The martingale clause we quoted verbatim on July 13, 2026, "Martingale / Grid strategies (abusive use)," defined only as "increasing position size aggressively after losses" that creates "uncontrolled risk exposure", no longer matches the live Terms & Conditions. As of July 20, 2026, that same list item reads "Martingale strategies, grid averaging, recovery-style sizing, or uncontrolled risk escalation," different wording, not a typo fix. IC Funded's Terms page carries no visible "last updated" or "effective date" field, so we only know this happened because we'd already documented the old text. For a firm this new, that's worth flagging on its own: the rulebook you agree to on sign-up may not be the one you're held to a week later.
IC Funded's branding, name and homepage testimonials ("they chose IC Markets, the broker I already use") sit close enough to IC Markets, the large ASIC-regulated broker, that an independent review site (ghosttraders.co) went and asked both companies directly whether they're connected. IC Funded's answer: "Raw Trading Ltd. has a cooperative relationship with IC Funded; however, they are separate companies, each operating independently," and elsewhere, "in the legal and commercial field they are totally different companies, which have a commercial relationship." Neither statement explains why a new prop firm would pick a name, logo style and colour scheme this close to an existing broker's, and neither company volunteers one.
SwingFish contacted IC Funded's own support chat directly and asked whether their challenges and funded accounts run on IC Markets price feeds. Their answer: "We do not use ICMarkets price feeds. Our challenges and funded accounts run in a simulated environment, and the exact price feed provider is not specified in our rules." That's a step back from the "cooperative relationship" language given to ghosttraders: not just "separate companies," but a refusal to name who actually feeds the prices.
We also reached out to IC Markets directly about it. No transcript was kept for that conversation, but the substance matched what ghosttraders got: separate companies, and when pressed on why a well-established broker would let a much newer, unrelated firm trade this close to its name and reputation, the answer amounted to "we're not the same, we just have a similar logo," with nothing further offered.
On July 13, 2026, IC Funded's Terms prohibited "Martingale / Grid strategies (abusive use)," defined only as "increasing position size aggressively after losses" that creates "uncontrolled risk exposure." We put that definition to their support chat directly:
- Asked whether 1 lot followed by 3 lots after a 3-pip drop, on a 100k account, with the combined position risking 0.2% of the account if the stop is hit, would qualify: "Yes, that example can qualify as prohibited... it's a 3x size jump while in loss."
- Asked to put a number on "aggressive": "We do not define 'aggressive' with a specific number (for example, a fixed lot multiplier or a set % increase)."
- Pointed out that a 4-pip stop on 0.2% max account risk isn't uncontrolled by any objective measure: the answer didn't move: "the key is not whether slippage is negligible or the SL is 4 pips... [it's] whether the pattern is 'increasing position size aggressively after losses'."
- A second, smaller example (0.5 lot plus six 0.1 lot adds below) also got: "Yes, that example would likely be a violation."
Five exchanges, and every one of them landed on "it depends on the behaviour," never a number. Scaling into a position while it's red is a completely normal technique for a huge share of traders, and by IC Funded's own answers, a mathematically trivial version of it can still be called a breach after the fact.
Update, July 20: pushed again with a cleaner example (doubling size after a drawdown while halving the stop distance, so total risk stays flat), support finally gave a number: "not exposed your trading account over 1.5% on a single trade idea or symbol." A real threshold exists this time. It's just not written anywhere, not in the Terms, not on the Rules page, only handed over after repeated, specific pushing in a support chat. The same conversation produced a number for HFT too, "opened and closed in less than 1 minute, repeated more than 30 times within a single trading day", against a Terms clause that just bans "High-frequency trading (HFT) or tick scalping" with nothing attached. Two real numbers now confirmed to exist, neither one published anywhere a trader would see it before getting flagged for crossing it.
The website advertises an 80/20 profit split, bi-weekly payouts, and a challenge-fee refund "after your third payout has been processed." None of those three numbers appear anywhere in the actual Terms & Conditions, meaning none of them are things you can hold IC Funded to in writing, they're marketing copy, not contract terms.
What the Terms do contain is broad, one-sided discretion: "IC Funded retains full and sole discretion to determine whether any strategy, behavior, or activity constitutes a prohibited practice," and that determination "is final and binding." Alongside the martingale clause sit other undefined bans: "non-replicable execution strategies," "sudden strategy switching between evaluation and funded stages," and "single-trade dependency or disproportionate concentration of profits," none with a number attached. Section 15.2 separately notes that passing an evaluation "does not guarantee a funded account," which is a strange thing to spell out for a product whose entire pitch is passing the evaluation to get funded.
The document that actually governs your money once funded isn't readable before you pay, either. Asked directly, support confirmed: "Your Trader Agreement would be available once you have successfully passed the evaluation phase." You commit the challenge fee and the trading effort to pass it before you can read the contract you're agreeing to.
"Flatten Friday" is a required rule, every position closes before the weekend, full stop, while news trading is allowed intraday. Combined with leverage caps on the low side for the category (1:50 FX, 1:20 indices/metals/commodities, 1:2 crypto), that rules out a fair chunk of standard swing technique before the martingale ambiguity even comes into play. If your style depends on carrying a position through the weekend, this firm structurally doesn't support it, regardless of how the risk rules get interpreted.
Credit where it's due: pushed for specifics on payout timing, support gave a clean, consistent structure. A "profitable day" requires 0.5% account growth. The first payout needs 5 profitable days, the second needs 3, and from the third payout onward the profitable-day requirement drops entirely, a withdrawal request every two weeks is all that's needed after that. Confirmed directly in writing, July 20, 2026, and unlike the martingale and HFT numbers above, this is the kind of answer that should just be published on the Rules page instead of requiring a chat transcript to extract.
Signing up as an affiliate produced this timeline: registration complete at 17:48, a "Rate your experience with IC Funded" Trustpilot prompt at 17:50, two minutes later, and the actual affiliate approval itself only at 20:29, nearly three hours after being asked to rate an experience that hadn't happened yet. Whatever score comes out of that prompt reflects how easy the signup form was, not the KYC process, risk enforcement, or payout timing, the parts that actually take weeks to experience and are the parts that matter.
IC Funded has a number of negative reviews online. On their own, that means less than it looks like: every prop firm, including the good ones, collects complaints from traders who got breached and are angry about it. What moves this past "the usual noise" is that the vague, undefined enforcement language traders would need for a complaint to have teeth is confirmed, in writing, directly from the firm's own Terms and its own support chat. The reviews aren't the evidence here, the rules are.
