FTMO - For serious traders

Exactly!!... I can't fathom why this is so difficult to understand. Refundable fee plus Free capital, holy crap!!

Understandable. All the best.

Lol Good man Driven, Good Man.

Copy and past from a previous post

Quoting Phylo

In a complex system there can be multiple server utilizations - which specific servers does the above refer to ?

The questions here are

1. Regarding these specific servers - what is their utilization ? The impression is that they are FTMO servers not LMAX servers ?
2. Regarding these specific servers - are they maintained in house by FTMO on FTMO premises ?
3. Regarding these specific servers - are they located in outsourced Data Center and if so then the Data Center will be responsible for infrastructure maintenance - who is responsible for non-infrastructure maintenance ?

Quoting Thomas

1. ....
The server where our FTMO Platform is physically running is maintained by a company called Tools 4 Brokers (already mention that). Liquidity provider is LMAX with servers in London, Tokyo and New York.

2. ....
Our platform servers are maintained by T4B. If you talk about servers where we evaluate traders, then we have some servers on our premises and also many servers in several data centres in Germany. There is an external contractual company which is taking care of these servers. We are just renting the hardware.

3. ...
Our technological provider, Tools 4 Brokers, is responsible for the maintenance of our platform. With the other data centres where are rent hardware, these companies are not responsible for any faults in their services.

Additional Comment: from perspective of an engineer

Most server locations and maintenance are outsourced - any single trading company does not have the resources, technological infrastructures or expertise to do this in-house, except large institutions like banks.

When server location and maintenance are outsourced there are legal binding contractual agreements. Any contractual agreement includes a contractual time duration and a contractual expire date. Example: ABC company will house and maintain XYZ company servers for X amount of time for X amount of costs.

So both parties are married to each other for X amount of time - for better or worse, richer or poorer, in economical sickness or health until contractual expire date doth them part.

If ABC underperforms XYZ cannot just up and declare a contractual divorce. That would involve costs - legal costs and legal preparation time costs.
Often, contractual agreements will expire before the case can be heard in court in which case the only option is to weather the storm and if economical sue for damages in due course.

Further to the above ABC company will have employed any number of sub-contractors - each with legal contractual agreement and contractual expire date.

Unfortunately, due to layers of sub-contracting and contractual legal agreements and associated contractual expire date it can be a challenge to iron out weak links in an otherwise strong chain.

Often - when some main or sub contractual agreement in the chain expires a plaguing problem expires as well.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To FTMO: PART: ONE & TWO of TWO remains unrectified - https://www.forexfactory.com/thread/...7#post13046957

Lol, it must be really hard being a trader in a first world country with all those requirements. All I need in my "third world country" is a laptop, internet connection, trading knowledge & capital.

1. It is impossible to empirically verify this statement.

*empirical

1 : originating in or based on observation or experience empirical data
2 : relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory an empirical basis for the theory
3 : capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment empirical laws
4 : of or relating to empiricism

1. As far as I am aware FTMO is the only Prop openly and transparently present on an international forum - of course, subject to correction (Note: FPA in this contents is not considered a forum but a review venue).
2. In fact - other Props appear to be noticeably absent on global forums.
3. To be openly and transparently present on an international forum is to be placed under the global spot-light and magnifying glass and open to global detailed assessment and scrutiny.
4. Props not openly and transparently present on an international forum have no global forum exposure and are not subjected to global detailed assessment and scrutiny.
5. Therefore, it is not possible to indirectly assess the quality of services of forum absent Props.
6. Its easy broadcasting a glossy web site without global forum presence and exposure - everything looks absolutely reliable oozing with quality of service - the public is easily glamorized and sold on dreams.
7. The apple may be whole or the apple may be rotten - without global forum presence exposure and public global comment of scrutiny it is impossible to form any non-client assessment or consensus of forum absent Props.
8. In other words - who is a client of 20 Props - as other than the above global forum presence and exposure offering opportunity of indirect assessment the only way to obtain a direct verifiable assessment of 20 forum absent Props is to be a client of each and every of the 20 Props.

