Welcome back to the C-Suite. This is a once a month interview, where we talk to leading executives in the online trading industry.
This time we’re talking to Petros Kalaitzis, the General Manager for IC Funded – the prop trading arm of IC Markets.
Petros joined the company earlier this year, as part of bigger plans for the brokerage group’s prop offering.
DK: My first question is what’s going on at IC Funded? IC is really amazing on the broker side and it feels like they launched this prop business 18 months ago and they didn’t really invest much in it. Is there some kind of bigger plan now you have joined?
PK: There are a lot of projects happening at IC and IC Funded was one of them. It was another project plugged in under the umbrella of the broker side. Just because of how good the IC brand is, for a couple of months things were booming after IC Funded launched.
But if you don’t keep investing and managing the risk, things start going down. There were a lot of changes in the broker side, which is the main focus, and so resources were taken from the prop business.
So effectively the project was alive, but it was completely dormant for a while. I joined at the beginning of the year. We’re going to have a dedicated budget for the first time this year. We’re going to try to become more autonomous within the business.
So we have our budget, we will start recruiting quite soon, but before that we had to go through a very big restructuring on the operational side. We changed literally everything. It’s almost ready to go live and by the beginning of April we will start promoting it. So it’s going to be like a startup within the ecosystem of IC and we will now be really giving it the attention it needs. That’s the plan for 2026.
DK: In terms of vision, is your goal to make IC Funded as big in the prop space as IC Markets is in the broker space? Or would you be happy to be an ‘ok’ player in the mid-range?
PK: IC doesn’t accept medium things or “it’s okay.” It’s “go big or go home.” So we are pushing to become a top player.
At the end of the day, we’re going to apply the same logic that IC has, which means that we will try to give literally the best trading conditions. It won’t be the same as on the broker side, as prop is something different. But we want IC Funded to be the benchmark that other props are judged by.
DK: You worked in the broker space, then you moved into more tech roles, and then you moved into the prop space. The prop sector is maybe kind of frustrating to deal with because on the face of it the product is somewhat similar in terms of people trading CFDs and the platforms they’re using are the same, but actually the whole mechanics of the business seem quite different. Do you think that’s a fair analysis? And from your point of view, what are the big differences between the two?
PK: For prop, it’s a completely different story in terms of who is making money and when, and how can you assist clients making money, and how can you make money with them.
It’s not the same risk management as in the brokerage sector. In some cases people don’t even understand that it has nothing to do with the risk logic of the broker. If you try to apply the same logic, you’re going to lose money. Because a prop trader is trading entirely your money, so it’s kind of a risk-free for them and that changes their psychology.
For example, let’s say you have a refund on your challenge fee. Then you start trading the funded account. You make some money, you make your first payout, your second payout, then on the third payout, you say “let me try this strategy” and then it blows up. For the trader, they think “Who cares? I got my money back, I got my payout, let me try again.”
But you would probably never have done this with your own money. You don’t try things with your own money. This is number one.
The second thing is right now there is no regulation and no client funds rules. This is creating a lot of space for scammers who abuse prop firms. The community management has to be so strong and so focused because there are plenty of people that will take your email, they will edit it, they will screenshot part of your email and then they will go to the forums, to X, or to Instagram and they’re going to start tagging review websites just to feed the social media algorithm, create views and say, “They didn’t pay me” or “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
And then you take their account and you see the trader spent 99% of his or her margin in one trade. You have to deal with this behaviour constantly, which is something you see in the broker space, but to a much smaller degree.
DK: It seems like a lot of props have faced problems over the last six months. We see that with firms blocking people from trading metals entirely, for example. Do you think these problems are surmountable or are they inherent to the product?
PK: It’s a tough question. Firstly, I would say that the end trader needs to look at what is going on in the market. If someone has challenges that have a crazily cheap price, you need to understand that is not viable long-term. I have worked on the technology side, the B2B side, and the B2C side. I know what is possible and what is not.
