FTMO - For serious traders

-You are literally making assumptions and being cynical with this statement. You are not providing any value here. You are trolling at this point.

If you're not able to see the value then it is your problem, not mine. And you can calm down now as I don't intend to lose any more time in this pointless discussion with you

Just as an FYI, FTMO has a similar term:


A little concerning and something that put me off of programs like Funded Trader, where their risk management team will bounce you for "changing strategies". Which is challenging when my trade strategy includes tuning position size/granularity based on confidence levels, already secured P&L for the day, etc. That said I bounced around a lot in my FTMO challenge and they had no problem, so I hope the same would apply on the FTMO Trader Account.

It would be terrible to go in on a larger trade based on high confidence (even with monitoring/stops/buffer), get a big win, and get hammered by FTMO for "forbidden practices" and lose the account or even just have the trade busted.

Wow, I wonder how I got "Commercial Member" flair?

-Yes, but every firm will likely have something similar to cover themselves, legally. But this kind of language is not concerning for me, especially as it relates more to obviously-questionable practices and not subjective, arbitrary reasoning. What is concerning for me is when we start to see evidence of firms using such practices to reject funded traders, even though they are profitable and hove not broken any rules. I have not seen FTMO or any Traders Central firm doing this yet, to be clear. And unless we start seeing concerning evidence coming from traders, then I will not worry so much about it.

In the case of any firms that may be operating under the Traders Central umbrella, there is an important point to consider here. Rejecting a trader before they are funded may be reasonable, in my opinion, even if they are profitable and have passed their challenges. The reason being...if you, as a prop firm, intend to allocate real capital to a trader, then you want to first ensure that they are consistent and know what they are doing. You do not want to risk real capital on someone that got lucky with a hail-mary or was clearly gambling or fumbling through their challenges. Such traders that are rejected, even though they pass their challenges, are fully-refunded, which is reasonable and expected. So, I do not see anything wrong with that model, as it shows that they mean business and are not just looking for kids that are aiming to gamble for quick profits.

I have personally seen a couple of traders claim to have been rejected, for the reasons mentioned above, that passed their challenges, but never received a funded account. For the most part, there is nothing wrong with it, so long as traders are receiving their refund, and I have not heard of anyone yet that has not recovered their challenge fee. In order to be fully objective, we have to consider the possibility that Traders Central is rejecting good traders and selling that data off to a 3rd-party, but based on what I have seen from traders reporting such rejections, they seem to be legitimately rejected for the reasoning outlined above.

The part that worries me about all of this, however, is if traders start to get rejected for inconsistency or some questionable reasoning, even after they are funded and have worked so hard to grow the account. So far, I have not seen any evidence of this, personally, but as a trader, this is the kind of thing that I would prefer not to have to worry about. Which brings me back to my reasoning for making such requests here, with FTMO. It would be great if all firms would consider such programs that have no DDD and super-fast scaling, but I do understand that not everyone may be receptive to such models, as clearly outlined in this thread already.

The biggest concerns with such models is greater exposure to investor capital (in the case of super-fast scaling), and, inability to effectively secure profits (in the case of no DDD). Both of these issues can be fully mitigated, however, as previously mentioned. Not only would this allow for greater profit-potential for firms that employ such programs, but it could potentially attract more traders to any firm that offered it, so long as there were no shenanigans for traders to have to deal with.

This is a great option. Very exciting, and thank you for responding to demand in this way. I created a new dummy challenge to check it out.

Went looking for this yesterday and it was missing. Talked to support and same for them. Guess it was down. Tried today and it's back.

After exploring it a bit I thought I would share what I can see. Unfortunately the payment interface isn't very documented, so hopefully this is useful to others.

First, there is a 3% fee. On top of that Unlimint uses an unfavorable conversion rate. So, for a $400 payment they want 0.00682676 BTC which comes out to $432.87 at current prices. This is more like an 8% fee.

It looks like only Bitcoin is supported. The button for this provider shows a Bitcoin icon only, and upon clicking it asks for a rollback address (BTC only) without providing any other documentation.

In particular, the issue with these providers is the terms of payment acceptance and here, if I must be truly honest, this is where Unlimint is lacking right now. The biggest questions are 1) how long one has to make the payment and 2) when it's considered accepted. I can share that after clicking through it does allow 3 hours to make the payment. But, there's no information on how many confirmations are required... this could be plenty of time or it could be quite insufficient. And given Bitcoin is the only option presently, one might need to know the amount of Bitcoin to buy and then if it's not considered received in time one might have to buy more and on top of it has lost 3-4x transfer fees in the end.

