The Funded Trader Halts All Operations | What Does It Mean For Their Clients?

The Funded Trader (TFT) is one of the largest evaluation firms in the world. They have paid out their clients over $150,000,000 dollars, they have a huge customer base, offer up to 200:1 leverage, and they have frequent promotions that allow their traders to start with 90% profit splits instead of 80%. So what went wrong? Why did The Funded Trader stop their operations? Why does it seem that they have left their entire community hanging?

 

The Funded Traders History

Let’s start from the beginning. The Funded Trader is a proprietary trading firm, founded by Blake Olson, Angelo Ciaramello, and Nick D’Arcangelo. The three experienced traders made TFT using their extensive experience and feedback from their trading networks to put together a prop trading firm that was designed for traders, by traders. So, The Funded Trader was born. The company officially opened its doors in 2021 and rapidly expanded.

The Funded Trader was known for its multiple promotions that never seemed to end, offering 125% refunds on challenges and 4% bonuses from the phase 1 profits. Some critics would often discuss that TFT’s aggressive promotions made them look unprofessional and that they never really grew up as a company due to the ongoing promotions they had. 

 

TFT’s Issues in the Company

Recently, The Funded Trader has been experiencing a lot of serious issues, from payout denials to faulty accounts that have made negative customer reviews shoot up in the past two months. 

There have been endless reports about payout denials from TFT on social media, significantly more reports than any other firms of this size. The payout denials were often for unclear reasons or sometimes, for no reason at all, meaning that traders who had fairly earned there were allegedly getting scammed by TFT. Angelo Ciaramello decided to address this issue with a livestream update, but that didn’t help their case too much as during the livestream the participants could see that overall TFT had about 10% of all payouts marked as “denied payouts”, that’s over $2,000,000 in payouts for the months of January and February (2024) alone. 

 

The Funded Trader Layoffs

The Funded Trader and their partner company Easton Tech have been carrying out massive layoffs. There have been some former employees from TFT who have been informing traders that things are not looking good from inside. Anyone might have reservations about listening to grumpy fired employees until an email that Easton Tech sent out to an ex-employee got leaked and in that email Easton Tech itself admitted that The Funded Trader was going through a particularly challenging period. 

 

The Funded Trader Halts all Operations

Angelo Ciaramello shared a tweet that The Funded Trader has stopped their operations and will be working on relaunching their platform with a different look and feel. On their website they have added a countdown which at the time this is written shows 20 days and 18 hours from now. They haven’t been very clear on what will happen three weeks from now. 

 

So what’s Expected in the Future for The Funded Trader and its Members?

As TFT’s website and operations have come to a halt, their traders accounts, payouts, and investments have also come to a halt. Hopefully the future will be bright for TFT’s members and the company will rise up again, but it wouldn’t hurt for traders to proceed with caution in light of the suspicious activity and decrease in customer trust recently seen at TFT.

 

There is good news—It’s not the end for TFT’s traders, and there is light at the end of the tunnel. OFP Funding welcomes you to embark on a new journey in your trading endeavors. OFP prioritizes putting our customers first, and we focus on your needs. We have 24/7 support in multiple languages. If you are a former TFT client and are interested in transitioning to us, feel free to contact our customer support team or, buy an account here. OFP wishes luck to all traders out there.