Ivana is 38, Croatian by birth, living in Bosnia since 2022 after 33 years in Germany. She is raising a nine-year-old daughter, keeps horses, and started trading in 2020 after the pandemic cost her a job she had counted on. Six years, two lost personal accounts, and more failed challenges than she can fully count later, she now holds two funded accounts with The Trading Pit and has collected six Rewards totaling $3,137.
"I was always a woman that doesn't do things everybody's doing," she says of the moment she decided trading was worth trying. It turned out to be a fair description of how she'd trade too.
From a Facebook Screenshot to a Strategy of Her Own
Ivana's introduction to trading was almost incidental. She saw a screenshot on Facebook, Googled it out of curiosity, and then heard from a friend who had just enrolled at a trading academy and was already talking about trading. "She said, if you want, you can do it with me," Ivana recalls.
She signed up a trading academy to learn the basics, what a chart was, how trading worked at all. A year in, she still was not profitable, so she kept looking, working through other teachers, YouTube videos, and other strategies before eventually building a setup entirely her own.
Two Years on Personal Capital, and a Year Learning to Trust Herself
Ivana traded personal capital for roughly two years before she ever heard of prop trading. She lost money for most of that stretch and became profitable, but inconsistently, in year two. The real problem was practical: "How can I live from this money? How can I pay my bills?" she remembers asking herself, which is what sent her looking for another way in.
Why Ivana Chose The Trading Pit
Her first reaction to funded trading was outright disbelief. "I thought it's a scam," she says. "Nobody will give you 100k for this money that you can work with, and you get about 80 percent of your profit. It was like, no chance, it's fake."
What changed her mind was talking to real people using it. She met other traders online who worked with The Trading Pit, learned from how they analyzed the market, and eventually saw proof for herself: their Rewards, their passed challenges, and a customer service reputation that held up under questioning. "I thought, okay, it's a big company, so it needs to be good, because if not, they would not work with them," she says. That was enough to convince her to try it herself, and she has since also become an affiliate of the firm.
Learning the Discipline the Rules Forced on Her
Ivana eased into funded trading carefully. She spent about two months on a demo account first, deliberately training herself to feel comfortable trading in far larger amounts than she was used to. Then she bought her first real challenge, and lost it, and the second one too. She adjusted her strategy and lost a third. What finally worked was a plan: stop rushing, use the full 30 days instead of trying to pass in two, and calculate exactly how much profit she needed per day. On her fourth attempt, she passed, and found herself holding a funded $50k account.
Getting there, and actually holding onto it, took close to a year from her very first challenge purchase, partly because she lost funded accounts again along the way before her discipline caught up with her ambition. She credits the prop firm's own risk rules for eventually reshaping how she traded at all. With personal capital, nobody was telling her to stop, so she would trade through a loss until the account was gone. With a challenge, a fixed daily loss limit forced a reset. "You need to stop, you need to clean your mind," she says. "The next day you see the chart from another perspective."
Nineteen Days
Two months before this interview, with more time freed up from work, Ivana passed two challenges inside the same 30-day window. She hit the target at the start of August. Nineteen days later, her first Reward came through. "I was screaming," she says. "It was my dream." An approval email came first, then a second one telling her the Reward had been sent. She braced for a wait of several days. It landed in her Bosnian bank account two hours later. "I told it to everybody," she says.
The Strange Discomfort of Winning
The high did not last uninterrupted. With the Reward withdrawn, her account balance dropped, and Ivana found herself oddly hesitant to take her next trade, half convinced that losing again now would somehow undo what she had just earned. She stepped away from trading for two days, meditated, spent time with her family, and deliberately used some of the money on something for herself, just to make it feel real. Then she took her next trade. It was profitable, and five days later, her second Reward arrived. "Girl, that's it," she remembers telling herself. "You can live from this money. You can live from trading. You can say it's your job."
The Math Behind Staying With Prop Firms
Ivana has no interest in going back to trading her own capital at scale. By her own estimate, she would need somewhere around $10,000 of her own money on the table to generate the results she currently gets through funded challenges, risk she would rather not carry herself. A past experience with a broker that never returned money from one of her personal accounts only reinforced the point. Losing a challenge costs her the price of the challenge. Losing a personal account costs whatever she put into it. With two $50k funded accounts already earning, her plan is to reinvest her Rewards into more challenges and scale toward five $150k funded accounts.
Rules That Force a Reset
Ivana now trades inside limits she has set for herself, not just the firm's: a maximum loss of about $150 on her first trade of the day, a hard stop around $300 in total daily losses, and a rule that after two stopped-out trades, she closes the laptop, no exceptions. A recent example stuck with her. She was down roughly $200 on her first trade one day and shut the laptop rather than chase it. The next day, calmer, she made about $250, more than recovering the loss. "It's fine," she says of the losing day itself. "You need to lose to get better." She describes the whole process less like a single race and more like a marathon: "I cannot be funded 400k and get angry because I lose one day of profit. That's not possible."
Psychology First, Strategy Second
Asked whether psychology or strategy matters more, Ivana does not hesitate. Strategy matters, but she has seen how quickly it collapses under pressure. She once tried ten different approaches loaded with so many indicators she couldn't read her own chart. What worked was stripping it down to one setup she could repeat, and only trading when she genuinely had the time and headspace for it. If she has to rush to pick up her daughter in thirty minutes, she simply will not take the trade. "Control your emotions," she says, "because this is the most powerful thing to get profit."
Ivana's Advice to Other Traders
If she could go back six years and give herself one piece of advice, Ivana knows exactly what it would be: don't rush. She remembers being within roughly $50 of passing a challenge or hitting a Reward more times than she can count, and pushing to force it through in a single day instead of waiting. Those pushes cost her $200 or $300 at a time, chasing a $50 gap. Her advice now is to trust your own plan, tune out everyone else's opinions, and remember that less is often more. "You need the time to grow," she says.
What's Next for Ivana
With six Rewards totaling $3,137 collected since her first payout in August, Ivana's next goal is straightforward: reinvest into more challenges and work her two current $50k funded accounts toward a target of five $150k accounts. Given how long it took her to get here, she is not in a hurry to rush that either.
