Luca Ronchi
Luca Ronchi is a 35-year-old trader from a village of 3,000 in northern Italy who watched his prop firm get shut down by regulators the day after he passed – then stopped for a year. Here is his story, in his own words.
My name is Luca. I’m 35, from a village of about 3,000 people in the province of Brescia, in northern Italy – we didn’t have broadband until 2006 or 2007, to give you a sense of the place. I started building websites at 20, then moved into digital marketing: Facebook and Google campaigns, affiliate work. For years I actually promoted CFD brokers, which is what first brought me close to the world of trading. Today I trade gold almost exclusively, using a pure price action approach based on ICT methodology, in the New York session. I’m currently funded with two prop firms: FTMO and Topstep.
Getting there took longer than it should have. In September 2023 I passed Phase 2 with My Forex Funds, only for the firm to be shut down by regulators the very next day. So the real answer is January 2025 – that is when I got my first funded account, with FTMO. A second followed with Topstep a few months later, in August 2025. When FTMO confirmed me in January 2025, the dominant feeling was not excitement. It was relief. Quiet, serious relief, like finally landing after a very turbulent flight.
The first thing I bought with trading money was not something I could photograph. No car, no vacation, nothing dramatic. I took my first trading profits and moved them straight into my stock and ETF portfolio. For me, that was the proof – not the size of the amount, but the origin of it. Money generated from a skill I had built, from reading price action, from executing a process under pressure. That kind of money feels different. It sits differently.
I failed more times than I want to count. I spent years going through courses that turned out to be more about marketing than actual trading. I paid for a Telegram signals group in 2018 that was essentially a scam – though strangely, it is what first pulled me into actually learning how markets work. I failed evaluation after evaluation. Then in 2023 I passed Phase 1 twice and Phase 2 with My Forex Funds, and the firm collapsed before I could be onboarded. After that, I stopped. For about a year. What eventually kept me going was not passion or stubbornness. It was the fact that I had seen proof it was possible. I had passed. And with a more stable counterparty, I knew I could do it again.
September 2023 was my lowest point, and I remember it precisely. I passed Phase 1 with My Forex Funds on 17 August. A few days later, a second Phase 1. Then Phase 2 at the start of September. The next step was a KYC email: send your documents, become a funded trader. I woke up that morning to an email from them and opened it immediately. It was not the KYC request. It was a notice saying the firm had been frozen by the authorities. I sat there looking at my screen for a long time. Did I consider quitting? Yes. Not dramatically – I did not announce anything, I did not make a scene. I just quietly decided I was done. And for about a year, that was the truth.
It affected me in ways I did not always acknowledge at the time. I had built a business from nothing, I understood systems, I was disciplined in my work – and the market still found ways to make me feel completely out of my depth. There is a specific exhaustion that comes from doing everything right technically and still not getting the outcome. I lived in that exhaustion for a long time. After the My Forex Funds collapse, what I felt was closer to grief than frustration. Not for the money, but for the time, the effort, and how close I had been. What trading has taught me is that the skill you are actually building is not chart reading. It is your relationship with uncertainty. And that is a much longer project.
My most expensive lesson was losing my first funded account. €980 with FTMO, which I lost because I exceeded my maximum daily limit by 20 cents. That was a blow, but it taught me never to use 100% of the limits, and to always keep a safety margin.
Today I trade gold – futures, GC and MGC – almost exclusively, on the New York session. My approach is based on ICT, Inner Circle Trader methodology: smart money concepts, institutional order flow, market structure. No indicators whatsoever: no moving averages, no RSI, nothing. Just the raw chart and some volume indicators. I work primarily on the daily and 4-hour for the bias, the 15-minute for context, the 5-minute for setup identification, and the 1-minute for entries and trade management. The goal is one or two high-probability setups per session, executed with precision. Quality over volume, always.
My day naturally divides into two parts. The morning and early afternoon belong to my software company: client work, development, managing projects. The New York session opens in the mid-afternoon Italian time, so from around 2:30 or 3pm I shift into trading mode. I review overnight price action, identify key levels, and then I wait. Many days I do not find a setup that meets my criteria, and I do not trade. When a clean setup does appear at a key structural level, it is usually resolved within 30 to 60 minutes. Then I close the charts and go back to the rest of the day. The routine is not glamorous. That is kind of the point.