This is where a stablecoin could be very helpful. I saw you mentioned Tether (presumably USDT) and even with the atrocious gas fees of Ethereum it might be preferable to at least have a fixed price. That said, it would be great to support at least USDC as well. More importantly, it would be great to be able to send Tether over Tron which costs mere cents rather than Ethereum which would double the costs of making the payment. In general I would love to see accepted USDC/USDT via Algorand/Stellar/Tron blockchains because those transport options are dirt cheap (and I suggest the same for crypto payouts). It would also be great if they considered accepting other pure-crypto payment options such as LTC, BCH, Dogecoin (plus ALGO/XLM if desired) that are much faster and cheaper than BTC and ETH.

Regardless this is a great option and I hope this info is useful to others. I hope you can find out for us how many confirmations are required and whether it will be BTC-only from this point on.

There are no other providers shown so I guess Unlimint is the only crypto payment option after this point?

Be ware to buy any plans on FTMO anymore they turned scam and cheated me.
I paid for the 200k plan by crypto and they did not gave me account after contacting they rejected its not our address and we have techinal issues on crypto payments . But what next I lost my money , only paid on the address shown on their page.
They not gave me even 100k account on request I lost full amount by trusting these fake peoples.

-Provide link to blockchain data so that people can verify legitimacy and accuracy of transaction. If FTMO (or their payment processor) is custodian of the recipient wallet, then they will be able to access your funds and return them to you. If you erroneously sent funds to the wrong address, then you are out of luck; that is your responsibility and FTMO cannot do anything to help you, nor would they be obligated to do so.

Is that the only "proof" of payment you can provide?

Which payment provider and currency did you use (and, as already asked, what address did you send to)? If Bitcoin, what address did you give for rollback?

If you use Blockchair you can use the transaction ID to even get a nice PDF "receipt" that can be used for easy reference. You can also use the address you sent it to get there.

A scenario consistent with the circumstances described here (I don't speculate as to these actual events) is that the user enters an incorrect rollback address for the Bitcoin payment. Then, even if sent on time, it does not receive the requisite number of confirmations and so Unlimint bounces it to that wrong address. Defects here are the lack of any documentation before it starts demanding payment details, the lack of explanation as to what the rollback address is, and the lack of documentation on how many confirmations required. The risk is the scenario we see here (regardless of whether it was the issue in this exact case): a user attempts to follow what instructions are given, pays the full amount on time, but the payment is bounced forever. The challenge for FTMO is that because these seemed to be external iframes, they are limited to providing feedback to the vendor or creating their own documentation for users.

Can you be more specific about whether they said it was the wrong address or technical issues? The reason I ask is you show a crypto.com option marked unavailable, while as I mentioned even Unlimint was missing initially and then it was available but the only option. crypto.com are also more of a known vendor; I'm not their biggest fan but I've literally never heard of Unlimint whose documentation and user experience are both sketchy. If that crypto.com option will remain (as long as it's reliable) that makes many of my previous comments moot since I see they accept Litecoin and Dogecoin. :-)

Hello Traders,

Friday is here and along with that, another FTMO update as well. I hope you all had a great, profitable week (don’t forget that you can share your results here as well).

Let’s get into the platform updates:
Due to scheduled maintenance on Saturday 23rd October, trading will be halted from 8 am to 6 pm GMT+3 on all platforms. As a consequence of the upgrade, access to MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 Mobile Apps will be unavailable until Sunday, 24th October inclusive. Therefore, kindly make sure to manage your trades accordingly and on the desktop version of the relevant platform.
Secondly, I would like to point out the upcoming futures expiration. Due to the upcoming futures expiration on Tuesday 26th October, trading on NATGAS.f will be disabled from 9 am to 10 am GMT+3 in order to allow the transition to the underlying with the new expiry date. Traders are required to close all the open positions on NATGAS.f and delete the pending orders on the symbol before that time regardless of the account type (FTMO Challenge, Verification, or FTMO Account). Any remaining open positions and pending orders will be automatically closed. Traders will be able to re-enter the position or create new orders if they wish to do so when trading resumes.

Now let’s address something that most of you already know about, but it has not been officially announced here yet: Crypto payouts.
After extensive development and testing, we’re finally able to offer our FTMO Traders to withdraw their profits in cryptocurrencies. The payouts are available in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Tether, Bitcoin Cash and are provided by FTX.com.
The crypto withdrawal is available in the Client Area just as the Bank Wire option or Skrill. Crypto payouts submitted till 12 PM (noon CE(S)T) will be processed on the same day, payouts submitted between Friday 12 PM and Monday 12 PM (CE(S)T) will be processed on Monday.

