“There’s about two to five prop firms opening up almost every week,”
he said. That pace of entry, he argued, has produced a landscape where most
firms look identical, compete on price, and lack the operational depth to
survive a sustained payout cycle.
The prop firm
sector has faced growing scrutiny over its business model sustainability, particularly following a
string of high-profile closures and enforcement actions in 2024. Philip’s
comments suggest the stress has not abated. He described a pattern where firms
scale quickly on challenge fee revenue, encounter a wave of funded traders, and
then find themselves unable to honor the commitments that follow.
The volume
surge has been documented across the industry. easyMarkets
reported a 240% jump in gold trading during Q4 as volatility returned to the
market, a figure
that helps illustrate the scale of the trend Philip says most firms were not
positioned to absorb.
Rhodium, he
said, is trying to take a different route by designing its rules around
long-term trader behavior rather than optimizing for failure rates. “Our
rules… push traders to be a bit more consistent and long-term,” he said,
describing the goal as a “more long-term consistent successful
partnership” compared to what he characterized as industry norms.
Instant Funding Models
Under Fire
Philip was
particularly direct about instant funding challenges, a product format that has
gained popularity across the sector in recent years. He described them as a
mechanism built around exploiting trader impatience rather than identifying
genuine trading talent.
“These
instant funding challenges… it’s just a quick money-making scheme,” he
said. “It literally works on people’s greed… people want to get instant
funded. All they think about is I’m going to have the money right away, but
they don’t realize that these rules are so strict and so hard to actually get
that first payout.”
Instant
funding models became a major topic of debate within the industry after several firms that
heavily promoted the format ran into payout difficulties. Philip argued that
the format continues to attract new operators precisely because the revenue is
front-loaded and visible, while the liabilities arrive later and quietly.
Rhodium
does not offer instant funding. Philip said the firm has seen slower growth as
a result, but maintains that a two-step evaluation model with more lenient,
consistent rules will produce a more stable client base over time.
Pay-to-Play Reviews and
the Trust Problem
One of the
more pointed moments in the interview came when Philip addressed how traders
research and select prop firms. He said the review ecosystem that most traders
rely on is fundamentally compromised, claiming that rankings and ratings on
major comparison platforms largely reflect which firms have the biggest
marketing budgets rather than which firms actually pay out reliably. According
to Philip, it comes down to “who’s got the biggest pocket.”
This
creates a compounding problem for newer or smaller firms trying to compete on
quality rather than spending. Philip described the challenge of converting
experienced traders who have long relationships with established names, noting
that even if a newer firm offers better conditions, the trust gap is difficult
to bridge.
The question
of trader protection and review transparency has become a recurring concern across industry discussions,
particularly as a number of firms that carried strong review scores were later
found to have manipulated their ratings or withheld payouts.
Regulation Is Coming, but
Not Quickly
Philip
spoke at some length about the regulatory horizon for the prop trading sector,
offering a more measured view than the alarm that has characterized some
industry commentary. He said regulators are watching, but suggested they remain
genuinely uncertain about how the business model works.
“I do
think we have a bit more time, but a lot of these owners are making a lot of
red flags for these regulators,” he said, pointing to rug pulls and opaque
financial operations as the behaviors most likely to accelerate a regulatory
response.
He drew a
comparison to how ESMA’s leverage cap on European retail brokers played out,
noting that the rule, while defensible on trader protection grounds, pushed
many clients toward offshore providers offering higher leverage. The lesson he
drew was that regulation without a coordinated industry response often
reshuffles clients rather than protecting them.
The ESMA
leverage rules have had lasting effects on the European retail FX market, redirecting significant volumes to
less-regulated jurisdictions.
On the
United States specifically, Philip said Rhodium has made a deliberate decision
to stay out of the market entirely. “If America hunts you down as a
financial institute, they really hunt you down,” he said, referencing the
compliance risk posed by the Dodd-Frank Act. He warned that firms quietly
accepting US clients while building out their operations are creating a legal
liability that will surface the moment they try to legitimize or scale.
Background: From BlackBull
to Dominion to Rhodium
Philip’s
path to running a prop firm ran through the brokerage side of the industry. He
joined BlackBull Markets in 2018, worked through account management and market
analysis roles, and was later recruited by the owner of Dominion Markets to
build out the sales structure. He eventually rose to COO, handling operations
while the firm’s founder, known publicly as Raja, remained the outward face of
the business.
Dominion
Markets built a substantial following in the retail trading community, in part
through its educational content and the high-profile social media presence of
its founder. Philip described the firm’s pace as intense, reflecting the
founder’s background as a short-timeframe trader. He said the experience gave
him both the operational knowledge to run a financial company and a clearer
view of what traders actually need versus what most firms offer.
Rhodium FX,
which is based in Dubai, is positioning itself as a longer-term, more
institutionally structured alternative to the mainstream retail prop model.
Philip said the firm is also exploring connections to liquidity infrastructure
that would allow it to benefit directly from successful trader activity, rather
than operating on a pure challenge-fee model.
“You
have a lot of prop firms… not even allowing gold to be traded anymore,” that
is how Philip, co-founder and CEO of Rhodium FX, described what he says is a
growing structural problem quietly spreading across the retail prop trading
industry.
Speaking in
a Thentick podcast interview, he argued that the gold market’s record-breaking
run is doing something the industry never prepared for: making ordinary retail
traders consistently profitable, and the economics of many prop firms simply
cannot absorb it.
The
observation cuts to a core tension that has been building for months. As gold prices
pushed to successive all-time highs, retail traders who had long struggled to pass
evaluation challenges suddenly found themselves on the right side of a single,
powerful trend. For prop firms whose business model depends on a majority of
traders failing or churning out before reaching payout thresholds, that is a
significant problem.
