The Funded Trader: how the trades of thousands of traders vanished overnight

On 28 March 2024 The Funded Trader abruptly "suspended operations" — and voided the trades it had made with traders. By that point the company had already spent months denying payouts to one in every ten clients. The company's main broker terminated the partnership that same week, and the firm itself was left with a choice: shut down for good, or be reborn somewhere else.

The Funded Trader, run by CEO Angelo Ciaramello, was one of the notable companies in the proprietary-trading sector, offering traders an "evaluation" on simulated capital followed by access to real profit payouts. The company operated actively through MetaTrader and the broker Eightcap, and its community of traders numbered in the thousands of active participants who regularly shared their results on Trustpilot and social media.

The first warning signs appeared in early 2024: in January and February the company, according to Ciaramello himself, paid out around $17 million to clients, but at the same time denied payouts totalling more than $2 million — roughly one in every ten requests. In parallel, MetaQuotes increased pressure on brokers servicing prop firms with U.S. clients, and at the end of February 2024 Eightcap completely ceased providing services to such companies. The Funded Trader attributed the growing payout delays specifically to the technical strain of migrating to a new platform.

On 28 March 2024 the company announced a full suspension of operations. Eightcap immediately terminated the partnership. The Funded Trader tried to relocate to the Cayman Islands, presenting this as a business "restructuring", and later resumed operations in a limited format.

As of August 2024 the company had paid off only about 30% of its debts to traders, and even as of 2026 it had never returned to the scale of operations it had had before the crisis.

Published 1 February 2026