While the above may appear a defense of FTMO - it is not.
Its comment on common sense and what is verifiable and what is not verifiable.

Apparently you're unaware of EliteTrader and Futures.io, to name just a couple where some of FTMO's major competitors have started and maintain similar and equivalent threads (except without most of the complaints seen here because their technology works and they understand what customer service is).

Thanks for update - I have unrestricted access to both forums (futures.io requires a one-off elite member cost for unlimited access) and my experience with futures.io is Prop threads are tiny to small and of few posts without focus or any substantial contribution and I have not found any direct Prop presence on futures.io.
Futures.io:

Here is an example from futures.io Elite Circle, Elite Member FKtrader

* * * * *
Hello traders,
I want to ask about prop trading firms which offer the same approach like XXXX XXXX .Can you please share some names here?
Thanks in advance
* * * * *

1. Note: This post is from the Elite Circle section
2. This post has one reply with a broken link
3. No Big Mike or any Prop response

There are numerous similar posts requesting prop trading opportunity information with zero to a few lukewarm responses posting a link.

Again - no Big Mike or Prop response to any of these threads - I find this odd for the below reasons.

Clarification:

1. Elite Members are given preferential treatment - not ignored.
2. My experience is that Big Mike, as founder of the futures.io forum (previously called Big Mike Forum), robustly and actively promotes all Commercials. Commercials and their content play a large roll on the forum and Big Mike while not fanatical is respectfully and enthusiastically an avid promoter of Commercials and their content - personally answering individual posts with relevant information.

EliteTrader:

Similar to above

Example thread below -

Prop trading Firms
Discussion in 'Prop Firms' started by DaytraderBS, Sep 12, 2018.

The above thread five pages long that has a link that leads to, as far as I can find, two threads hosted by Props.

Further searches have not revealed a host of other threads hosted by Props.

I am having difficulty locating the other 18.

While one of the above mentioned threads has passable substantial content the other consists of,- lol - besides the odd WTF type of post comment, entirely of new member after new member from low income regions in Russia, Ukraine etc., posting their first ever post on EliteTrader and leaving short no substance positive review after positive review after positive review - Xxx is the best blah, blah, blah.

Then there is this - deserves to be framed

* * * * *
I wonder if there would be so many posts without a gift.....

If you decide to leave your feedback (until Oct 31, 2019) in the Trading with Xxx thread, we’ll give you a free gift: Either a free $10K Practice Session OR a free Restart
* * * * *

and for the piss-take there is this - its a giggle !

* * * * *
Damn, I want to try this myself now [blue face with big teeth grin emoji]

Good morning comrades,

my name is Igor Dollarokov, and I am from Retardovakia. I trade many many years, lots of experience. I have lots of knowledge and kapital, but now I joined xxx, they are super, the best. I have nothing bad to say, only thing was that one time it took them a bit longer than usual to pick up phone.
I scalp morer trades per minute now, understanding orderflow. They are the best, great guys. Really. You can believe me.
* * * * *

lol - however, it can be appreciated that said gift will be a substantial gain to those of the mentioned regions. lol ................

Is this meant to be sarcastic, driven18?

Or is it just me?

He is saying put up, shut up and put out, so you get a part of the profits that you have made.

Hello Everyone,
I hope you had a nice weekend.
Our weekend upgrades done during the previous weekend were very successful and although we did encounter one technical issue on MT4 Platform between 11 pm Sep 30th and 3:30 am Oct 1st, our infrastructure metrics show great improvements overall. The above-mentioned issue was a new error that occurred due to the upgrades and we believe we can prevent it from repeating again. Further upgrades were implemented this weekend and as stated before, more are to follow every weekend in near future so we are confident to gradually reduce the problems we have been combating lately to just rare occurrences that no company can really prevent. As you noticed, Tokyo exchange was down for a full day this week and Outlook had worldwide outage for several hours and some of you pointed out that IC Markets and Oanda experienced some too. I’m writing this not to make excuses, merely to illustrate that no system runs smooth forever. In our opinion, the important part is how we deal with such situations and we believe we always take a fair position and provide compensations whenever these are justified.

