FTMO - For serious traders

I am watching it mate.........Powerful

FTMO is showing proof of big payments..........Real deal

Hooked

Happy Friday everyone,
I hope you had a week full of triggered take-profits. Here goes the final update of April, this time rather a short one.
FTMO has been through a regular week with no extraordinary events happening, just focusing on our everyday operations, mainly the IT department has been busy with internal improvements of our infrastructure. Also, as the covid restrictions are being toned down and the outside temperature is on the other hand rising, we finally might enjoy some team-building events.
Anyway, back to business.
As mentioned, we have not recorded any issues worth mentioning or anything that would affect our platforms.
Finally, let’s talk about our thread. Compared to the recent weeks, we’ve settled down a little to something over 60 posts, so I hope my recent posts have answered your questions.
However, there are always some that require a personal response, so let’s see them:


Hello Profitfarmer, there’s nothing to regret really as we have never paid/endorsed anyone to put out a fake review, not even years ago. Our CEO Otakar occasionally reaches out to our traders and asks them if they would not mind sharing their experience with us and reviewing us on Trustpilot, but we're definitely not interested in fake reviews. Clearly fake and artificial reviews are pretty easy to spot and in the end can rather undermine the credibility of the company that endorses them.
Regarding the interviews, we naturally select those traders who are successful in their trading. If you watch any of the interviews, you’ll see that the vast majority of the video is dedicated to the trading strategy of the particular trader and what led him/her to success. That is the reason why our viewers watch these interviews - to get some knowledge and trading insights from successful traders. I do agree that interviewing more long-term profitable traders would not be a bad idea, however, there are not that many traders that actually agree with the interview. And you’re right that we’ve recently interviewed Raul who does have quite a following on social media, but as far I know, that was the only influencer we’ve ever interviewed.

Hi Lakhan, our system is set to actively monitor each FTMO Account and to allow replication of the trades that are in accordance with our rules. Ideally, we would like to have executions of the trades that are not in accordance with our rules technically impossible on all FTMO Accounts, but as no system is perfect and so far we can’t guarantee such functionality with near 100% reliability, the responsibility and liability has to be on the side of the trader. As we are always aiming for long-term cooperation, we tend to issue warnings in the first instance (often coupled with balance correction). We have been assessing the situation and unfortunately have a relatively large number of such offenses, so we might take a firmer stance in the future. I would like to point out that the contracted rules are binding and should never be ignored or disrespected.

Hi PaulMF, I went through several of your recent posts and sent a few examples to your inbox to prevent further escalation of the issue here. Please check your inbox. Thank you.

Hello ForexGa1VA, I’m glad to see you did proper preparation before taking the Challenge. I hope the Free Trials gave you enough confidence to pass the Challenge as well, keep us updated!

Hi Doyathink, I think you’ve already received an answer, but I’d like to also add that if you use our Economic calendar, you can filter out restricted news only. Also, if there is a restricted event coming in the upcoming 24 hours, we will send our FTMO Traders a reminder via email.

Hi Parveenverma, I’m not aware of what is the particular case, but if you’ve received the response that my colleagues are unable to help you, I doubt there’s something I could do about that. Our CEO Otakar is an insanely busy person, but if you contact us at [email protected] and mention that Tomas from ForexFactory should look at this (also please mention your ForexFactory nick - parveenverma), I will check your case personally.

Hello Saileshs89, glad you’re happy! We’ve been actually recently improving our payout operation, so the withdrawal process should be now a bit faster than before.

Hi Ehsaan1999, I believe programming such EA should be possible, however, although you may use them, FTMO does not provide their traders with any EAs.
What I wanted to mention is that there are not that many restricted events throughout the week and especially with our email reminders and Economic calendar, avoiding trading during these restricted news should be quite simple.

Hello LoveScalping, our traders have generally access to the master password only, but the investor password can be provided upon an email request, there’s no need to dig into MT4. If you’d need the investor password, just hit us up at [email protected] and one of my colleagues will gladly provide you with it.

