Between January 2024 and early 2026 the prop trading industry lost somewhere between 80 and 100 firms, according to Finance Magnates Intelligence. Most of them disappeared without a headline. This page covers the closures we can document: what happened, when, why, and what it meant for traders who had money with them.
Confirmed closures
Listed oldest first. The tag on each entry separates firms that collapsed from firms that closed in an orderly way, because the difference matters to anyone deciding where to put money next.
My Forex Funds, run by Canada based Traders Global Group, was the largest retail prop firm in the world when the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a complaint against it on 29 August 2023. The complaint alleged fraudulent solicitation of more than $310 million from over 135,000 customers. Operations were frozen and never restarted.
What happened next matters, and most summaries get it wrong. On 13 May 2025 a US federal judge dismissed the CFTC case with prejudice. The dismissal was based on procedural misconduct by the CFTC rather than on the truth of the allegations, and several CFTC staff were placed on administrative leave. The firm was never found liable and was never cleared on the merits. Either way, customers who paid for evaluations before August 2023 did not get a resolution, and the prop business has not returned.
MetaQuotes terminated this Hungary based firm’s MT4 and MT5 licences on 2 February 2024 with no warning. Client funds sat idle for months while the firm tried to move to cTrader and Match-Trader. It had already been added to the CFTC RED List in June 2023, the first prop firm to be named there.
On 13 May 2024 it announced permanent closure and cited financial insolvency. Industry reporting put the damage at roughly 300 traders and about $1.2 million unpaid. That figure originated with a competing firm rather than an audit, so treat it as an estimate. True Forex Funds was the first big name to fall in the platform crackdown, and its collapse set the pattern for the rest of the year.
SurgeTrader stopped operating 11 days after True Forex Funds, caught in licensing disputes with MetaQuotes and Match-Trade at the same time. Losing both left it with no working trading platform and no way to serve funded accounts.
The closure was abrupt by the standards of that year. Traders reported being left without payouts. The lesson other firms took from it was that spreading across two platform providers is not diversification when the pressure on both comes from the same place.
Funded Engineer lost its technology licence in February 2024 when provider FPFX Technologies revoked it over fraud allegations, then lost its broker, Purple Trading, in the wider MetaQuotes crackdown. It spent five months trying to recover.
On 15 July 2024 it announced permanent closure and said it would file for bankruptcy. Its own statement told traders that outstanding claims would be handled through the bankruptcy process, which it said might take years to settle. That is the bleakest outcome on this page for anyone who was owed money.
Karma announced it was finished on 11 August 2024, a week after launching a new trading platform. The founder said a promised technology solution never arrived and had been draining money for four months, and that risk checks were not implemented correctly, so traders who should have failed were passing both evaluation phases.
The firm said this left it with no liquidity. It is a clean example of the model that killed a lot of small firms in 2024: evaluation fees funding payouts, with nothing in reserve when the numbers stopped working.
Funded Friends launched and closed inside the same year. It ceased operations in September 2024 and was acquired by competitor TradingFunds, which took on the assets.
An acquisition is a softer landing than an insolvency, but the brand stopped operating and traders had to deal with a different company than the one they signed up with.
Smart Prop Trader announced its wind down in November 2024 and stopped taking new traders straight away. Funded traders kept trading until 29 December 2024, which gave them time to hit targets and withdraw. Funded traders who were at break even or in profit in November were refunded in full, and a separate plan covered payouts for accounts still in good standing after the closing date.
This is the one closure on this page we would point to as done properly. Nobody was left guessing. It shows that a firm shutting down does not have to cost traders money, and that whether it does comes down to reserves and intent rather than bad luck.
Ascetic Capital launched on 28 November 2024 and shut down on 3 December, giving it a working life of five days. The founders said they made four sales in the first week, which broke the conditions of their investor agreement.
Their statement was unusually direct: they said they had misjudged the market and overestimated their ability to build what they had described. It is a small story but a useful one, because it shows how little capital some firms launch with.
In December 2025 FundingTicks brought in a one minute minimum hold time aimed at scalpers, raised profit targets and cut profit splits. Traders said the changes were applied to accounts they had already been trading, cancelling profits and completed evaluation stages they had already earned. Its Trustpilot rating fell from 4.1 in October 2025 to 3.2.
In January 2026 the firm announced it was winding down, describing it as a strategic decision to focus on other opportunities. Active evaluations and funded accounts were refunded in full regardless of profit or drawdown. This one was not caused by a platform or a regulator. The firm changed the deal after the fact and could not carry on once traders stopped believing it.
ForFX closed permanently in June 2026 and settled up before it went. Active challenge fees were refunded, pending withdrawals and funded account profits were paid, and the firm kept support running for a month after it stopped trading.
Its own site now serves a single page reading Service Closed, which is how we confirmed it. Alongside Smart Prop Trader, this is the second example on this page of a firm treating closure as something it owed its traders rather than something it did to them.
Left the prop business but still trading
MyFundedFX rebranded as SeacrestFunded in 2025 to sit alongside the Seacrest Markets brokerage. In February 2026 the company closed the prop side entirely and kept the CFD brokerage. All prop accounts and open positions were closed on 6 February 2026.