Now let’s address your specific questions and posts you discussed since our last presence:

Quoting Takisd

Disliked

I just got pretty badly screwed by the Metrix system. I hit a losing streak, which happens. After losing all my profit, I check metrix to see whats left, it says 1400. Then I lose 310 more and close up. Go to check metrix again and it says i exceeded max daily loss by 500. If at any point it showed that I was within $500 of daily loss I wouldn't have opened another trade and thus i failed verification. I was fairly sure that my day prior watermark was 1000 lower than it is being shown. Pretty nightmareish.

Ignored

Hello Takisd, I’m sorry to hear about what has happened to you. As Atenoip pointed out, we have a large disclaimer saying that the MetriX is not updated in real-time, but periodically and the platform result is what ultimately matters. If you believe there might be an error with the MetriX, please contact us at [email protected] and we will calculate all your positions and floating P/L at the time of the recorded violation of Max Daily Loss. If the breach is confirmed, we send you all the calculations and supporting screens and in the opposite case, we would reinstate your account.
You made further points about how difficult it is to track your daily results if the MetriX is not fully up to date. Notice that we aligned our platform times (MT4 and MT5) with our main time – CE(S)T so that you can calculate your daily results even it the trading platform quite easily by summing your trades of the day, current floating P/L and swaps and commissions.
Also, please note that MetriX does display the time of its last update so you should be able to see at the first glance whether it is fully up to date or not. If it is more than 10 minutes behind, you can send us an email reporting the issue so we can fix it for you and calculate your results yourself if you want to continue trading despite the fact the MetriX is delayed.

Quoting tradista

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I don't get it, so much whining.. why don't people track their own stats? It's your business, you should take due diligence through your own means and not expect others to be responsible for giving you the means to your business. Personally, I'm not relying on their tools and I'm keeping my own records. It's hard work? sure... so what? success requires hard work. As FTMO clearly states, those are just tools they put at your disposal "as is", to help and try to give a good service, that's it. If they weren't there you wouldn't even have a clue, and...

Ignored

Hi Tradista, thank you for balancing the thread a little bit. It is very easy to always point to some issue rather than putting up more work and assuming responsibility. We like your approach a lot. Best of luck with all your trades!

Quoting fx75

Disliked

a very simple way to track your progress. trade after trade and day after day... {image}

Ignored

Hello Fx75, please be aware that the Max Daily Loss does not grow or constrict depending on the current account balance. It is set at 5% of the account’s initial capital (on normal risk strategy account) and even if you are in profit, it stays the same. 5% a day is a large loss in our opinion and in order to prevent revenge trading and our psychological traps, we believe traders should stay well below that mark.

Quoting doyathink

Disliked

suggested improvement for Metrix: track equity, in addition to balance, on the main chart. This is actually the number that counts for daily and overall loss.

Ignored

Hello Doyathink. Thank you for the suggestion. We track equity internally and we used to display it in the balance chart. However, many people were confused so we decided to take it down and display just balance.

Quoting AnRan

Disliked

{quote} You can't compound your own profits if you always base your risk on original balance. That is incorrect. FTMO doesn't take your money into account so it does nothing. In order to compound you need to be able to use new profits to to make higher % returns under the same risk but you can never use new profits to calculate a higher % risk and/or RR. If you calculate your trades by % risk per trade. As you made more money and didn't withdraw that money the value of the % would increase. So compounding gives you an exponential line of growth....

