Izabela: US30 at the 9:30 Open

TL;DR: Izabela, who the host calls Izzy, was born in Brazil and moved to the United States around 17. She spent about three years trading US30 at the 9:30am Eastern open, after forex signals, zone trading, and a short crypto stretch. She says the first evaluation she passed was in early January 2022, and that she had reached six figures in performance fees by March, at other firms. She had just started with Alpha when this was recorded, after a futures break, and she was coming back to CFD accounts. Those 2022 figures are hers. They are not Alpha Capital results, they are not typical, and they are not guaranteed.

This page summarises The Truth About Trading Progress Nobody Wants to Hear, a 55-minute 41-second Alpha Group Podcast interview uploaded on 3 February 2026. The video is embedded above. Figures below are what she and the host report, not an audited record.

Izabela trader profile

Alpha Capital Evaluations and Qualified Accounts use simulated funds. Performance fees are based on eligible simulated results and are not guaranteed. Izabela's 2022 numbers are interview claims about other firms.

Where did the trading start?

She was a poor student, in her words, through high school and college. The family path was law. She did not want it. A car accident, which she says she was lucky to survive, led her into the military. Logistics was not what she expected. She describes being unhappy, on a schedule that did not feel like a job she could leave, and ready to get out when the contract decision came in Italy.

Back in the United States she found out she had cancer. She says it took one surgery and did not come back. The medical stretch gave her time. She looked at dropshipping and real estate. Friends were day trading. She says that was the one that felt right, before she knew what the work was.

What did she trade before US30?

The first teaching was chart patterns, bull flags and bear flags, from a group she calls an MLM. The people running it were trading breakouts and would not walk her through the steps. She left.

Zones came next. She marked them, then found they moved depending on who drew them. She traded zones and breakouts for about a year and still did not have one market.

Crypto was the focus after that, because it was the market everyone was in. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP, for about six months. A move could happen at any hour. She was on the charts all day with her phone in her hand, and she told her friends that was not a way to last. She jokes that people leave a 9 to 5 and pick up a shift that runs from 5 until 11.

Why US30 at 9:30?

A friend brought her into a group that was learning SMC. They traded indices. She had been told indices would blow an account. She tried them anyway, because they had a clock. Every day at 9:30am Eastern there was a move. Her question became which market would pay her for the least time on the screen. The answer she kept was US30 at the open.

For the following three years, that was the market. The goal she set herself was $1,000 from about one hour a day, and she thought she only needed to be right for about five minutes or 15 minutes. She says she did not yet understand how the market moved. ICT is what made the logic click, in her account.

She tells students that the entry model can differ. The direction is the part that has to be right. The stop and the rest come after.

What did ICT change that SMC had not?

She treats supply and demand, and liquidity grabs, as part of SMC. ICT, for her, is the timing. A liquidity grab is not just a pattern. She expects it around news, around the open, and in the windows she calls kill zones. She uses 8:30 news as the example: she calls that manipulation, meaning a fake-out, and then a move toward the other side of the range.

On SMC she was managing a risk-to-reward number. With ICT she says she has specific areas and a reason for each one. She studied more concepts than she uses. The ones she still uses sit in the background, and the execution gets faster because she has seen them.

She has been on the same concepts for about three years. The grasp she has now, she says, came from seeing the same thing, not from finishing a course and trading it the next day. She compares it to chess. The rules are short. Recognising the position in real time takes the years.

A call can be right on direction and wrong on distance. She gives the example of calling 100 points and getting 50. Where you exit is what makes the trade. She has watched a position float and then come all the way back to the stop. Getting stopped once does not, for her, cancel the idea. She will look at the candles and consider a second entry if the idea is still there.

What happened between January and March 2022?

She traded her own money first. The MLM accounts were about $100, $500, or $1,000. The goal was to turn $100 into $1,000 in a week. She says she did that and then blew it. She puts the spending at about $500 to $1,000 a week of her own money. A 5% gain on a $1,000 account was $50, and she could not make herself care about risking 1% for $10.

She says she only became profitable, in her words, once she found prop firms. She describes paying about $500 for a $100,000 simulated account and treating a 10% loss, about $10,000, as the room she had. That is how she remembers those earlier firms. It is not an Alpha Capital price.

She blew the first evaluation, passed the next one straight away, and then blew that account too. The pass was the proof, in her telling. The first attempt was in December. The first pass was early January 2022. By March she says she had reached six figures in what she calls payouts. In our wording those are performance fees, and they were not paid by Alpha Capital.