That should do it for the updates. Now, there were several posts I’d like to respond to, so as always, please find these below:


Hi Mdot, as usually, I can not really comment on our future business decision, however, the Evaluation Process represents a crucial part of our business that pre-determines which traders have the qualities to manage the FTMO Account. As we copy the trades executed on FTMO Accounts on our own accounts at our own discretion using aggregated orders, entrusting the account to just anyone who pays the initial fee currently does not seem reasonable.

Hello Nsak3y, thank you for your compliments, getting in touch with traders also outside of the formal communication is actually sort of refreshing.
When it comes to the calculation of our Max Daily Loss limit, there are multiple reasons why this Trading Objective is designed in such a specific way. Vitore below actually described one of them quite well - as the Max Daily Loss reset every day to the same default value, it gives us the assurance that the equity on our proprietary live accounts moves just within certain limits. Also, the limit is supposed to prevent traders from overtrading and revenge trading.
Now, I can not 100% confirm that this Trading Objective will never be changed or adjusted, however, we’re definitely not planning on doing so in the near future.
When it comes to the Scaling Plan, that has been a part of our services for many years. If we spot a consistent and profitable trader, it is naturally in our own interest to provide the trader with more resources to trade. If you manage to generate at least 10% of net profit after 4 consecutive months of trading on your FTMO Account while making at least 2 withdrawals, your initial balance will be increased by 25%, and your Profit Split ratio increases to 90%.

Hi Koop, thank you for the warm words, crypto payouts were in development for quite a while as we truly wanted to make sure that the whole process will work flawlessly. Also, Tether is one of the available currencies you can use for withdrawal.

Hello Delta-vega, we’ve been reaching the transaction limit relatively often, adding a second crypto provider was therefore a necessary step. Also, I can confirm that Unlimint has not been available on Tuesday for certain countries in a span of a few hours due to quick maintenance. Regarding the fee - Unlimint does take a 3% fee for their services, however, you then have to include the network fee which also depends on your crypto wallet provider.
Currently, if you decide to go for USD as the payment currency and Unlimint as the provider, only BTC is available and as far as I know, this is already being handled (plus Crypto.com is also available with 4 possible payment currencies as well).
I agree that choosing Bitcoin as a payment currency may not always be the most convenient choice as there is no way to effectively predict how long the confirmations (I believe at least 6 are necessary for BTC transactions with both Unlimint and Crypto.com) are going to take (traders can actually affect that by setting a higher network fee, if available). If the trader chooses Litecoin for example to pay for the initial fee, the probability that the transaction is going to be processed faster than a Bitcoin one is pretty high.
I would also like to add that crypto payments/payouts are one of the fields that are still in the phase of undergoing development and further improvements can be expected.

Hi Eagle Eyees, we spent 15 days trying to track the transaction and sent you 8 emails in the effort to bounce the transaction back to your wallet. However, after you provided us with the Hash ID, Crypto.com, unfortunately, had to confirm that the address the payment has been sent to does not belong to Crypto.com Pay and as the address was incorrect, there’s sadly nothing we could do. Please note that we are very well aware of how important reputation is in our business and we truly did everything we could to retrieve the payment. Once again, I would like to emphasize how important double-checking is when processing cryptocurrency transactions as once the payment is sent, there’s no way back.


Another update is history, today with a little more questions than usual, which is great. Thank you for your participation and I'll see you all next Friday. Enjoy the weekend everybody!
-Vitek

Hello, again. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my suggestions.

Regarding the daily loss limit, I understand your reasoning and respect your decision to stick to that. I do know that not every firm will share the same risk appetite, and that is completely reasonable.

Regarding scaling, I am fully aware of your scaling plan, but was simply asking if you would ever consider a more aggressive plan. I do believe that the added risk can be fully-mitigated if such a program were structured correctly. As such, I do hope that you will reconsider this one, at least as an option for those that are interested.

Thank you.

One thing still bothers me with FTMO compared to other prop firms (like My Forex Funds and Traders Central)
The thing is I think FTMO overcharge for their 200k challenge, it costs around $1270, while other prop firms like My Forex Funds charge $979 for 200k challenge, and Traders Central charge $720 for 200k challenge.

