Meet The Disruptors: Angelo Ciaramello Of The Funded Trader On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Anyone that is working towards a goal can be considered a success.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Angelo Ciaramello of The Funded Trader, a proprietary trading firm, that’s gamified trading. The company works with experienced traders and allows them to purchase a challenge to display their profitability. The company includes an evaluation, and if they are able to pass, The Funded Trader will fund them up to $600k. The company has some traders making upwards of $100k in a single month, and they’ve paid out over $10 million in the past year.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

At 21, I found myself tired, burnt out and lacking the clarity to see the vision of what my future would be. I was finishing up an internship at my university, and realized I needed to prioritize my own well-being first in order to shape what my future would include. Upon graduating college, instead of taking a job like every other college student, I took 1 year off focusing solely on working out, doing yoga, reading books and finding the niche that he would be passionate enough about to build a business. In the 12 months to follow, I became certified in kettlebell training, read 50 books, and discovered the niche of retail trading. It was not all roses from there, as I needed to get a job in order to pay the bills and decided to start driving uber.

Upon meeting a sales rep while driving uber, I got my first job as a sales development representative for a shipping company. This is where I learned the foundations of email marketing and sales which would later be an asset to me in building his social media company.

Fast forward to 2021, I left my job in corporate America with one goal, to gamify the retail prop trading industry. In less than 12 months the company has paid out over $10 million dollars to retail traders across the world and I’ve gone from an entry level IT role to becoming a millionaire.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

The Funded Trader is disruptive because we’re leveling the playing field when it comes to retail traders approaching the market. Too often, traders fall victim to undercapitalization, which leads them to take big risks and ultimately fail. By providing traders with capital, we are solving this problem and empowering traders to take a professional approach to trading the financial markets.

We have turned the retail trading industry into a true meritocracy where anyone with the necessary talent and discipline can make it.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of the largest mistakes I made when we first started was related to trading. Looking back on it, it was comical but at the moment it was not as much fun. Long story short, we made a decision which caused us to lose $100,000 in one day. In the span of hours! It was a pretty epic failure at the time, and the most I had lost in one day. The lesson I learned lied in how we handled it. We looked at it as an expense to the business and that if we were in position to lose that much comfortably, we were doing something right. In the end we have been a lot more focused on our risk!

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

One of my mentors outside of business was a fitness instructor of mine, Phil Ross. He inspired me to instill discipline in my everyday life, and that it was not something that was a chore, but rather a tool to unlock the freedom and goals I set. It really changed my thinking to be a better person.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

I would say that any time you are shifting an industry that brings more opportunity to its members, it should be seen as a positive shift. In our company, we look to bring more opportunities which will result directly in money made by our clients and at the core of this we believe that anyone can truly change their situation and leverage our platform to end up in a better position than they started. This is changing the game for everyone involved.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Anyone that is working towards a goal can be considered a success.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

The plan for us is to really start to focus on broadening the market. We have grown at an exponential rate within our niche. The goal is to grow the entire industry through reaching new people. By introducing new people who are completely unaware of the opportunities that are available this could be an exponential opportunity for us and them to grow.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

The number one book I ever read, The Magic of Thinking Big. This book made me realize that it’s not about where we are presently or where we’ve been. It’s about how we choose to show up to our current situations and where we BELIEVE we are headed.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

The movement I hope to inspire is embedded in thought. I believe that the society we live in is scared to chase their dreams. More specifically they are scared to bet on themselves when there is so much pressure to conform to what someone else tells them is a good life. You can be anything you want to be. We only get one shot at life and to waste the opportunity to actualize your dream is scarier than the risk to get there.

How can our readers follow you online?

You can find us on all social platforms at thefundedtraderprogram.com

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!


Meet The Disruptors: Angelo Ciaramello Of The Funded Trader On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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