FTMO is a prop trading firm based in the Czech Republic.
In this article, you’ll get a review of this prop firm, including instructions about the challenges and how to pass them to get funded with an FTMO funded account.
Here’s what you’re going to learn:
FTMO is a prop firm located in Prague, Czech Republic, founded in 2014.
FTMO is a prop firm dedicated to Forex and other CFDs trading.
Here’s a list of the assets that you can trade with their accounts:
FTMO has different types of funded account sizes and each one has a different cost.
The account sizes initially go from $10,000 to $200,000. With their calling plan, they can increase up to $2,000,000 over time.
To access the challenges for these accounts you have to pay a one-time fee that goes from €155 (smallest account) to €1080 (biggest account).
The fee will be refunded once you pass the challenges and get the first payout.
Leverage is key to understanding how much is an account really worth, regardless of the balance.
Unlike other prop trading firms, that advertise accounts with big balances but tiny leverage, FTMO provides a decent and “normal” leverage on their accounts.
The leverage will be different though depending if you are trading a normal account or a swing trading account.
Normal accounts leverage:
Swing trading accounts leverage:
The FTMO payout profit split starts at 80:20. You get 80%, and the firm keeps the remaining 20%. But it doesn’t stop here.
When you meet the conditions of their scaling plan, they increase the balance of your account, and at the same time, the payout also increases to 90% for you.
The FTMO scaling plan allows you to increase your account size as you keep trading with consistency.
This means that if you keep trading and getting good results with proper risk management, you’ll be able to make more money as your account increases, without increasing the level of risk.
The capital increments happen in four-month cycles and you need to have made at least 10% of profit on your account. That’s an average of 2.5% per month.
The scaling plan will increase your account balance up to $2M.
According to Trustpilot, FTMO is very well classified in terms of reviews. The company has a staggering 4.9/5.0 after 4400+ reviews, which is quite impressive.
The Challenge is the 1st step of the evaluation process.
During the Challenge, you need to follow a series of rules to prove that you have good trading skills and discipline while trying to reach the objectives.
The FTMO Challenge doesn’t have any maximum duration. You can take as much time as you need without pressure to reach your objectives.
The challenge can be passed pretty quickly. You only need to trade for 4 days to be able to pass to the next step. Note that you need to open at least one position per day, so you need at least 4 positions opened in 4 different days to be able to pass.
Here are the basic rules of the FTMO Challenge (normal risk account):
And here’s a table with the values of the rules, considering a normal risk account:
The Verification is the 2nd step in the FTMO evaluation and it’s much more relaxed than the previous step. If you were able to complete the 1st step easily, you should have no problem passing this one too.
The rules from this step are pretty similar to the step 1 rules, except for the profit target that gets cut in half.
Here are the rules for this step considering a normal risk account:
It’s important to notice that you don’t need to pay any fee to take step 2 of the FTMO challenge.
If you like to use EAs to trade, FTMO is a great prop firm for you.
They allow EAs although the strategy should be able to be replicable on a live account.
Some EAs may place too many orders, or exceed the maximum capital allocation. You need to be careful with that. There’s a limit of 200 orders at a time and 2000 maximum positions open per day.
FTMO offered free repeats of the Challenge in the past. Those were the days when you had 30 to 60 calendar days to complete the challenge.
Now that the pressure was removed, FTMO considers that free repeats are no longer needed.
If you’re having trouble passing the challenge with your losses, learn how to calculate the maximum safe lot size to avoid trouble breaking the drawdown rule.
The free trial is a simpler version of the Challenge. As the name states, it’s free but also doesn’t give you access to a funded account.
The free trial is good for traders who want to test the FTMO trading environment and see if they have what it takes to pass the Challenge. If you are able to pass the free trial successfully, you have a better chance to pass the Challenge too.
FTMO gives you access to the most popular trading platforms used by Forex brokers.
You can use:
When trading the challenges, FTMO has no requirement about position closing. You can keep them open overnight and during the weekend too.
The exception comes when you are funded with a FTMO account.
Unless you have a Swing Trading account, you are required to close your positions when the following happens:
This last rule applies to all stocks for example, so it’s good to know when does the stock market close so that you can be aware of the time limit to close your positions.
If you are trading crypto, since they usually run throughout the weekend, you may not need to close your existing open positions.
When you are trading the FTMO Challenge, there are no rules to close position during news releases.
When you are funded with a real account, except for the swing account type, you have news trading rules to follow.
Two minutes before and after some important news releases, you are required to close positions from the assets that are affected by the news that is being released. Symbols that are not affected by the news can be traded normally.
Yes, FTMO is a legitimate company.
Here are the contacts to reach them:
Here’s the list of the best FTMO alternatives:
For more alternatives check our alternative prop firm tool:
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