so yesterday the CEO of Apex Trader Funding sent out an email basically saying he recognized where they had fucked up and they refuse to accept it and they are doubling down on doing better basically. at first glance, they seem sincere. i havent requested a payout in a while so i cant personally vouch but apparently they recognize that the turnaround time for getting payouts processed was problematic and although they cant really nail it down as a baseline expectation, they have hired on enough people to process them fast, like within 72 hours of requesting them fast. my fingers are crossed.

also i havent seen any of the dramas we had a few months back with slow data feeds / phantom orders lately. like really they have been rock solid. so clearly its not all talk and they managed to solve whatever that was.

and thats good news for all of us.

but theres an interesting rumor percolating on the sosh that a major shakeup is coming in the form of a hedge fund thats taken a hard look at the success of apex et all and has decided that there is money being left on the table. simply put; they want to start their own retail prop firm. and they are going to take a page from apex's own book when they do it.

remember that apex's lore is that the CEO created it because he saw that the other retail prop firms were simply too scammy and manipulative. he basically stripped away half of the pain in the ass restrictions and trusted that he could return a profit. apex let people trade more accounts, knocked the price of each account down considerably via promotions / sales, but also implemented some very casino-esque tactics to keep people at the table so to speak and apply psychological pressure via trailing drawdowns and such. and it worked, they made millions and millions and millions of dollars.

now whats interesting about this hedge fund rumor is that they want to drink apex's milkshake and they have the money to do so. the rumor is they are going to roll out a retail prop platform that severely diminishes or outright eliminates all the little pressure games apex relied on to low-key encourage people to blow up accounts.

so for example.. if these guys took a page from topstep traders book and eliminated the dreaded trailing drawdown and then said hey if you trade your account for 5 days, you can have money in your bank account on the 6th business day... they would make less money per client than apex but would probably take 90% of apex's clients (and everyone elses clients) within a month.

in fact, its likely they could put just about everyone out of business effectively except perhaps topstep themselves.

anyway its an interesting rumor because frankly it makes sense. apex spent millions and millions of dollars on sketchy shit like youtube shills and other really questionable marketing plays that probably made a lot of sense to people who make money in the online marketing world. but apex got their marketing budget by drinking leeloos, topstep, oneup, etc's milkshakes because they offered a better product essentially.

so yeah the notion that a hedge fund could see the value in going after apex's market share is pretty fucking compelling.

if i was apex id stop spending money on influencers, id fire half my marketing team, and id take all that money and invest it in shrinking whatever gap exists between people making money and actually being able to get paid out. offer accounts without trailing drawdowns maybe. and charge more for everything up front, rake cashouts more aggressively, but keep people paid, make that the goal.

anyway we shall see how this all shakes out.