Hi Hxs, yes, holding your positions over the weekend is allowed during the Challenge or Verification. Many similar questions are answered in our FAQ, so I’d recommend you checking it out here.

Hi again LoveScalping, it’s great to see that, especially considering how unfortunately the last Verification ended. I wish you good luck with your current Challenge and mainly with the upcoming Verification, keep us posted!

Hi Premistis, the most favorable time for trading is generally during the New York and London session as at this time, the liquidity is usually peaking and spreads are nice and tight. During the Asian session, the spreads may get naturally a little wider, however, if you plan to scalp majors or gold, the difference should not be significant by any means.
Just bear in mind to be careful around the market rollover from 23:55 to 00:05 platform time. The spreads often widen just before the rollover and in approximately 15-60 minutes after the rollover. In general, we do not recommend trading during these times as it is quite common for the SLs to be hit due to the spread and price spikes occurring during this time.


Okay, we're finished for April, I'll see you all in May! Thank you for your attention, I'm glad the forum came back to its previous form and instead of personal batterings, we can focus on trading again. Take care everybody and enjoy the well-deserved weekend.

-Tomas

Hi Tomas

I have raised this issue in chat but not on this thread, awareness here may prompt you to respond quicker.
I am not here to bash FTMO but as your company is somewhat at the forefront of this type of prop model I would expect that you want to rectify this situation with some urgency.

The issue is the lack of historical chart data (only 12 months) on all instruments apart from Eur-Usd /Gbp-Usd on the cTrader platform.
I believe from another thread your other platform offering MT4 has a good chart history.
There is nothing informing the consumer about the lack of data on your website.
I think you need to make people aware of the lack of data so they know before they make platform decision in the short term but as soon as possible provide full historical data for cTrader. A trading platform lacking in historical data is next to useless for many technical traders regardless of it's great functionality.

Kind Regards

FXD

Hey there! Could you please let me know how US30 is calculated with FTMO? Thanks!

Ouch! Am I kickn out? Is there chance for new challenge as the balance is positive?

Sure!! Of course, Why not. It's not like you clearly broke any rules.

as far as I know for a new challenge (no point should be violated) you have a violation of the daily loss limit

Of course. Stop this challenge and start a new one. You might try more than one, but one by one.

First I would like to share that I passed my challenge after several tries and am excited to be in the verification. By and large I think the FTMO offering is a good one, the overall rules are understandable, and I look forward to working together. I'm also looking at doing additional challenges to have more to work with.

Thanks also for fixing an issue in the updated calendar. I reported that it was silently displaying no banned events on any but the most bleeding-edge browsers. It was fixed quite quickly, thank you.

With the newer liquidity providers I've also learned that the index instruments (US500, US100, US30) are open throughout the full session, until 16:00 Central Time. I think they weren't previously and would close early on Friday. So this is a nice improvement as well.

I do have a couple issues to share, echoing the concerns of others. But first let me please say again that by and large I am happy with my FTMO experience and look forward to working further together. I hope these can be read on this basis.

First, I was (as far as I know, since it was news to support) the first to report the recent loss of crypto liquidity on the weekend. Tomas, I know you say it was a trivial issue but from the trader standpoint it is quite nerve-racking. I also ran into a case where the market closed on a different schedule than posted, or lost connectivity to FTMO (it wasn't clear).

I also encountered an issue the other day where I lost connection to the FTMO server. Now, I had the cTrader client open on several independent devices with completely different network connections -- one business-class -- and all remained otherwise online. On each desktop it suddenly began flashing "attempting to connect to a/c nnnnnnnn". On the mobile client everything was grayed out and it showed a spinning indicator. Of course I immediately contacted support. During this chat, it appeared to regain connectivity and the desktop client seemed to restart the UI (but without restarting the process entirely). Unfortunately there was nothing in the journal about this and support made it very clear that without a log of something the client does not log, they wouldn't believe me.

