Brett Simberkoff is the founder and CEO of Tradeify, and most traders know him better by his other name, Brett Simba. He built the firm with co-founder Vinan Mistry, and getting it off the ground took a lot longer than either of them expected.
| Full name | Brett Simberkoff (goes by Brett Simba) |
| Role | Founder & CEO, Tradeify (co-founded with Vinan Mistry, COO) |
| Based in | Miami, Florida |
| Education | Florida Atlantic University, Bachelor’s in Finance |
| Background | Started trading crypto in 2016 to 2017, built a trading community as far back as 2012, previously ran Simba Stocks |
| Founded Tradeify | 2024, after roughly four years of false starts |
| Most active on | X (@BrettSimba) |
He learned trading the hard way, in crypto
Brett got serious about trading during the 2016 to 2017 crypto boom, back before institutional money touched Bitcoin and long before anyone was talking about ETFs. It was a wild, unstructured market, and he learned technical analysis and risk management the way most people do in a market like that. By losing money, adjusting, and trying again until something worked. By 2017 he had built a following sharing his trades and market analysis, and that following became the foundation for what he did next.
Before Tradeify, he ran Simba Stocks and had already been building trading communities since 2012. He and Vinan Mistry had worked together on earlier projects too, and both of them were actually trading with Topstep around 2020, years before either of them ran a prop firm of their own. That is worth sitting with for a second. The guys running one of the fastest growing futures firms today started out as customers of one of the oldest ones.
Why Tradeify took four years to actually launch
The original plan was not even futures. Brett and Vinan set out to build a CFD focused prop firm first. Then My Forex Funds, one of the biggest CFD prop firms at the time, got shut down after the CFTC brought a case against it, and that changed everything. Most of their audience, especially the traders who followed Brett specifically, were based in the US, so the CFD route stopped making sense. They pivoted to futures instead, and from idea to actual launch, the whole process took about four years of false starts before Tradeify went live in 2024.
Once it launched, it grew fast. Tradeify passed 100,000 active traders and grew sevenfold in active users in a single year, putting it in the same conversation as the more established names in futures prop. Brett and Vinan have talked openly about how they run the company, describing it more like a data analytics business than a traditional prop firm. Vinan put it plainly in an interview, saying if you are not constantly looking at the data and adjusting the offering, you will not survive very long in this space. That mindset showed up directly in one of their bigger moves, killing the monthly subscription model on evaluation accounts once the data showed most evaluations resolved within about a week anyway. The change barely moved revenue, but it removed a point of friction traders had been complaining about for years.
Building a brand bigger than his own name
One thing that sets Brett apart from a lot of founders in this space is that he deliberately did not build Tradeify around his own personal brand, even though he already had a following as Brett Simba. He had seen what happens to firms too tied to one person’s image. When the founder steps back, or runs into any kind of controversy, the whole company can take the hit. So he built Tradeify to stand on its own, with systems and a team that do not depend on him staying in the spotlight.
He is not hiding, though. He still shows up publicly, including a Finance Magnates interview alongside Mistry where they laid out where they plan to take the company next, from a new introducing broker arm to a push into prediction markets timed around the World Cup.
Where he actually shows up
X is where you will find him, under the handle @BrettSimba. He also appears on trading and prop firm podcasts and YouTube channels, including a fireside chat walking through the real story of how Tradeify came together. He is active on LinkedIn under his own name as well, where he occasionally shares thoughts on running the company and where futures prop is headed next. If you want the unfiltered version of how he thinks about the business, X and those longer interviews are where he actually says it, not the company’s own marketing pages.
