Reserves are the wrong test. Every prop firm at the point of failure had reserves. The right test is a checklist of structural commitments, publicly made, that are immediately verifiable and enormous to break. Here are the four Capital Mint Markets is making from today.
On Sunday, Alpha Futures announced the wind-down of its Premium Plan and the closure of all active Premium accounts. Refunds are being issued. Pending payouts on the Premium Plan — beyond the $25 million already paid — are being cancelled. The firm has attributed the decision to a partnership termination with NinjaTrader and Tradovate, effective 12 July, which restricted their ability to issue new accounts on that platform. I have read Alpha's announcement carefully. It is worth quoting the firm's own words back.
"We paid out more than $25m on this plan alone over the last two months, and at a significant loss."
"We were making tweaks to try to continue to offer this plan sustainably…"
"We made a mistake launching a plan we thought would be great, and unfortunately it was not."
Every trader reading Alpha's statement this weekend has already worked out what the statement is not saying. Partnership terminations do not, on their own, force firms to refund customers and cancel pending payouts. Unsustainable payout economics do. The NinjaTrader termination is, by Alpha's own account, a two-way business decision that was not the outcome either party wanted. The refund-and-close decision on the Premium Plan is a different decision, driven by different pressures, and made necessary by different arithmetic.
The Premium Plan was a loss-leader product priced below its own cost curve. It was popular precisely because it was cheap. It attracted traders whose payout expectations exceeded what the plan's economics could sustain. When the losses mounted, the firm tried to close the gap through rule tweaks. When the rule tweaks did not close the gap fast enough, and when a platform termination made the situation operationally harder, the firm concluded that continuing the plan would accelerate losses to a point they could no longer absorb.
This is a specific commercial pattern I have watched, in fifteen years of financial services regulatory work, in every consumer financial product where the launch pricing was not economically supportable. The pattern always ends the same way — either with a quiet product wind-down accompanied by a face-saving corporate narrative, or with a regulator forcing the wind-down after the losses have become uncontainable. Alpha, to their credit, made the decision themselves before it became unavoidable.
The pattern is predictable — and was predicted
Over the last two months, Capital Mint Markets has published two articles that described this exact pattern. The first, in June, was titled Why Prop Firms Fail — And the Ones That Don't. It set out the specific commercial dynamics that make certain prop firm business models structurally unsustainable, and named MyForexFunds and True Forex Funds as the two most recent examples of the pattern.
The second, published four days ago, was our analysis of the FundingTicks wind-down. That piece argued that FundingTicks was not the last firm that would wind down in 2026 — it was the first meaningful one in a wave that had been building for eighteen months. Three forces, we argued, were reshaping prop firm economics simultaneously: the shift from paid advertising to partner-driven acquisition, the shift of US prop firms inside the CFTC perimeter, and the geographic concentration of the industry in Dubai. Any firm operating without a plan for all three, we said, was on the same trajectory FundingTicks had followed.
I am not writing this to point out that we were right. Being right about industry failure is not, in itself, a comfort to any trader affected by Alpha's decision this weekend. Being right is only useful if it enables us to say something more useful about what happens next.
What happens next is that the trader community — reasonably — is going to spend the next several weeks asking every prop firm they use, or are considering using, the same question. Which is: what specifically prevents you from doing what Alpha just did?
That question is difficult to answer well, and most firms in the sector are going to answer it badly. Some will attack Alpha — a bad look, and one that misses the point. Some will make sweeping promises about their own reserves. Some will go quiet and hope the news cycle moves on. None of these responses answer the trader's question. The trader is not asking "are you better than Alpha." The trader is asking what structural features of your business make it impossible for you to do to me what Alpha just did to its Premium Plan users. That is the right question. And it deserves a serious answer.
Why "show us your reserves" is not the answer
Before I get to what we are committing to publicly this week, I want to be direct about something that is not a solution.
The trader community will, understandably, ask prop firms to prove their solvency by showing reserves. This is an intuitive request and it will not solve the trust problem. Alpha almost certainly had reserves. Every prop firm at the point of failure had reserves. The question is never how much a firm has on the balance sheet at a single point in time — the question is whether the firm's ongoing payout obligations exceed its ongoing revenue, and whether the reserves are large enough to absorb the gap for long enough to change the business model. Alpha's public statement makes clear their reserves were not.
There is a second reason "show us your reserves" is not the right test. A single reserve disclosure, at a single point in time, is not a durable commitment — it is a snapshot. The reserves the firm shows on Monday can be depleted by Friday. Traders need to know what the firm is committed to doing in specific future scenarios, not what its bank balance looks like today.
