Turn cTrader into your prop firm’s growth engine
Those of you who keep up with the zeitgeist may be familiar with the looksmaxxing trend, where members of the zoomer generation go to extreme lengths to enhance their appearance. I am personally more into retardmaxxing myself, like Marc Andreesen, but that’s another story.
Looksmaxxers describe their journey as ascension. In the prop space, we have seen very few firms take the ascension journey over the last 12 months. One exception is Lucid Funding.
Last month Lucid purportedly got close to 9m(!) site visits, based on Similarweb data. This is a lot and was likely the highest traffic volume across the prop trading industry.
What is mysterious about this is most prop firms generate traffic via high levels of ad spend. But Lucid’s Google activity has been minimal or even non-existent.
If you look at the Google data, I cannot find the company having a registered entity that is running ads. Less than 70 ads have been set up to link to the main Lucid Trading URL. All of these appear to be run by scam affiliate advertisers, not marketing agencies.
On Meta, data for the company’s page lists no active or historical ads linking to Lucid Trading.
Maybe I am missing something but I don’t get how this is possible. Traffic from alternative ad vendors is obviously an option but it seems pointless. Why would you use something like Adsterra, when you have zero need to do it?
The company does sponsor the actor that played Malcolm from Malcolm in the Middle, so that’s…something, right? But probably not enough to get the traffic volume they have.
The company does also appear to be blasting the affiliate partnerships. If you Google the firm or search for it on any other social media platform, there are so many ‘talking heads’ saying how great the company is.
Unless I have missed a third-party agency running ads for the company, or they are using alternative ad networks, I cannot see any other way that they are getting money. Consequently, I think they are playing a strong affiliate game.
At the same time, rival US prop firm Topstep published an entire article comparing themselves to Lucid earlier this year. It’s hard to see why you would do this, unless you were afraid of the competition.
The other oddity of Lucid is that they claim on social media to have paid out $100m (and then say it is $60m on their website). This is in the space of about 12 months.
To draw a comparison, I would say Instant Funding is (1) a large firm and (2) really good at marketing. They may not be a fan of TradeInformer’s retardmaxxing down at Instant Funding HQ, but I like what they do.
More importantly, Instant Funding has paid out $18.2m in the space of about 3 years. So by comparison, what Lucid is doing seems not just exceptionally good, but exceptionally good in comparison to a firm that is already exceptionally good.
Perhaps another telling factor is ease of challenges. Similarweb data shows that one of the company’s main sources of traffic is an affiliate site – Iman Trading.
Their description of the firm notes that Lucid is…
“one of the cheapest/easiest combined paths to funding and payouts in the industry”.
“You will grow really fast while you look like an ATM,” said one industry executive, when we asked them about Lucid. “But when you decide you also want to make money, and can’t let everyone win any more, that’s when you lose your “customers”.”
Let’s see if the ascension continues.
More fixed odds
On the topic of Instant Funding, this week the company’s CEO posted on X about challenges that have…
- A fixed time frame
- A fixed pay out
The structure of the challenges he described resemble almost exactly those launched by Moneta Markets’ prop firm Moneta Funded earlier this week.
These are called “Sprint Challenges” and they are binary-esque. This is because they take place over a fixed period of time – say two hours – and the payout you get is fixed.
Moneta’s challenges appear to have been lifted directly from Eightcap’s Day Trader challenges, which follow the same structure.
You set a payout multiplier of your challenge fee, which represents your potential payout, and have to hit a profit target over a short period of time. That ranges from one hour to eight hours.
I am a fan of these as I think they fit with the gamified model of the industry and they also help prop firms manage risk more.
If Instant Funding is also looking at doing them, I wouldn’t be surprised if more follow.