I've also continued to run into spurious max daily loss violations. My understanding was the root cause was identified and permanently resolved mitigated (okay, I re-read this and feel a little better) but I've run into it several times since, most recently on my last challenge and then again today on my verification (7029362; ticket RJH-KNGTQ-931). FTMO does extend the time once resolved, which is very appreciated, but this is also nerve-racking and takes a lot of time on the trader's end.

I say this from the standpoint of a fan of FTMO, looking forward to trading the FTMO Account. I have always shared my experiences honestly, and you can see I share when things work out well. Tomas, granted some people look to pick fights. I understand that can be frustrating, but many of us are on the same side and are not trying to accuse you of anything. In fact many of us want nothing more than to help FTMO, not even just for our own accounts, and in ways that would reduce disputes. Can we converse on that basis?

The common issue, and really the only one that frustrates me, is that from this side of the table it feels like the risk is all on the trader, whether the issue comes from the trader's side or from FTMO's. As I've said, I believe the general framework and the rules are fair overall. What I mean is that when anything goes awry, the trader is the one at risk of losing everything and we have to rely fully on trusting FTMO's judgment, without any assurance up-front or visibility into the situation. For example, a complete loss of liquidity while the market is moving could cause a gap and max loss violation for the trader even with responsible stops set, but no one will reassure us that we would not lose our account in such a case (I asked). Similarly, when an erroneous loss violation is flagged, we must put together exhaustive documentation because while we wait for investigation we will lose access to the historical data, and we don't know what we will need to argue. And as far as the server disconnection, why would I make such a thing up?

The frustration is that in an ambiguous case it feels like it goes against the trader even when it would cost FTMO nothing to do the opposite. In many other cases simple visibility into things would make us feel much more confident and probably remove a lot of the stress. In my experience it seems that after we demonstrate an issue, all we hear is "it is resolved now". Things happen in any system and just knowing the root cause would make most of us nod and say "ahhh that makes sense". Meanwhile, when it's not ambiguous it seems FTMO does right by people, so why not say the general policy up front?

Respectfully, I tried this several times without any success. Earlier on, when first chasing down the max daily loss issue, I mentioned you and linked to specific posts in this thread in my support request but as far as I know you were never brought in on that ticket. I actually also even made an international call to your office, mentioned you and this thread, but the person who answered the call refused to put me in touch or acknowledge your existence: he said "there might be more than one Tomas who works at FTMO" and "anyone can post on the Internet" and so forth. It was very strange, honestly.

In that case it was a little frustrating because we were told that max daily loss is counted based on starting balance. Some of us were reporting that in some cases it counted based on max equity and were told that was impossible or that we were misunderstanding the rules. I appreciate that you get many posts here, but to be honest it felt a little like the most loud and angry posters without a coherent case got all the attention. For example, I got an initial reply saying I should give details but only got a followup to a supplementary comment of mine and not to the detailed point-by-point I carefully put together or my remaining key concern.

As far as the max daily loss, it feels like in some cases it still may be going according to the high-water equity mark. There have been several instances where I couldn't make the purported loss match anything else but maximum equity. If nothing else, understanding what type of double-counting happens could help us be more reassured while we wait for investigation, if we can tell by the numbers that it will probably be clear to FTMO as well.

In today's case (7029362; ticket RJH-KNGTQ-931), for example, my starting balance was $100479.82 and max allowed daily loss was $5000. At $95907.66 I sold 100 US500.cash @ 4151.45, which I then closed at 4154.09. The price only went up during that time (sadly for me). There were no "spikes" before I closed the position, which I carefully verified tick-by-tick. My daily loss (and max daily floating loss) was $4843.65, but closing that last trade caused MetriX to claim it was $5381.04. That's over $500 discrepancy, but does seem to match my max equity of the day.