At the same time, we have markets that are going bananas. Even brokers are suffering a lot from this, so it’s not unique to prop. What you need is good risk management and an understanding of the prop business model. Like with brokers, what you are seeing is prop firms taking measures to ensure they remain profitable.
DK: Do you think there is actually a good risk management solution so far for this industry?
PK: The big issue here is you have to take a position. If you blindly follow an individual trader, it’s impossible to predict what he will think about tomorrow and, one way or another, you will be burned. And for him it doesn’t matter, but for you the drawdown will hit your balance sheet.
For me the ideal system is the one that is extremely good in analyzing the traders’ data in your company. So first you have to analyze your own database in terms of who is trading, what they are trading, then you need to take into consideration the mathematics and logic to find a strategy that has more winning days than losing. You cannot avoid burning some of your money by following people as well. I don’t want to go too much into how we do it but that is the bottom line – someone with more winners than losers.
DK: In your experience so far have you had anyone who is consistently really good. So they’re not doing anything scammy, they’re not abusing demo conditions, they’re just legitimately a really good trader.
PK: Yes, absolutely. In all the props I have worked for, we absolutely have these people. They would lose sometimes, of course. But effectively their gains were much higher than their losses over the long-term and usually they were quite boring traders.
They trade the same strategy on the same one or two instruments and that’s it – full stop. So these are not the ones you see making noise on social media. They really are there and most of them also don’t want to be in the spotlight. They just want to trade and use the prop firm model to do that.
DK: Interesting! In terms of other plans, do you think IC Funded will do futures as well?
PK: We will do futures. It’s too early unfortunately for us because this quarter we spent our time restructuring a lot of the product. We will start with CFDs. We will add futures, and we’re also looking at other new trends to see what else we can add.
DK: How much more complicated are they than CFDs? Do you think they are better or worse basically?
PK: It has some additional legal barriers because you need live data coming from the CME. That’s one. If you want to go to live trading, it is also very complex and a lot more of an operational burden.
On the risk side, everybody has the same price, everybody has the same liquidity. Full stop. So everybody plays both on the same court and you have to be extremely careful with your rules and competitive at the same time on your payouts, which makes things a little bit more difficult. So yeah, it’s a different product. Sometimes it also has a different logic on the risk and the rules. In some cases it can be significantly less profitable but we can manage that.
DK: Another trend you see in the space is that people are just using prop as a marketing tool and as a lead generator for the broker side. Do you think that IC will align the two businesses more or is the plan to just keep them very separate?
PK: IC Funded is backed by IC Markets. This shouldn’t be hidden. We have a Chinese wall between the firms, so it’s a different legal entity and so on, but at the end of the day, we’re part of one ecosystem.
We’re going to try and create the flow where the good traders will find a way to step up and benefit and go to the broker side. Imagine a world where you’re not confident yet. So we say, “ok, come here to IC Funded and try. It’s our money. Try with a small amount and then when you become sustainably profitable and you get your payouts, put your money in the broker and get 100% of your profits with the same conditions or even better.”
So we will absolutely try to do that. I think the big companies who are in the space, if they’re not doing it already, they are moving in that direction.
DK: Do you think that could end up kind of killing the prop model though? IC is a good example where the company is so big that they could potentially afford to have the prop firm as break-even or loss-making, something like that, and then they use leads and brand to monetise the business it generates. So as a standalone entity it’s not profitable but combined with the brokerage business, it is?
PK: I would look at it in a different way. I think entrants like IC will shake the prop industry because of the balance sheet, the existing brand, and the internal expertise that we bring. But no owner wants to have a business that is just loss making or breaking even.
At the same time, can the props with no backing survive if we see the same market conditions? I don’t think so. You cannot be a small or medium-sized business and continue to lose money. How long can you afford to do that? Maybe two or three months? So big firms coming to the market have an advantage there as well and I think we will see big changes in the next 12 months. IC Funded is going to be part of that.