Philip, who
spent several years as COO of Dominion Markets before founding Rhodium, said
the response from many firms has been blunt: simply removing gold from the list
of tradeable instruments. The same volatility that prompted some prop firms to delist the metal also forced liquidity providers to act, with Scope Prime widening spreads following CME margin rule changes.
“We’re
seeing owners make money real quick and they pull a rug on the whole on the
whole system,” he said.
You can
watch the full interview on YouTube. The article continues below the video:
2-5 New Prop Firms Opening
Every Week
The gold
issue does not exist in isolation. Philip pointed to a market that has grown
faster than its underlying infrastructure can support, with new entrants
flooding in at a pace that raises serious questions about long-term viability.
“There’s about two to five prop firms opening up almost every week,”
he said. That pace of entry, he argued, has produced a landscape where most
firms look identical, compete on price, and lack the operational depth to
survive a sustained payout cycle.
The prop firm
sector has faced growing scrutiny over its business model sustainability, particularly following a
string of high-profile closures and enforcement actions in 2024. Philip’s
comments suggest the stress has not abated. He described a pattern where firms
scale quickly on challenge fee revenue, encounter a wave of funded traders, and
then find themselves unable to honor the commitments that follow.
The volume
surge has been documented across the industry. easyMarkets
reported a 240% jump in gold trading during Q4 as volatility returned to the
market, a figure
that helps illustrate the scale of the trend Philip says most firms were not
positioned to absorb.
Rhodium, he
said, is trying to take a different route by designing its rules around
long-term trader behavior rather than optimizing for failure rates. “Our
rules… push traders to be a bit more consistent and long-term,” he said,
describing the goal as a “more long-term consistent successful
partnership” compared to what he characterized as industry norms.
Instant Funding Models
Under Fire
Philip was
particularly direct about instant funding challenges, a product format that has
gained popularity across the sector in recent years. He described them as a
mechanism built around exploiting trader impatience rather than identifying
genuine trading talent.
“These
instant funding challenges… it’s just a quick money-making scheme,” he
said. “It literally works on people’s greed… people want to get instant
funded. All they think about is I’m going to have the money right away, but
they don’t realize that these rules are so strict and so hard to actually get
that first payout.”
Instant
funding models became a major topic of debate within the industry after several firms that
heavily promoted the format ran into payout difficulties. Philip argued that
the format continues to attract new operators precisely because the revenue is
front-loaded and visible, while the liabilities arrive later and quietly.
Rhodium
does not offer instant funding. Philip said the firm has seen slower growth as
a result, but maintains that a two-step evaluation model with more lenient,
consistent rules will produce a more stable client base over time.
Pay-to-Play Reviews and
the Trust Problem
One of the
more pointed moments in the interview came when Philip addressed how traders
research and select prop firms. He said the review ecosystem that most traders
rely on is fundamentally compromised, claiming that rankings and ratings on
major comparison platforms largely reflect which firms have the biggest
marketing budgets rather than which firms actually pay out reliably. According
to Philip, it comes down to “who’s got the biggest pocket.”
This
creates a compounding problem for newer or smaller firms trying to compete on
quality rather than spending. Philip described the challenge of converting
experienced traders who have long relationships with established names, noting
that even if a newer firm offers better conditions, the trust gap is difficult
to bridge.
The question
of trader protection and review transparency has become a recurring concern across industry discussions,
particularly as a number of firms that carried strong review scores were later
found to have manipulated their ratings or withheld payouts.
Regulation Is Coming, but
Not Quickly
Philip
spoke at some length about the regulatory horizon for the prop trading sector,
offering a more measured view than the alarm that has characterized some
industry commentary. He said regulators are watching, but suggested they remain
genuinely uncertain about how the business model works.
“I do
think we have a bit more time, but a lot of these owners are making a lot of
red flags for these regulators,” he said, pointing to rug pulls and opaque
financial operations as the behaviors most likely to accelerate a regulatory
response.
He drew a
comparison to how ESMA’s leverage cap on European retail brokers played out,
noting that the rule, while defensible on trader protection grounds, pushed
many clients toward offshore providers offering higher leverage. The lesson he
drew was that regulation without a coordinated industry response often
reshuffles clients rather than protecting them.
The ESMA
leverage rules have had lasting effects on the European retail FX market, redirecting significant volumes to
less-regulated jurisdictions.
On the
United States specifically, Philip said Rhodium has made a deliberate decision
to stay out of the market entirely. “If America hunts you down as a
financial institute, they really hunt you down,” he said, referencing the
compliance risk posed by the Dodd-Frank Act. He warned that firms quietly
accepting US clients while building out their operations are creating a legal
liability that will surface the moment they try to legitimize or scale.
Background: From BlackBull
to Dominion to Rhodium
Philip’s
path to running a prop firm ran through the brokerage side of the industry. He
joined BlackBull Markets in 2018, worked through account management and market
analysis roles, and was later recruited by the owner of Dominion Markets to
build out the sales structure. He eventually rose to COO, handling operations
while the firm’s founder, known publicly as Raja, remained the outward face of
the business.
Dominion
Markets built a substantial following in the retail trading community, in part
through its educational content and the high-profile social media presence of
its founder. Philip described the firm’s pace as intense, reflecting the
founder’s background as a short-timeframe trader. He said the experience gave
him both the operational knowledge to run a financial company and a clearer
view of what traders actually need versus what most firms offer.
Rhodium FX,
which is based in Dubai, is positioning itself as a longer-term, more
institutionally structured alternative to the mainstream retail prop model.
Philip said the firm is also exploring connections to liquidity infrastructure
that would allow it to benefit directly from successful trader activity, rather
than operating on a pure challenge-fee model.
