One Prop Trader a Day – Kyriakos Kampourakis: Winning the War Against Yourself

Kyriakos Kampourakis

I am Kyriakos, I am 23, and I am from Greece. I have been trading for four to five years, mostly the NASDAQ 100 and Gold. It has been a long road of ups and downs, and every one of them turned me into a more disciplined and consistent trader than I started out as.

Age23

FromGreece 🇬🇷

TradesNASDAQ 100 & Gold

StylePrice action, 1H execution

FirmFTMO

What happens when passing an evaluation makes you feel unstoppable? Kyriakos Kampourakis, a 23-year-old price action trader from Greece who trades the NASDAQ 100 and gold on the 1 hour chart, got funded with FTMO in January 2024, then paid for the overconfidence that came with it. In this interview, he explains why he now takes only one or two trades a day, the 2,000 to 3,000 euros he spent on failed evaluations, and why he believes the real fight is against yourself rather than the chart.

The first time I became funded was in January 2024 with FTMO. In that moment I honestly felt unstoppable. Passing the evaluation gave me a huge confidence boost, but it also made me overconfident, and I paid for that later. Looking back, getting funded was not the finish line. It was the point where I realised that consistency and discipline matter far more than confidence alone.

I have failed more times than I can count. There were plenty of moments where quitting would have been easy, but I had made myself a promise that I would make it no matter what. My family believed in me through the tough periods, especially my brother and my girlfriend, and every failed evaluation became a lesson instead of a reason to stop.

If I had to put a number on my most expensive lesson, it was around 2,000 to 3,000 euros in failed evaluations. But the real price was bigger than money. I had to learn to analyse objectively, to accept failure without letting it define me, and above all to stay calm when the market moves fast and emotions try to take over. That mindset did not come naturally. It was built through years of mistakes.

My style today is built around patience. On most days I take only one or two trades, and if my setup is not there I am completely comfortable not trading at all. I trade price action off the 1-hour chart, using the 4-hour and daily timeframes for context. I stay away from my screens for the first hour after I wake up so that I am mentally prepared before I even open the charts. Then I mark my levels, build my plan, and wait for price to come to me.

My most recent losing trade was on the NASDAQ. The setup was actually there – a clean retracement, a strong bearish candle, a perfect retest of my point of interest. Where I went wrong was timing. I entered before the New York session had opened instead of letting the market show its hand, and I got stopped out. It reminded me that a good setup is not enough. Timing and patience matter just as much as the analysis itself.

What separates me from someone who washed out at their third evaluation is simple: I do not give up. I treat every failure as feedback, fix the specific thing that broke, and show up again the next day. If prop firms disappeared tomorrow I would still be in the markets, because they are a vehicle and not the destination. And if someone handed me a million-dollar account today, the first thing I would do is nothing at all – let a few days pass, keep a calm mind, and trade in exactly the same disciplined way that got me here.