City Traders Imperium (CTI) is calling on the proprietary trading industry to agree on a clear, shared definition of trader success, arguing that mix of pass rates, payouts, and consistency rules leaves traders and firms working from mismatched expectations. Pass a challenge. Survive 90 days. Reach a payout threshold. Graduate to a bigger account. All of these get called success, often by the same firm, and none of them measure the same thing. Traders often discover which definition applies to them only after paying for an evaluation.

"Ask ten firms what a successful trader looks like and you'll get ten different answers," said Martin Najat, Co-Founder of City Traders Imperium. "That means traders are choosing firms without knowing what they're being measured against."

The gap between attempting and succeeding is wide. Independent data covering over 300,000 funded accounts found that 14 percent of traders pass their challenge, but only 7 percent of all traders ever go on to receive a payout. Figures like these get cited constantly, with little agreement on what they measure.

Regulators have started circling the same gap from another angle. Authorities in Italy, Belgium, and the Czech Republic have separately raised concerns that evaluation challenges may be designed more to generate repeat attempts than to genuinely assess trading skill .

Part of the confusion comes from how performance gets measured once a trader is funded. Consistency rules, which cap how much profit can come from a single day, are meant to filter out lucky one-off trades, but the threshold varies firm to firm. CTI believes this lack of a shared standard hurts both sides: traders cannot judge whether their progress is on track, and firms struggle to show their funded population genuinely trades well.

"We're not trying to dictate what success looks like industry-wide," Najat added. "But that conversation needs to happen in the open, with real numbers, instead of every firm quietly defining it to suit its marketing."

CTI is proposing the industry move toward benchmarks built on sustained performance, such as drawdown discipline and payout consistency across cycles, rather than a single pass-or-fail moment. It is a slower, less marketable story than a headline pass rate, but the only one that protects traders from misaligned expectations.

As scrutiny of the prop trading model grows, CTI expects what counts as success to move from a marketing detail to a defining industry issue, one firms answering with evidence stand to win the most trust from.