The right test is structural. It is a checklist of specific commitments that a firm publicly makes, that are immediately verifiable, and that are enormous to break. This is how regulated financial services build trust with clients.
It is the same principle underlying the FCA's Consumer Duty in the United Kingdom, MiFID II's product governance rules in Europe, and the CFTC's fit-and-proper obligations for senior management in the United States. It is the framework I spent fifteen years advising banks, brokerages, and exchanges on. Reserves are not the test. Named accountability, transparent rule-change protocols, published wind-down procedures, and ongoing operational transparency backed by independent recourse — those are the tests.
I am setting out four specific commitments Capital Mint Markets is making publicly this week. The list is not exhaustive, and it is not a claim that we are the only firm in the sector making these commitments. It is a claim that these are the specific commitments every trader should now demand of every prop firm they consider — before spending any money.
The four commitments
Commitment 01
Named personal accountability
I am the founder and CEO of Capital Mint Markets. My name is Sadia Siddique. I have fifteen years of financial services regulatory practice — advising banks, brokerages, and exchanges across capital markets. My LinkedIn profile is public. My regulatory background is verifiable. My photograph is on our About page. My name is on our trade licence.
If Capital Mint Markets fails to honour any of the commitments in this note, there is a specific individual — not a corporate entity — who is publicly answerable. That individual is me.
Contrast this with the current state of much of the sector. Whose photograph is on the Alpha announcement statement? Whose regulatory practice is verifiable? Whose name is on the trade licence? This is not a criticism specific to Alpha — it is the standard state of the sector. Named leadership with verifiable professional histories, personally accountable for the firm's conduct, should be the minimum, not the exception. Traders should ask this question of every firm they consider. If the answer is "we don't publish that information," that answer is itself the answer.
Commitment 02
The 15-day rule change protocol
Capital Mint Markets commits, publicly and from today, that any change to the rules under which a trader's account operates will be announced with a minimum of 15 days advance notice, and — critically — will not apply retroactively to accounts opened under the prior rules. Accounts opened under existing rules keep those rules for the life of the account.
This is the single most important structural commitment a prop firm can make, and it is the commitment most obviously violated in the pre-collapse period of every failed firm in the sector. Rule changes in the run-up to a wind-down — sudden increases to profit targets, sudden decreases to profit splits, sudden introductions of minimum trade holding times — are the mechanism through which firms attempt to close a loss gap by narrowing the population of traders who can profit on the platform. Traders notice, publicly complain, and the firm's reputation deteriorates faster than the economics can be repaired.
The 15-day notice period is a small cost to the firm and an enormous protection to the trader. It means that no trader is ever caught by a rule change they could not plan for. And the no-retroactive-application principle means that a trader who signs up under specific rules cannot have those rules altered mid-account without their knowledge and consent.
Commitment 03
The wind-down protocol
Capital Mint Markets commits, publicly and from today, to the following wind-down protocol. This is not a promise that the firm will never wind down — that is not a promise any honest prop firm can make. It is a promise about exactly what happens to trader money and trader accounts if we do.
Payment priorities. In any wind-down scenario, the following order applies without exception:
→ Pending payouts owed to funded traders are honoured first, before any refunds are issued to challenge or evaluation accounts.
→ Refunds to challenge and evaluation accounts are prioritised by account age, oldest first.
→ Any funds remaining after all trader obligations are met go to creditors, and to shareholders, last.
Timeline commitments. From the day of any wind-down announcement:
→ Day 0: wind-down announced publicly.
→ Days 1–60: all funded accounts receive a 60-day window to complete any pending payout cycle already in progress.
→ Days 30–90: all approved payouts processed in order.
→ Days 60–180: refunds to challenge and evaluation accounts issued, oldest first.
→ Day 180: process complete.
Communication during wind-down. Weekly public status updates on the website. Direct email to every affected trader within 48 hours of the announcement. Named CEO — me — as the point of contact, personally, throughout. No anonymous corporate statements. No hiding behind PR.
The anti-extraction commitment — my personal undertaking. I commit personally, as CEO, that any funds paid to directors, shareholders, or related parties in the 60 days before a wind-down announcement will be returned to the trader payout pool. This addresses directly the fear every trader has about every prop firm: that the directors quietly drain cash out of the business in the run-up to a collapse. If Capital Mint Markets ever winds down, and I have taken cash out of the business in the 60 days before, that money comes back into the pool that pays traders. My name is on this specific commitment. It is not a corporate promise. It is a personal one, made by me, publicly, from today.
