One Prop Trader a Day – Episode 109
Vedanta Indalkar
My name is Vedanta Indalkar. I am 21 and from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. I trade gold against the dollar plus EUR/USD and NZD/USD, driven by news and macro data rather than chart patterns.
I’m Vedanta, I’m 21, and I trade from Mumbai. My market is gold against the dollar, with EUR/USD and NZD/USD alongside it. I’ve never been a chart-pattern guy. I want to know what is actually moving the asset, so most of my entries come from the news and the macro data, not from shapes on a screen.
Getting here was not quick. I breached 17 or 18 accounts before I finally got funded. It would be easy to blame the strategy for all of those breaches, but looking back, the strategy was never really the problem. I was. I cared too much about being “right” about direction, and the moment I got serious about discipline instead, things started to click.
The first thing I bought with trading money was a Tissot PRX. It was not a flashy purchase, and it was not meant to impress anyone. It was proof to myself, more than to anybody else, that this was finally working.
The loss that hurt the most did not even happen on a live account. I was in the second phase of an evaluation, almost done with it, the finish line right in front of me, and I blew it. No funded loss has stung like that one, precisely because I could see the end. It taught me something I still carry: being close to a goal is exactly when you get careless, and it is the moment you can least afford to.
All of this took a mental toll, and it came at the same time as my studies. Juggling failed attempts alongside coursework meant I had to draw a hard line between the two worlds. A bad trading day was not allowed to wreck my week, and a rough exam week was never an excuse for a sloppy trade. Somewhere in that balancing act, I learned to judge myself on process, not just on whether a session finished green.
Today I’m funded through FundingPips and FTMO, and the way I look at a firm has changed. I don’t pay much attention to the marketing anymore. What matters to me is whether the rules actually work with a fundamentals-based style, especially around news events, and whether the payouts are straightforward.
My biggest payout so far is around $2,000. It is not a huge number, but right now it is the one that matters to me.
If you ask what separates me from someone who quit after their third failed challenge, it comes down to one thing: I never let a single blown account tell me I couldn’t do this. Every breach was just information. My read on the market was usually fine. What I had to stop doing was wasting it on bad risk management.
And if someone handed me a $1,000,000 funded account today, I wouldn’t change a thing about how I trade, only the size. Around a 6% target, a 3% stop, the same process, and no ego about the extra zeros.
Verified funded – the receipts
About the writer – Vedanta Indalkar
Vedanta Indalkar is a 21-year-old fundamentals-driven trader from Mumbai, India, trading gold and major forex pairs on news and macro data, funded with FundingPips and FTMO.
