How did the common consumer realize the power of business machines for personal use? Apple's first computers were built in a small garage in Cupertino, California in 1976.
How did the ease and efficiency of online shopping become the standard? Jeff Bezos held meetings at a nearby Barnes & Noble, and, in 1995, launched Amazon and sold his first book from his garage startup.
The business world is wrought with stories of household brands coming together from humble beginnings to solve a problem. The SurgeTrader origin story isn’t all that different.
So, an FX broker, an institutional trader, and a venture capitalist walk into a sushi bar… We’ll spare you the punchline, but the discussion, as it often does, turned to the markets and then to business and, finally, a conversation around why most speculative retail traders fail.
The short answer… undercapitalization. The reality is that many retail traders feel the need to overleverage trading accounts to make a meaningful return for the time invested. A 30% return in your retirement portfolio is a spectacular result — and it’s passive. But a 30% return on a small $5,000 trading account is just $125 per month – and it takes countless hours behind the screen to achieve.
So, what happens to traders? They resort to usual pitfalls, like using massive leverage — as high as 500:1 — and chasing returns by overtrading. While this can allow the trader to make an outsized return on investment, it leaves almost no room to take losses and avoid margin calls.
Enter SurgeTrader… The company sought to answer the question: How can we harness the talent of good traders and put them into a position to succeed at trading for a living?
It’s not with gimmicky strategies or guarantees of a holy-grail algorithm. It’s capital. If they can identify traders that possess a talent for navigating the markets and exhibiting sound risk management, the only missing piece is enough capital to keep them from common bad habits like overtrading.
Profitable retail traders don’t just arrive at profitability overnight. Like professional athletes we see on game day, they’ve been disciplined. They’ve put in the behind-the-scenes work researching the markets, testing strategies, retesting, and reevaluating — and they’ve probably blown an account or two along the way. All of that to arrive to a place where they can claim consistent returns on their trading skills.
The final ingredient for a profitable retail trader to realize big returns is capital. You can’t go into battle with an ice pick. SurgeTrader solves that problem with an elegant and powerful solution — a funded trader program that stands above other prop firm offerings with a few monumental differentiators. More on that in a moment.
But first, a brief explanation of how the SurgeTrader program works is in order…
Traders take a one-step Audition, and once they achieve a 10% profit target in a demo account without breaching the drawdown, they receive a funded account — up to $1 million. Thereafter, they keep up to 90% of profits. It’s that simple.
There are nuances of the program, though, that give traders a huge advantage over other prop firm program offerings. As experienced market participants, SurgeTrader’s founders identified the drawbacks of other funded trader programs and decided to do things a bit differently.
When you graduate to a funded account, it’s funded with real money — thus aligning the interests of the trader and the firm
Some of the most well-known prop firms do not fund accounts with actual capital. Once traders pass their challenge, they are still on a demo account with fake money, and the firm only pays out the winners.
Their interests are not aligned. If a trader passes and receives a payout, that’s a loss on the P/L sheet, and a sad day for the prop firm. Thus, they look to profit from the failure of traders by creating programs with complicated rules and stringent time restrictions.
Not SurgeTrader. They stand by their traders with their own money. When a trader passes the Audition, gets funded and withdraws a fat profit payout, the Surge team celebrates with them. By funding accounts with real money, when a trader wins, everyone wins. Live funding is a bedrock of the SurgeTrader offering.
SurgeTrader built the program as a one-step process with simple rules
Most funded trader programs feature a multi-phase evaluation process. Traders succeed, only to have to do it all over again to receive a funded account. Not only that, but other programs often feature a complex set of trading rules designed to minimize the number of successful, profitable traders.
SurgeTrader founders saw what was happening and flipped it on its head. The SurgeTrader program features a one-step Audition with just a few clear, straightforward trading rules. The company stands by the premise that the process should be simple and easy to understand. Traders shouldn’t need a magnifying glass to read tons of small print, searching for gotchas.
There are no time limits on the SurgeTrader Audition
Nowhere else in the prop firm landscape can a retail trader register for an evaluation, pass through to a funded account with a single trade, and take a profit withdrawal — in the same day.
Many prop firms mandate that traders comply with a laundry list of demands to qualify. They must, for example, trade for at least ten days and pass within thirty days, while making a minimum of fifteen trades.
At SurgeTrader, retail traders can pass the Audition at their own pace — whether that’s in 30 minutes or 30 months. (And it’s not entirely uncommon for a trader to pass and get funded in less than a day.) With SurgeTrader, it’s simple. Traders can take all the time that their strategy needs to be profitable.
SurgeTrader offers the best trader support in the business
Zappos founder Tony Hsieh famously said, “Customer service shouldn’t be a department. It should be the entire company.” It’s a philosophy that the entire SurgeTrader team espouses. The firm has poured enormous resources into the customer service function and evangelized the core service message.
The breadth of service goes above and beyond competitors. Traders can speak to a live person and ask questions by phone, chat or email, nearly around the clock. Traders often report long response times to their inquiries with other prop firms. Traders, by nature, operate on quick timelines and need answers fast — and SurgeTrader delivers on that need.
Ultimately, successfully trading the markets presents people across the globe with a life of freedom and flexibility — if they are properly capitalized. The SurgeTrader program was born in that sushi bar to accelerate trader funding and offer the opportunity for traders to change their lives — to be a part of something meaningful and lucrative.
Backed by venture capital and developed by experienced market professionals, the SurgeTrader program landed on a win-win model and an incredible opportunity for traders the world over.
