Their seems to be some confusion between how the term "proprietary trading" is used on the rest of wall street and how it is used in the "prop" equity trading business. The traditional definition of prop trading is trading the firms money for a share of the profits. Schonfeld, for example, is by that definition a true proprietary firm. Other firms, such as Bright and much of Asent and Karlin define proprietary as a licensed trader using firm capital to avoid Reg T, even though the trader assumes his own risk by way of a deposit and might well receive 100% of his profits. I coined the term "psudo-prop" to refer to those kind of firms.