Ignored

Hi Anran, we are aware that the way the system is set poses limitations to traders who wish to compound their accounts significantly. From our experience, most traders only leave around 5-20% buffer of the profits above their initial FTMO Account capital to protect themselves from possible losing streaks and regularly withdraw profits made above that. We have decided to leave the Max Daily Loss set statically at 5% of the account’s initial capital to keep it simple without daily changes which might get confusing.
From your posts, I can see that you have extensive market experience. Are you an FTMO Trader yet? We can’t make any promises, but if we see great trading results with strict risk management achieved by any FTMO Trader, our CEO has the authority to offer individual conditions. Once you reach your first account scaling, you can always communicate your vision going forward and we can take it from there.

Quoting Atenoip

Disliked

My metrix area is frozen from 7 hours.. does anyone have the same problem?

Ignored

Hello Atenoip, I hope the problem has been resolved by now. We have hundreds of servers that host all the trader’s accounts. Occasionally one of the servers experiences an error and thus sometimes we have to manually reset it. Other MetriXes can run perfectly fine while yours might be impacted by this issue. If you encounter such a long delay in MetriX update, please report it to us so we can tend to the issue.

Quoting pipmaster77

Disliked

{quote} I believe commission has always been $3, the new server offers no commission on commodities and indices. I have also found spreads to be razor thin now. When I started my spread on GBPAUD was sometimes 7 in Asia and between 4-5 in London/NY, now it's never above like 2.5 even in Asia. I love the new server. I have confidence that FTMO will always make it right. I simply take screen shots as evidence of where a trade should have closed, I'm 100% confident they would honor it if you have the proper evidence.

Ignored

Hi Pipmaster. We actually used to have 0 commissions up until May 18th. In April we started noticing traders using HFT strategies that had quite different results on our live accounts as compared to their FTMO Accounts and in May the number of traders using these strategies grew like a wildfire and thus we had to implement the commissions. Thank you for the appreciation and trust. You are correct, if there is evidence (we investigate every reported case based on the evidence provided by a trader and by our trading platform journals that log all executions, attempted executions and so on), we always make things right.

Quoting KarlKraus

Disliked

{quote}

Ignored

Quoting KarlKraus

Disliked

Their technical problems and horrible customer support are just everlasting. Tomas appears here once every 2 weeks or so, answers SOME of the complaints, but ignores the ones he doesn't like and the most recent ones. The issue of them keeping customers waiting online for over an hour and then just disconnecting them at the end of their office hours remains both unresolved and even unacknowledged in spite of all the complaints about it, here. That tells you all you need to know. They have 20+ competitors who don't have...

Ignored

Hello KarlKraus, The technical issues are being tended to as the highest priority and as I said, we hope to have these resolved soon. It’s not as easy to migrate the entire system while keeping the operations up so it can’t be all fixed overnight. [/font]
I’m not aware of any questions or concerns that I would ignore. This thread is quite alive any many posts are of repetitive character, so I can’t address post by post here. If there is anything you think we haven’t addressed properly, please let us know.
As for the chats being cut once our office hours are finished, we are aware of the issue, but the software we are using for the entire email and chat communication doesn’t allow to keep the current chats in queue open while closing the ability for new chats to be accepted, so it is not possible at the moment. We have recently hired a lot more support staff and once the new support members are properly trained, we will have the chat open 24/5.
Of course, you might not believe me, but we have no paid promoters on YouTube nor here. We often get requests from influencers for discounts and free services and we respectfully refuse to offer any advantages to them.

Quoting Trader4818

Disliked

{quote} This is what puts me off with their whole company, is the horrible stories of freezing platforms, and barely existent customer support when things are going wrong! It is not hard to come onto a thread which they have started, and to spend 1 hour a day to address these issues that occur on a daily basis.

Ignored

Hello Trader4817, We have addressed the issue with traders overloading our customer support in case of technical issue in my previous posts (most recent on page 190). Please understand that it is just not possible to keep such customer support staff to trader ratio which would be required in such occurrences in order for us to be able to handle all the incoming chats. Literally, hundreds of traders come to the chat within minutes if a broad technical error occurs.