In January she was still borrowing money for bills. A meal came up that she could not pay for. Her birthday is in March. By that birthday she describes about $600,000 in simulated allocation and about $100,000 in performance fees. It was her second year trading. She was still tilting, still less consistent than she wanted, and still backtesting. The ratios then were 1:1 or maybe 1:2. She thinks she was overleveraging, and she says that year was still one of her best.

She had told herself $100,000 was a five-year plan. It showed up in about three months of that year, after two years of work. She says she did get cocky. She thought she had made it. She did not yet have the experience to repeat the same thing.

She quit the other work and traded full time for about another year.

What happened when those CFD accounts disappeared?

She is in the United States. She describes the period when CFD accounts on MetaTrader were shut for US traders. She calls it the MetaTrader apocalypse. Her accounts were gone overnight. Trading was her only income.

A few firms in the United States still had her on, she says. The loss of the allocation pushed her to try to replace it immediately. She then stopped, said her savings were intact, and spent about six months deep in ICT. She was still trading, from fear, and she overcompensated by studying and backtesting until she wanted to be perfect. The psychology, she says, came back after that.

Some of the firms in that stretch did not pay. She names one where she made $50,000 and was never paid, because the firm went bankrupt. She also describes the older timetable she remembers: about 30 trading days to pass an evaluation, then about another 30 before a performance fee, so 60 to 90 days, with no promise the firm would pay.

The host talks about why he trusted a UK-registered firm with people from banking. That is his account of Alpha, not her performance-fee history.

What is her experience with Alpha, as of this recording?

She had just started. She calls the process seamless, and she talks about trust rather than a track record. Xander reached out. Within about a week or two she had met the team, and she met them in Miami the week after that.

She told him she wanted to trade with Alpha. He started her on Alpha Futures. She had taken a break and had been trading futures. The team then brought her back to Alpha Capital. She says that closed the circle: she began on CFDs, left them when those firms shut US traders out, and was coming back to CFD accounts. She had not traded a CFD firm for a long time.

She says she misses a 10% static drawdown. On Alpha Capital, that buffer is the Swing account, which is built for holds and uses a 10% static drawdown. The rules are also in prop firms that allow swing trading. Loss limits on the other plans are in Alpha Capital rules explained.

She wants two accounts with two jobs. One she can compound. One she can scalp. The host's line is an Alpha Futures account and an Alpha Capital Swing account. She says she likes that the group offers both. She had not, on this recording, reported a performance fee from either.

Stricter rules, she says, forced her to be more disciplined. When she went back to her own money, the habit was different. She could trade it without blowing it the way she used to.

What is worth copying from this interview?

Copy the sequence.

• One market and one clock. Hers was US30 at 9:30am Eastern, for about an hour
• Direction before the entry model
• The same concepts for years, with the entries and exits tightened inside them
• A smaller personal account taught her the wrong lesson about a 1% risk, because the dollar amount felt pointless. The simulated account is where she says the risk finally mattered
• Two different jobs can sit on two different accounts. She does not ask one rule set to scalp and swing at the same time

Do not copy the 2022 fees, the $600,000 allocation, or a three-month jump as a promise. Those numbers are her memory of other firms. Alpha Capital evaluations and Qualified Accounts use simulated funds. Performance fees are based on eligible simulated results.

Other index interviews on this site: Jake on gold and Nasdaq, Saad on a systematic index system, and Abraham on index scalping. More are in the Alpha Capital interview library.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Izabela?

Izabela, called Izzy on the episode, was born in Brazil and moved to the United States around 17. The interview was published on 3 February 2026. Her market in the story is US30 at the New York open.

What time does she trade US30?

9:30am Eastern. She built the habit around one hour, and she wanted the actual exposure inside that hour to be about five to 15 minutes.

Were the six figures from Alpha Capital?

No. She puts the first pass in early January 2022 and six figures in performance fees by March 2022, at other firms. By her birthday that March she describes about $600,000 in simulated allocation and about $100,000 in performance fees. She had just started with Alpha when this episode was recorded.

What happened to those earlier accounts?

She says the CFD accounts disappeared overnight for US traders, in the period she calls the MetaTrader apocalypse. She was full time by then. One firm she made $50,000 with never paid her, because it went bankrupt.

Does she trade futures as well?

She did, after that shutdown. Xander started her on Alpha Futures. She then came back to Alpha Capital because she wanted CFD accounts again, including the 10% static drawdown she says she missed. She wants one account to compound and another to scalp.

How long did the strategy take?

About five or six years in markets at the time of the interview. US30 at the open was the market for three of those years. She says the same concepts have been in place for about three years, and that the last year is when the entries and exits got tighter.

This article summarises a public interview. Alpha Capital evaluations and Qualified Accounts use simulated funds. Performance fees are based on eligible simulated results. Simulated results do not reflect real trading outcomes. This is general information, not investment advice.