# Trust and risk — The Prop Standard

> Who you are handing your money to: registration, regulation, rule-change history and what happens when a firm closes.

**Source:** https://thepropstandard.com/guides/trust-and-risk  
**Publisher:** The Prop Standard — independent analysis of the prop trading industry  
**Byline:** Editorial Team

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## What this guide covers

How to check a firm before paying it. Where evaluation firms sit relative to financial regulation and what protection does and does not exist, the clauses in the terms that decide whether a payout is honoured, what a traffic trend does and does not tell you about a firm’s health, KYC and country restrictions, prohibited strategies, and what recourse a trader has when a firm shuts down.

## Published in this guide

- [FundedNext vs Industry Standards: 2026 Deep-Dive Analysis](https://thepropstandard.com/article/fundednext-vs-industry-standards-2026-analysis) — FundedNext offers a broad product catalog and fast payouts, but its entry-level 70% profit split on Stellar Instant falls below the 80% industry standard. This analysis weighs every challenge model against current market benchmarks. _(2026-09-11)_
- [Alpha Capital Group vs Industry Standards: 2026 Deep Dive](https://thepropstandard.com/article/alpha-capital-group-vs-industry-standards-2026) — Alpha Capital offers eight distinct evaluation paths with 80% standard splits (90% on Direct) across five platforms. This analysis measures every dimension against 2026 market norms. _(2026-08-17)_
- [AT Funded: Comprehensive Evaluation Against Industry Standards](https://thepropstandard.com/article/at-funded-analysis) — This analysis provides a detailed comparison of AT Funded's offerings against broader industry standards, focusing on profit splits, evaluation models, and more. _(2026-07-11)_

## The other guides

- [Passing evaluations](https://thepropstandard.com/guides/passing-evaluations) — The mechanics of getting funded and staying funded: the rule types that end accounts, and which one bites first.
- [Money and taxes](https://thepropstandard.com/guides/money-and-taxes) — Fees, splits, payouts and filings — what a funded account actually pays, and what it costs to get there.
- [Platforms and futures](https://thepropstandard.com/guides/platforms-and-futures) — The execution layer: MT4 and MT5, TradingView, NinjaTrader and Tradovate, and how futures evaluations differ.
- [Trader psychology and process](https://thepropstandard.com/guides/psychology-and-process) — The part that is not the rules: sizing risk against a limit you do not control, and the habits that survive it.