A prop place like Echotrade, Bright, Assent, etc makes most of their money on commissions. If you put up enough capital, you will keep 100% of your gains and be responsible for 100% of your losses. It's basically a retail account on steroids. You can do whatever you want and don't have to answer to anyone. If you want to use some serious overnight leverage, then you will have to convince or prove to a few people over a couple of months that your system is stable and that you aren't at risk of blowing through all your capital and then eating into theirs. 20:1 leverage on a system like yours wouldn't be that uncommon. I've held as many as 70 positions for weeks and months at a time leveraged 20, 30 or 40:1.
Haircut is like a risk or leverage premium that the firm will charge you. Prop firms cannot be leveraged more than 6.7:1 on all their overnight positions, firm wide. If you are over that amount, they will usually charge you haircut. For example, say you have $50k in your account and are holding $1M in positions. 50,000 * 6.7 = $335,000. 1M - 335k = $665k. If your haircut rate is 15%, then you'd pay about $277/day in haircut (665,000 * .15 / 360) Haircut is a negotiable rate and some firms don't charge it at all. You pay interest on the full amount of leverage you are using also, around 3-4% at today's rates.
Your situation sounds like one that is ideal for a prop firm. All you have to be aware of is the drawdowns on the fully leveraged amount, because they come right out of your capital and a few bad days or weeks can knock you out if you aren't careful. A 5% drawdown on a million dollars and your $50k account is all gone. But I'm sure you already knew that.
