Donato Rossiello is a financial advisor from Puglia, in the south of Italy, managing money for more than 200 families. He is also the trader behind The Trading Pit's first success story built around a Reward from a stocks Challenge, a rare specialty in prop trading, and one The Trading Pit is only one of two firms in the world to offer alongside futures and CFDs. With The Trading Pit, Donato has collected $600 across two Rewards so far, one of which he cashed out purely to fund his next Challenge rather than because he needed the money.
“With the cost of a pizza, of a restaurant, they can create a big chance for their lives,” he says of what prop trading actually gives people. It's a line that means more coming from him than most, because he was making that argument years before the industry existed to prove him right.
A Financial Education That Started at Ten
Donato's father sold shoes for a living, not stocks. But in the afternoons, when his father came home to rest, young Donato would sit with him and follow his investments. “At ten years old, eleven years old, I know also what is a stock, what is a bond, what is a yield, what is a mutual fund, what is a dividend,” he says. While other kids his age dreamed of becoming footballers, his dream was different. “My dream is to work in the bank,” he says.
That early fascination carried straight through school and university into a career as a financial advisor, with trading following naturally behind it. “This passion started a lot of years ago,” he says, “and so growing up, then school, university, experiences take me to start this role.”
An Idea Nobody Believed In
Long before prop trading became the industry it is today, Donato tried to pitch something close to it himself, proposing to brokers and liquidity providers that traders be given firm capital to risk instead of their own. “A lot of people didn't listen to me,” he says. Years later, when prop trading firms began appearing and growing, he had a very specific reaction. “I smiled a lot,” he says.
What mattered to him wasn't being right. It was what the model meant for ordinary people. “I'm very happy because when I think something, I don't think that thing for me, but for all,” he says. “It's very important to give people the possibility to risk not their money.”
Why Donato Chose The Trading Pit
Donato first heard of The Trading Pit through industry contacts, Fabrizio Alessandro and Fabri La Rosa, former business associates he no longer works with, but the connection stuck. When he later went looking specifically for a prop firm that offered stocks, a much shorter list than firms offering forex or futures, The Trading Pit was the first one he tried. It's also the one he stayed with.
Futures First, Then a Deliberate Switch to Stocks
Donato's history with The Trading Pit started on Nasdaq futures, where he earned his first Reward. The move into stocks came later, and by his own account it was a decision made on purpose rather than a drift. Some people doubted that a long-term, buy-and-hold philosophy like his could work intraday. “I started this challenge only to let understand these people that also on that stocks you can take advantage with intraday trading,” he says.
He is candid that stocks are a genuinely harder intraday instrument than what he'd traded before. Nasdaq, gold, and forex move reliably every day. Stocks don't. “You need to find the right stock that in that day will move,” he says. “It's very, very difficult to understand which stock they can move.”
Trading His Own Long-Term Portfolio, Twice
Donato's intraday edge comes directly from his day job. He builds long-term portfolios of blue-chip stocks, names like Amazon, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Procter & Gamble, and Home Depot, for his advisory clients. When some of those names dip into a longer-term drawdown, he uses that same list as his intraday watchlist, watching for short-term rebounds on stocks he already knows well. He trades exclusively long, never short, because his advisory background taught him to recognize the moments when institutional money is stepping back in. “I know when institutional funds enter the market, the exact time, exact minute,” he says, “and so I follow them.”
Risk Management First
Ask Donato what actually drives his results, and he doesn't point to a signal or an indicator. “My goal is to manage the risk first of all,” he says. “With the right risk management, we can enter in the market also with closed eyes.” His numbers back that up. On a $25,000 Challenge, his stop losses ran around $50, against profit targets of $200 to $300. He scales into positions deliberately, buying a small starting size with a tight stop, and if the trade moves in his favor, adding the rest of the position while pulling the whole trade to breakeven.
What Passing His First Challenge Proved
Donato doesn't see a prop firm's evaluation as a hurdle. He sees it as validation. “If you can't pass the challenge, your trading system, your trading isn't okay,” he says. Passing his very first one, years ago, confirmed something he already believed about his own process. “My idea of some years ago was very good,” he says. “First of all, passed the challenge, so my training is okay. A lot of nice feelings.”
Donato's Advice to Traders Moving Into Stocks
For traders coming from futures or CFDs who want to try stocks, Donato's advice starts with the watchlist. Stocks require tracking a much wider universe of names than something like forex, where a trader might work with around 28 major pairs. He points to the Dow Jones, with its 40 constituent stocks, as a rough benchmark for the kind of list you actually need, filtered well enough to surface real opportunities every day.
The rest of his advice is about patience. Stocks won't move meaningfully every single day, and that's fine. “Don't worry if some days the market has low volatility,” he says. “You need to choose the right opportunity, one opportunity to make the week. No problem. The patience is very important.” Even a single well-chosen trade a week, he says, can be enough to stay consistently profitable over the long term.
Want to hear it directly from Donato?
Watch the full interview below for more on how a financial advisor from southern Italy became one of the few traders in the world building an edge in stocks through prop trading.