My most recent losing trade was Thursday 18 June. I was short gold, watching the $4,260 level on the futures – the point of control for the session – reject price three times. Three tests, three failures to break through. On the third rejection I had my entry. The setup was clean, the structure was there. But the trade ground against me for the entire session. Volumes were already starting to thin out: it was the day before Juneteenth, a US federal holiday, and the market knew it. After holding for as long as I reasonably could, I threw in the towel. Minus 0.7%. I closed the position at a loss. And five minutes later the market started the move that took price exactly where I wanted it, and would have given me a sound win if I had kept the position open. That is the hardest kind of loss to process – not because of the money, but because of what it reveals. My analysis was right. My direction was right. My patience ran out four minutes too early. Would I do it differently? Honestly, I am not sure. The conditions were anything but optimal, volumes were dying, and holding through a holiday eve is a different kind of risk. But what I take away from it is this: a correct view and a correct trade are not always the same thing. The market does not reward you for being right. It rewards you for being right, at the right time, with the right conviction. That day I was three out of four.
The popular rule I completely ignore is the idea that you should always trade with the trend. It sounds like wisdom, but it is a limitation disguised as a rule. The ICT framework I use is built around understanding where institutional liquidity is positioned: where the orders are sitting, what price needs to reach. That analysis does not care which direction the 50-period moving average is pointing. Markets create opportunity in both directions. Refusing to engage with one of them does not protect you – it just cuts your edge in half. Context and structure matter far more than the label of any trend.
Most people in my life know me as a digital marketing and software person; that part they accept without many questions. Trading is harder to explain. I am from Serle, a village of 3,000 people, and the concept of someone generating income by analysing financial charts is not exactly a familiar framework there. Reactions vary: genuine curiosity from some, protective scepticism from others. A few people have actually asked me if it is legal. At some point I stopped trying to explain the mechanics and started pointing at the results. That tends to be more convincing than any explanation.
As for lifestyle, less has changed on the surface than I expected. Same place, same car, same company. But something has shifted underneath. Having a second income stream that is growing, and that does not depend on clients, projects, or anyone’s budget cycle, changes how you make decisions across the board. You negotiate differently. You take on fewer things you do not believe in. You can afford to be more patient. The biggest impact so far is not financial. It is psychological. Knowing that the trading account is there, and that it is growing, changes how everything else feels.
What separates me from someone who washed out at their third evaluation is the ability to stop. I think a lot of people wash out because they cannot accept that they are broken, at least temporarily. They keep pushing, increase their position sizes, try to force results they have not earned yet. After the My Forex Funds collapse in 2023, I had every emotional reason to keep going: I had momentum, I had passed, I was so close. Instead I stopped. Completely. For a year. I went back to my main business, let myself recover, and came back in 2025 with a clearer head and much better judgment about which firms to trust. That pause was not weakness. It was the most important trade management decision I have ever made.
The advice I would give myself one year ago: trust the process over the outcome of any single trade. A year ago I was still unconsciously trying to validate my entire method with every position – a good trade means the system works, a bad trade means something is broken. That is not how probability operates, and it is an exhausting way to live. What works is consistency over a large sample size, and you can only build that if you stay in the game. I would also say: be rigorous about counterparty risk. The prop firm landscape is still not fully regulated. Read the terms. Understand what happens if a firm gets shut down. Choose your partners with criteria, not enthusiasm.
If prop firms disappeared tomorrow, I would still be trading, without hesitation. I would trade my own capital, starting conservatively and scaling up systematically – honestly, I am already building toward that. The profits I pull from my funded accounts go into stocks and ETFs. Prop trading is one layer of a larger financial architecture I am constructing, not the destination. The edge does not live in the firm. It lives in the process.
And if you gave me a $1,000,000 funded account today, the first thing I would do is nothing. Two or three days minimum: watching the account, going through my normal routine, but not executing a single trade while I take in what that size actually means. A million-dollar account is a completely different psychological environment from what I am used to operating in. The worst thing I could do is walk into that context and immediately start acting out of character: trading too large, too often, trying to justify the account size with activity. After that calibration period, I would run my exact normal process. Same setup criteria, same risk parameters, just scaled. The account size does not change what is happening on the chart. It only changes the pressure. And managing that pressure is the whole game.
His funded trader certificate.
About the writer – Luca Ronchi
Luca Ronchi is a 35-year-old trader from Serle, a village of 3,000 people in the province of Brescia, northern Italy. He started building websites at 20 and today runs a software and digital marketing company alongside his trading. He trades gold futures almost exclusively on the New York session, using a pure price action approach built on ICT methodology – no indicators, just market structure and institutional order flow. Funded with FTMO in January 2025 and Topstep in August 2025, after the collapse of My Forex Funds cost him a year, he treats prop trading as one layer of a broader financial architecture, routing his profits into stocks and ETFs.