Traders holding active, unbreached evaluation accounts could claim a full refund of their fee, and funded traders could request a final payout, both with a deadline of 28 February 2026. Refunds were processed within 30 days of the request. Breached accounts and giveaway accounts were not eligible.
This is a different kind of closure to the rest of this page. The company did not run out of money. It decided a regulated brokerage was a better business than funding traders, which is a decision more firms have been making. Seacrest is still operating, just not as a prop firm.
Paused and never came back properly
The Funded Trader had more than 80,000 accounts and was one of the biggest names in forex prop trading. Complaints about denied payouts built through early 2024. In a live session that March the CEO said the firm had paid out $17 million in January and February while denying more than $2 million, attributing the denials to KYC checks, card fraud and prohibited strategies. Many traders disputed that.
On 28 March 2024 it paused all operations. Its broker Eightcap had withdrawn prop firm services at the end of February, creating a migration backlog it could not clear. The firm later moved to the Cayman Islands and restarted in part, reporting by August 2024 that it had processed a portion of what it owed.
We list it separately because calling it closed would be wrong. It exists. It has never returned to the scale it had, and a lot of traders holding denied payouts from early 2024 never got them.
What actually killed them
Four things, and they compounded. The first was MetaQuotes withdrawing MT4 and MT5 licences from prop firms starting in February 2024, mostly those serving US clients or operating without a proper broker relationship. MetaTrader’s share among prop firms fell from 48% to 24% within nine months. A firm whose entire product ran on a platform it did not own could lose its business in a single email.
The second was brokers pulling back. Eightcap stopped serving prop firms at the end of February 2024, which took out several firms at once because they had all been standing on the same floor.
The third was regulatory attention. The CFTC complaint against My Forex Funds in August 2023 was the first big action against a retail prop firm, and True Forex Funds had been added to the CFTC RED List two months before that. The industry went from ignored to watched, and firms operating in the grey ran out of room.
The fourth is the one that matters most for choosing a firm today. A lot of these businesses paid winning traders out of the fees paid by new ones. That works while sales grow. When the platform news frightened off new buyers in 2024, firms with no reserves could not cover payouts they already owed. Karma said so directly. Ascetic Capital could not survive four sales. This is why our scoring caps payout reliability for any firm with under twelve months of history, no matter how good its terms look on paper.
How to reduce your exposure
You cannot audit a prop firm’s balance sheet, so the useful moves are all about limiting what you stand to lose. Withdraw on every cycle you are entitled to. A balance sitting in a funded account belongs to the firm until it reaches your bank, and every collapse on this page proves the point.
Spread accounts across more than one firm rather than concentrating capital at whichever one has the best split this month. Check how many platforms and brokers a firm depends on, because single point failure is what did most of the damage in 2024. Read reviews from the last 60 days rather than the overall rating, since a firm in trouble looks fine on a lifetime average and bad on last month. Treat slow payouts as the warning they are, not as an admin delay.
Age helps too. Firms under 18 months old were hit hardest in 2024, which is not a criticism of new firms so much as a description of who has reserves.
Common questions
How many prop firms have shut down?
Finance Magnates Intelligence estimates that 80 to 100 prop firms ceased operations between January 2024 and the first quarter of 2026. A separate study by Brokeree Solutions tracked 82 firms through 2024 and found 71 still operating at the end of the year, which is roughly one in seven gone in twelve months. We list only the closures we can tie to a named source, so this page is shorter than the industry total and always will be.
What caused so many prop firms to close in 2024?
The trigger was MetaQuotes revoking MT4 and MT5 licences from prop firms in February 2024, followed by brokers such as Eightcap withdrawing services. Firms that had built everything on borrowed platform access had no way to trade. Underneath that was a business model problem: many firms used incoming evaluation fees to pay existing traders, so any interruption to sales made payouts impossible.
Do I get my money back when a prop firm shuts down?
Usually not. Most prop firms are not regulated as financial institutions, so there is no compensation scheme and no deposit protection. Some firms handle it properly. Smart Prop Trader refunded funded traders and kept paying until the closing date, and FundingTicks refunded evaluations and funded accounts in full. Others closed citing insolvency, and Funded Engineer told traders their claims would go through bankruptcy proceedings that could take years.
Was My Forex Funds proven to be a scam?
No, and it was not cleared either. The CFTC alleged fraud involving more than $310 million and over 135,000 customers in August 2023. In May 2025 a federal judge dismissed the case with prejudice because of procedural misconduct by the CFTC, not because the allegations were tested and found false. The question was never answered on the merits. What is certain is that the firm stopped operating in August 2023 and customers who had paid for evaluations did not get resolution.
How can I tell if a prop firm is about to close?
Payout delays are the first sign, because a firm short of cash slows withdrawals before it admits anything. After that, watch for rules changed retroactively so that profits already earned are cancelled, which is what happened at FundingTicks. Also check how many platforms and brokers the firm depends on, how long it has been operating, and whether recent reviews from the last 60 days differ from older ones. Firms under 18 months old were hit hardest in 2024.
Is a firm being on this page proof it did something wrong?
No. Businesses close for ordinary reasons. Seacrest closed its prop division because it decided brokerage was the better business, and refunded traders. Smart Prop Trader wound down while paying everyone. We separate how a firm closed from the fact that it closed, because those are different things and only one of them tells you anything about the people running it.