The thing I don't understand is the price increment from 100k challenge(540 euro) to 200k challenge(1080 euro) is 100% increment
While the price increment from 25k challenge(250 euro) to 50k challenge(345 euro) is only 42%
also the price increment from 50k challenge(345 euro) to 100k challenge(540 euro) is only 39%

why when the account size double from 100k to 200k you double the fees but for lower tier accounts when the account size double the fees doesn't actually double instead you get the higher tier account at a reduced prices compared to buying two lower tier accounts.
The 200k challenge fee should increase by around 40% of the 100k challenge fee, same increment as lower tier accounts mentioned above, so it should cost 1.4*540(euro)=756 euro

Obviously this is your business and you charge whatever you think is suitable, but I thought this is something worth mentioning to you since you take feedback from people who are interested to join FTMO.

FTMO need to cut some prices

Prices are irrelevant as we get them refunded once challenges are passed.
If people are not confident in their ability to trade in order to pass the challenges then they should keep honing their trading talents with the unlimited free trial accounts FTMO make available and not be spending money punting on buying the challenges.

Hi Vitek,
first thing first I would like to thank you for your presence and your prompt responses here.

I am wondering why FTMO doesn't align the reset time of Max Daily Loss to the mt4 server time.
At now, traders are penalized because the increases in spreads that regularly occurs gradually starting from 22:55 CET (23:55 mt4 server time for FTMO accounts) and the reset of max daily loss occurs at 00:00 CET and not at 00:00 mt4 server time......this means that any time that a trader go overnight and he has a negative open p&l he could lose the funded account for surpassing the max daily loss just for the widening spread from the broker (i.e. you are increasing the probabilities for traders to lose the account for causes not entirely/directly dependent on him).
It is obvious that pro traders has to try to factor in even this kind of things, but I really think that your terms are not fair in this way because the widening of the spreads is very broker and event dependent, so even if I can factor in very well an average widening of spread, if volatility or liquidity (or something else) in a given period is worst relative to the average, this will bring the broker to widens spreads in a bigger way and this could lead to lose an account not just for trader mistake.......so, don't you think that align the reset time of the Max Daily Loss in line with the midnight of mt4 server time would be really in line with your "motto" of providing the best trading terms and conditions for traders?
In this way a trader can cut out the probability of lose a funded account for this very unfair reason, because the widening of the spreads would impact the cushion provided by the next/new day Max Daily Loss...

it doesn't make any sense to me to keep this misalignment in reset hours...


Thank you for your attention

Exactly. Plus if the price of say the $100k challenge is too high, you can always take on something like the $25k challenge. Pass it, get refunded, then take on another $25k challenge. Once you pass that one you get refunded again, and can merge your two accounts into one $50k account.

-I personally do not have a problem with current FTMO prices, but I do believe that prices could be relevant, both, for FTMO and even for seasoned traders. Maybe a few, possible reasons:

1. Competition. In order for FTMO to remain competitive, they have to consider all current and future price-points.

1. Operational costs. If FTMO decided to offer free challenges, for example, then that might present problems for them from an operational standpoint.

1. Expectations and how they are perceived. Depending on how high or low the price-point is, could impact how traders perceive them as a company with regard to expectations/standards, professionalism and overall seriousness. For example, if FTMO challenges were $10K, many traders might laugh at them and quickly dismiss their offerings. Similarly, if challenges were $1, many traders may not take them seriously and might question their legitimacy.

1. Even good traders have losing streaks (or connection issues/emergencies etc.). You may be fine using proper risk and money management while trading within your own parameters, but you may struggle when you are forced to generate 10% or 20% profit on an account within a limited time-frame.

1. Not all traders live in developed countries where they might feel comfortable risking that much, even for the smaller programs. Or, maybe they would feel comfortable, but might have to spend a great deal of time saving up.

1. Marketing (conversions/profits). Higher or lower prices could impact the number of traders that sign up and would need to be split-tested to confirm.

At the end of the day, whether or not there should even be a fee for such a challenge could be questionable. Furthermore, as you say, if you pass, you are refunded the fee (so long as FTMO honors that). Those that lose, can hopefully treat it as a tax write-off; costs of doing business and/or as educational expenses etc..

Just my opinion.

Aye but let's face it, most people who whinge about FTMO's prices are doing so purely because they are comparing them with the prices charged for similar packages from other prop firms, none of the (perfectly valid) reasons you raised.

and the only real competitor is MFF. I don't take any firm other than FTMO or MFF seriously at all at this point.