FTMO Review

Unfortunately business model is not fair to traders.
You need to pay a fee to participate which is only refunded after passing the evaluation and verification. Still you will not get fee back You need to trade a live account and fee is only refunded with your first profit withdrawal. All this points to un-fair business model for traders. Stay away !

Only going to post this once. A friend of my son asked me to look at this. I'm a prop trader and have been for over twenty years. I've also been around a bit. All the reviews with glowing praise are clearly bollocks. NO ONE offers risk on accounts for $ 800 up front and then 70% of the profits. Think about it. $ 800 in FX trading is so tiny it's like trying to find a knat's testicle with a welding mask and gloves. But hey ho - go ahead and make the scammers happy and give them your $ 800. And when you work it out that it is a scam, you can go ahead and feel really F...g stupid. Since you are.

DO NOT JOIN! listen I am a normal person who trades. the FIRST day I placed a trade my server failed and it lost... I could not see the trade or anything at all. It magically turned back on when I was out of the trade. This happened every time I placed a trade. So obviously I contacted them and told them that I was worried this was a scam. I sent everything that they needed to investigate. They said it was MY fault. I literally sent them a screen recording of my server and they still said it was my fault... IT IS A SCAM. I am an ICT charter member... enough said

I had brought their $100000 Challenger Account and on the first day itself after they provided the login details and few orders were traded, they changed the password and i could not login to account and eventually they closed my account saying I did not pass. Beware and never join them, you will just end up paying the fee and that is what they want. All positive reviews are not real ones.

I passed both a challenge and verification. But the company said, your strategy involves very tight stop loss which can't be used. And offered me a free challenge and warned me not to use that strategy again. I understand that their real account suffers a loss from slippages due to my tight stop loss. But if they have given us a clear instruction about their minimum stop loss placement in the first place - for instance, 10 pips away from entrance, I'd have happily followed. In this case, they should eliminate the statement - "Trade your own trading strategy with no limits or restrictions.", and impose a minimum stop loss requirement on us.

This happend on 2 of my accounts.
FTMO fails you on max daily loss exceeded when that is far from the truth.

So what happend to me is I failed challenge 1 as stated above.
After I “failed” the challenge I went on trading on this account trying out a new strattegy which ended in a series of losses.
Now please note that had I not “failed” the challenge I would obviously not be stupid enough to try out a new strategy on a paid account. I treated it as a demo account.
I then went and purchased a new challenge.
Sure thing on day 3 I “failed again due to max daily loss exceeded.

At that stage and only that stage did I realize that something is wrong.
I contacted FTMO and told them their daily max loss is not resetting and asked them kindly to sort out the issue. This was on my second account only.

Something told me to check my first account and sure as hell all the daily profit and losses together added to the max daily loss on that specific day.
So yet another email to FTMO.
They are willing to reinstate my account, but not at the balance it was prior to aTHEIR system failing and sure as hell no retake on the challenge.
My question, why should I settle for an account balance less than prior to system failure.
FTMO should take ownership of their system and all the glitches that comes with that.
Be truthful and over rightly if not a new challenge at the very least the balance prior to system error.
Why should we pay for FTMO mistakes?
Is this a mistake or is this the way they scam people to pay for new challenge?
Kind off looks dodgy to me.

There is a really serious problem with this company's requirements to graduate past the initial funded account size. A 34.5% annualized return rate (in 10% four month intervals) is required to move up from the initial 100k to a 175k account in the first year. Don't believe me? Here is their wording taken directly from https://ftmo.com/en/scaling-plan/

"Capital increments on the FTMO account take place in four-month cycles. For a capital increase, the trader has to gain at least 10 added percent points in four consecutive months (i.e., the average of at least 2.5% gain per month)."

This is BAD for two reasons:
1. It is difficult for conservative traders with minimal drawdown to increase their funding. These are the traders most wanted by hedge funds, so it begs the question of what FTMO's goals and motivations might be.
2. It forces traders to "take shots" at increasing their funding, and this may force traders to deviate from their optimal money management strategies.

My advice to improve your advancement/scaling model:
Reward traders for consistency over bi-annual or annual periods. You can still keep the 4-month increase model, but if you have traders who consistently bring in 15-20% year after year who are staying at the initial 100k, they will be gone like the wind. You are ensuring that you lose some of your best traders. But then again, maybe your business model does not rely on profitable trader retention.

I gave a 2 star because they payout and overall you can make money with them.

My issue:
The ftmo servers are not good. This is the third time I can remember since they’ve migrated to new servers that they’ve crashed. I was in verification phase and was trading bitcoin on Sunday. Equity was up to $102,800 and I tried multiple time to close. It wouldn’t close and eventually hit my stop loss.

Here I made a great trade and put myself back into position to pass. It’s Friday and still no new account or anything. Barely even any response through email support. They acknowledged it but aren’t willing to replace my verification account.

If you have bad servers AT LEAST help the customer.

Overall it’s not a bad company and withdrawals are fine. But the way they go about things on customer service side of things are bad. Servers aren’t good at all and if they can’t help me when these issues arise, I’ll not have much faith in this company moving forward.

FTMO was very friendly and made me comfortable before I gave them money.

The platform overall is smooth and setup was quick.

Unfortunately, I think their recent "FTMO Server" is less reliable than I understood from reviews of their old service. Market specifications have been wrong several times. Other times they are randomly changed without notice and fixed without explanation. Sometimes the server is down, unscheduled. Crypto trading unavailable on weekends despite promised availability.

Even though there is live support, there is no coverage during US market hours by anyone with authority. So you are left waiting a business day for response, more to resolve if there are followup questions.

So far I have not had any luck getting time restored to my challenge for these issues. I have lost probably 7 out of the allotted 30 days (really, 28, because there is no crypto trading on weekends after all).

I hope these can be worked out and will update my review if we can make this happen. I would love to have a long working relationship with them.

I was trading for the 10k account and my daily loss limit was £500 and my goal for the 30 day was 1000 I made a total of 4,119.76 in 2 days smashing the target but because my “floating” loss was -900 I violated the limit even though that trade later turned into a £3k profit trade. FTMO is legit but I wish that wasn’t a violation as In my MT4 history the most I physically lost was 383 but again “floating” losses ruined it for me hoping they can give me the benefit of doubt as I clearly know what I am doing.