Proprietary Trading Firms

Proprietary Trading Firm- "Prop firm" has become a loosely defined term. With the onset of high frequency trading and high computing power, Proprietary Trading Firm originally referred to a trading company employing a proprietary trading method.

Increasingly, these methods were quickly becoming algo driven and automated. Even more so with the onset of HFT.

After the financial crisis, and to offset the notion of the "robber-baron" rich trader responsible for all the ills of the financial system, the names changed a bit. "Hedge fund" supplanted "trading," because it seemed more moral.

A prop firm also came to mean a group of traders who tried to get young people to urge their parents to take an equity loan on the house to fund their trading. The money was then pooled and leveraged, to the disaster of many involved.

The semantics have wiggled a bit into names like "quant" and "capital markets." But proprietary trading is alive and well. See below for info and links to probably one of the most comprehensive lists of proprietary trading firms around.