Emerging Financial Products
For the operators of funded-trader programs, trading platforms, signal networks, strategy tools and other new financial products.
The questions every platform’s documents have to answer.
Funded-trader programs, strategy tools and signal networks each have to answer whose money is at risk, what the fee is for and who has discretion over whose account. We build the documents so those answers are settled at launch.
We build the complete legal suite for funded-trader platforms, structure multi-product trading groups onshore and offshore, and act for quantitative signal networks in their agreements with the managers who trade on them.
The work is often a single document, like a terms-of-service refresh before a new product tier or a market data license up for renewal. Users, venues and payment processors read those documents first.
Platforms, networks and the groups behind them.
Complete legal suite for a funded-trader proprietary trading platform: evaluation and challenge terms of service, trader independent-contractor agreements, payout framework, a unified privacy policy across affiliated brands, and shared-services arrangements.
Asset-management platform agreement and trading and clearing agreements for a quantitative trading network.
Offshore restructuring of a trading-services business through Cayman and British Virgin Islands vehicles, coordinated with offshore counsel.
The full list for this practice is on the Selected Work page.
The funded-trader suite.
A funded-trader platform runs on a small set of documents that together show whether it is a software business or a regulated one. Each build starts from a document set already in use at live platforms.
What is in it
- Challenge and evaluation terms of service
- Trader independent-contractor agreement
- Payout framework and the account rules it depends on
- Privacy policy and policy set across affiliated brands
- Shared-services and intercompany arrangements
- Market data license review
How it runs
- Product session: fee, account type, payout formula, venue and brands, mapped in one sitting.
- Perimeter memo: what the design implies and the drafting choices that follow from it.
- Full draft set, built to the memo.
- Revision rounds with the product and payments teams.
- Launch: policies live, agreements in the sign-up flow, payout mechanics tested against the terms.
Timetable
Stated on the first call
A platform with one product and one venue takes weeks, not a quarter.
Fee
Fixed for the suite
Quoted on the first call. The perimeter analysis for a new product type is scoped separately, with regulatory counsel where a product touches commodity interests or securities.
Every document is built from the platform’s actual account rules, payout formula and brands. A written statement of the suite’s scope is available on request.
Networks, strategy tools and data.
Around the platforms sit the products that feed them: signal networks whose strategies third parties trade, strategy-building tools and the market data licenses behind every live price on the screen. These agreements decide who owns the signal, who is advising whom and what the platform pays per user for data, and they are usually written last.
- Asset-management platform agreements and trading and clearing agreements for signal networks
- Terms of service and license architecture for strategy-building products
- Participant and contributor program terms
- Market data license agreements and redistribution terms
- Venue, referral and integration agreements
- Ownership and portability of strategies, signals and training data
Structure: entities, offshore vehicles and payments.
A trading business that grows past one product should not keep every product in one entity. We structure the group: companies in the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands where the operating business belongs offshore, and onshore corporations where investors, banks and payment processors need one. We say up front which problems offshore structuring solves.
- Onshore and offshore entity formation for multi-product trading groups
- Development, shared-services and intellectual-property assignment agreements
- Intercompany licenses and fee arrangements
- Payment-processor, banking and vendor agreements
- Restructurings that move products between entities
- Constitutional documents for offshore vehicles, with offshore counsel
How this work usually begins.
A challenge program running on a terms-of-service page that was written before the first payout.
A platform adding a second product, such as a strategy tool, a new brand or a live-venue integration, that does not fit the entity or the documents of the first.
A payout formula the founders can explain and the contract cannot.
A network whose participants’ signals are about to be acted on by third parties.
An offshore services company that now needs a United States entity to bank, process payments or raise.
If yours starts somewhere else, it is still worth a conversation.
What the matters taught us.
How the Regulatory Perimeter Shapes a Funded-Trader Agreement
In preparationWhat each piece argues is on the Writing page.
Show us the payout formula.
The fee, the account, the payout and the venue tell us most of what the documents have to say and which entity should sign them. Bring them to the first call, whether the platform is live or still in build.