Quoting pipmaster77

Disliked

I 100% agree. If they are going to continue to grow, they will need 24/5 support. In this business, support needs to be available during ALL market hours. I still think what they offer vs. their competitors is not even in the same ballpark. I have researched some others and FTMO is, by far, the best bang for your buck. However, if these others firms are issue free (which I do not know as I don't trade with them), then yes that needs to be factored in when making a decision on which one to trade with. I trade and have traded with...

Ignored

Hello Pipmaster, As I wrote in one of the previous replies today, we will have 24/5 support within weeks from now. Thanks for the appreciation words.[/font]


That's it for this time. I will address the few most recent posts not addressed in this segment next time.
Best of luck to all of you, have a great day and a profitable week!
Tomas

Can you name 20+ competitors?

Lmao he's obviously exaggerating.

I didn't mean it as a negative towards FTMO. The 5% of starting balance really isn't that big of a total factor. Even at $300k total funds, risking 1% per trade, that would be 3,000 USD. Lets say they were up 5%, so now they have $315,000 balance. Risking 1% of $315,000 is still only $3,150. A small addition of $150 compared to the total max daily allowance of $15,000. I don't think it has that big of an impact on traders day to day downside. The only real negative, as you said, would be how it caps the upside, but that is what happens with any form of risk management. Lowering the risk lowers the profit, but there is a scaling plan so it balances out.

And on the second part, that is great to know. I will keep it in mind.

Let me guess.. Typical talented anonymus guy sovraperforming the best trading companies of the world, working with trendlines like 50 years ago.
Yes, being a retail trader IS hard also using best modern tools..

Congrats on such a heavy move, although I don't think this can be replicated every month. But you should drop some of the stats, no. This is half of the picture, gotta drop the context. Good-luck in the future

"We have decided to leave the Max Daily Loss set statically at 5% of the account’s initial capital"

So this has changed. It used to be the Overall Max DD of 10% was set statically at 10% of the accounts initial capital. The Max Daily Loss of 5% used to be set according to your "current" daily account balance. So now, if you choose to leave 20k of profits in your account. Your new account balance would be 120K but your Max Daily Loss will remain at 5% of your initial capital. So your Max Daily Loss will remain 5k. That means your new Max Daily Loss will be 4.1%

Has it happen to anyone that the Metrix shows that I have violated the Daily loss, but I have been monitoring it live and I haven't violated it, I have been monitoring it live? Did this happen to anyone and if then they could check it and fix it?

Nah I don't deserve this much praise, you think too highly of me. I'm just a normal profitable trader from a third world country without any scientific background or technological instruments.

Understating, actually.

I think you guys maybe don't appreciate quite how many of these retail funding firms there are, these days.

It's becoming a really competitive market, which is why working technology and reliable customer service are so important.

Easily.

Can you?

Obviously they're not all identical in what they offer and their rules, but broadly speaking, the competition includes TopStepTrader and TopStepForex (those are two different programs but jointly owned), Earn2Trade, TraderDock, Trader2b, MainStreet, Leeloo, CityTradersImperium, The5ers, WeFundTraders, AffinityTraders, Traders4traders, BluFX, AudaCityCapital, BigBendFX, UnibullMarkets, Colibri, NOFT, TrendTradingDNA, TheTraderInstitute, Savius, SMB, SMM (this one's for options), LibertyMarket, Fidelity, Lenno, Funded-Trader, OneUPTrader.

That's about 30, and those are just the ones that come to mind quickly. I'm sure there are plenty more, too.

That doesn't matter much, though. What MATTERS is that FTMO are alone in asking people to make 10% profit in 30 calendar days(!!!), while at the same time having crap technology, and their customer service sucks so much that when you point out to them that they're repeatedly leaving people hanging on their online support toy for over an hour and then just diconnecting them unattended-to, you (eventually!) get a response from Tomas saying things like "it can’t be all fixed overnight" and "it is not possible at the moment" (see above). That's what MATTERS.