Contrast this whole protocol with the Alpha announcement, in which refunds have been issued to Premium Plan accounts and pending Premium Plan payouts beyond the $25 million already paid have been cancelled. That is the reverse of what a serious wind-down protocol requires. The customer whose payout is next in the queue is the customer with the strongest claim on the firm's remaining resources. Refunding challenge fees ahead of honouring outstanding payouts is a decision made in the interests of the firm's cash flow, not the interests of the trader.
The wind-down protocol we are publishing today is not a promise that Capital Mint Markets will not fail. It is a promise about what the trader receives if we do. It is the promise that any regulated financial services firm makes to its clients, published voluntarily by an unregulated one because the underlying principle is right regardless of the regulatory environment.
Commitment 04
Operational transparency and independent recourse
Capital Mint Markets commits, publicly and from today, to three ongoing operational disciplines that produce external, verifiable accountability without relying on any single legal document or reserve disclosure. Each is measurable. Each either happens or does not. Each is immediately visible to every trader on the platform.
Same-day payout SLA with published performance data. All payout requests from KYC-verified funded accounts will be processed on the same business day as approval. From the end of July, we will publish monthly performance data on our website — total payouts processed, percentage meeting the same-day SLA, and average processing time from approval to funds sent. This is measurable, it is verifiable, and every month it either meets the standard or it does not.
14-day grievance resolution SLA. Any complaint raised through our published grievance mechanism will be acknowledged within 24 hours and either resolved or formally escalated within 14 days. Monthly reporting on complaints received, complaints resolved, and average resolution time will be published on the same page as the payout data. A firm that has nothing to hide publishes this information routinely. A firm that has something to hide does not.
Independent community ombudsman. Within the next 60 days, Capital Mint Markets will appoint an independent third party — an industry figure or respected trader with a verifiable public professional history — to review any disputed payout that a trader believes has been handled incorrectly. The ombudsman's decisions will be published. This is not a substitute for regulatory oversight, which we do not hold. It is a form of voluntary third-party accountability that costs the firm nothing but the discipline of accepting external review by someone who does not answer to us.
Together, these three commitments produce the signal a legal opinion letter would provide — third-party verifiability, ongoing, immediately checkable — through operational discipline rather than a one-off document. They cost the firm nothing except the discipline of doing what it says it will do. They are enormous to break, because breaking any of them is visible to every trader on the platform the moment it happens.
What this note is not
I want to be clear about the boundaries of these commitments.
They do not guarantee that Capital Mint Markets will still be operating in five years. That will be measured, not promised. Any prop firm that guarantees perpetual solvency in a sector that has seen MyForexFunds, True Forex Funds, FundingTicks, and now Alpha Futures wind down products in eighteen months is not being honest with its traders.
They do not include a reserve disclosure or a solvency guarantee. Those are the wrong tests, as I set out above. They are the tests traders have been asking for. They are not the tests that actually protect traders. The tests that protect traders are the structural commitments set out here.
They do not claim moral superiority over Alpha Futures or any other firm in the sector. Alpha built a leading futures firm that paid out more than $200 million to traders over two years. That achievement is real and it is not erased by this weekend's decision. My criticism is of a specific pattern — the launch of a loss-leader product priced below its own cost curve — that Alpha explicitly acknowledged was a mistake. The four commitments I have set out here are precisely designed to make that specific pattern impossible at Capital Mint Markets.
Closing
To the traders affected by Alpha's decision this weekend: I am sorry that this has happened to you. Some of you are owed money on the Premium Plan that will not now be paid. All of you have lost time, effort, and belief in a firm you trusted. That is a serious thing, and no amount of industry commentary from a competitor firm changes it.
To the wider trader community: if you take one thing from this note, take this. The question you should be asking every prop firm you consider — not just today but every week for the next year — is not "how much money do you have in reserves?" It is: what specific structural commitments have you made publicly that would make it impossible for you to do to me what Alpha just did? Ask that question. Get answers in writing. Prefer firms that answer with specific commitments over firms that answer with general reassurances.
To the industry: this pattern will continue. Alpha will not be the last. The firms that survive this wave of consolidation will be the firms whose structural commitments made them impossible to sacrifice quietly, and the firms whose leadership was named and personally accountable. The firms that do not survive will be the firms whose economics were structured for a different environment, and whose leadership was diffuse enough to be blamed collectively rather than personally.
Capital Mint Markets is committing to the four structural features set out in this note, publicly, from today. My name is on this. My LinkedIn is public. My regulatory practice is checkable. If Capital Mint Markets fails to honour any of these commitments, you know exactly who to hold responsible.
That is what prop firm trust actually looks like.
Sadia Siddique
Founder & CEO, Capital Mint Markets · Tuesday 14 July 2026