It took a lot of money and hard work to finally pass the Challenge and it's absolutely excruciating worrying about the state of the Verification. I don't know if you can know how much passing this means to me, or how carefully I was watching and ensuring I didn't go over, only to see a purportedly tremendous loss. I know it can be fixed but it's agonizing in the meantime waiting to know we're on the same page.

Respectfully, I would like to believe this but it also doesn't match my experience. Maybe it's different for the FTMO Account than the Challenge. But even in the case linked previously, it was frustrating in that very specifically a FTMO bug caused an erroneous violation to be flagged. I followed the procedures given and immediately stopped trading. But, after I proved the issue, all I asked was for the loss on those specific trades at issue to be reversed -- only fair given only incurred due to a bug and me following FTMO's policy after that -- and for another go at my prior challenge as a "bug bounty". Neither would have cost FTMO anything but I gave up after, to be honest, it seemed I couldn't get a straightforward response. Bug bounties are an extremely common practice in the industry but it was just a request and all FTMO would have had to say is "no".

Perhaps something got lost in the shuffle or I misunderstood between the forum posts and the support thread. If I remember, it was around the holidays and I was concerned I wouldn't be credited additional time spent trying to work things out further.

Side note: is it possible that some of the challenges might come from the fact that replies here only come once a week? To be honest this wasn't clear to me at first and led to some frustration. It seems also that it's easy for some messages to get lost in the shuffle over that length of time. Perhaps it would be helpful to check in throughout the week as well to interact with individual posts and then make a weekly post to sum-up. This forum feels like the only way we have to engage with FTMO. You suggested the support address; is that a way to make suggestions that will get a response? For example, I've done similar work before and would still love to suggest a method to detect the MetriX anomaly without the overhead of real-time monitoring.

The work you and all the staff do is really appreciated, especially front-line support who are ready to deal with our concerns at the time, and investigations who dig into everything. Hopefully I've succeeded at conveying my appreciation for them even if I am frustrated at some issue.

I hope this doesn't jeopardize a working relationship as I really look forward to future success together.

A thought just occurred to me!

I've been playing around in MetriX a bit more recently.

Never paid too much attention to the trade log there before but it seems it's been gaining features. Would it be possible to add to each trade its max floating loss and the corresponding price it reached?

This would be useful in 2 ways: First, it would help greatly in reducing the nervousness I mentioned in my other post while waiting for a disputed violation to be investigated; if I know when I was last flat and can see the max loss of trades following matches my understanding, then I can have confidence while I wait. Furthermore, this would be useful for improving trading strategy, as it's something not shown in my client and would greatly help in reviewing my risk management.

P.S. I forgot cTrader has this nice feature (see attached) that helps to look over a trade but it's still necessary to manually locate the extreme and calculate accordingly. Its history is also a bit heavyweight when there are a lot of entries (though I do see I can set a custom range, so I could pick the date I needed).

Solid posts 100%.

Managed to pass the free trial with 100% win rate, might be worth considering to take the real challenge after one/two repetitions!

you need double profit to pass the challenge, and it seems you are scalping, hope you dont have a huge stop loss, it just takes 1 trade to go against you

That's for sure! but since you have as well as double the trading days in challenge compared to the free trial , it might not make any differences!
No need for huge stops as long as not risking more than 1% per trade and avoiding over/emotional trading. Generally focus on quality trades rather than quantity might be the way in order to minimize mistakes!

Smart fellow. Doesn't matter the position size or stop loss distance, so long as you have a safe percentage based risk system you adhere to.

More trials to make sure you weren't just lucky. Good luck going forward.

Any Update on Crypto Payment Option ?

Is it real 3x back?

Haha

The last day of failed challenge!
Anyway, already try my best and being pepared for the next one.
Very hard lesson not to overtrade!

Looks like you passed but then carried on trading. Why? Move onto the next challenge