The idea started where most good things in trading start: at 3am, watching a chart, frustrated by yet another international prop firm that wouldn't pay out in rand, charged in USD, and routed support through a Discord bot.
South African traders are good — really good. We grew up trading at unusual hours because of timezones, with limited capital, navigating exchange controls and currency volatility nobody else had to think about. The traders who survive that environment have a kind of discipline that's rare in the rest of the world.
But our options for getting backed were terrible. Pay in dollars at a punishing exchange rate. Wait two weeks for a payout. Read forum horror stories of unpaid traders. Hope the firm doesn't change the rules retroactively.
So we built the alternative. Cleared Capital is the prop firm we wished existed — designed from the ground up for SA traders, by people who've been on the wrong end of the existing options.