Hello all. Long time lurker, first time poster. I thought I would share my own experience attempting the FTMO challenge. Read posts here and elsewhere discussing the company and noticed a lot of supposition and not much about the specific questions I had. FTMO was very friendly and gladly answered all questions I had prior to giving them money. They really seem like they want everyone to succeed and their intentions are good. Currently on my second $50k challenge. Blew up the first one fairly quickly due to circumstances that were not entirely my fault but I entirely should have managed better. The second has gone better from a trading standpoint but unfortunately I have not had a great experience with the reliability of the server, and I've lost a full week of time from my challenge all told. There is no information posted on the FTMO site about when certain markets are supposed to be available. One is supposed to rely on the specification on the server. And this makes sense, remembering that this is its own global market. One Friday I was trading US500 when the market suddenly stopped. According to their specifications it was open for another hour (trusted this and had planned to trade from the closing bell to the 16:15 options deadline). Turns out the specification was simply wrong. Luckily it gapped up on Monday. Crypto futures are supposed to be available 24/7. This was a big reason I chose to go with FTMO. They simply stop working on the weekend. I've narrowed it down to price data simply vanishing and the FTMO Server will not even accept a limit order (it says "no price snapshot"). I reported it one weekend. They said "no one else reported issues" but it happened again. On other days different markets have simply frozen on me. Then they say "oh there is a server shutdown interval at this time". I asked them to post the schedules on their Web site but they tell me I should rely on the specification. One day the minimum order size on index futures jumped from 1 to 3 lots randomly. I contacted support because this greatly interfered with my trading plan and risk management. The live representative had no access nor authority to do anything at all, and refused to commit to whether the time waiting for a response would be added back to my challenge. Support did reply the next day, simply saying it was fixed with no explanation and no offer to extend time. I've seen lots of speculation that the FTMO Server is them trading against the user. I have no reason to think that. But it is interesting that the times the crypto markets have suddenly gone offline is when there was a strong directional trend. Similarly, when there was world news, the minimum order size for index futures changed such that that fluctuations would violate the drawdown. No reason to believe this is anything other than a coincidence, but I do notice it. So, my takeaway so far. Friendly and informative in pre-sales; they make it comfortable to give them money, and challenge account is set up quickly. No support during US market hours, and traders are not taken at their word, so better hope you have logs for anything. No success yet getting lost trading days added back to challenge. Crypto markets, available on weekends, is a strong benefit; unfortunately, doesn't work. Market specifications changed randomly without notice/explanation and are sometimes wrong. Server fast and reliable, except for the times it goes offline suddenly, and latency is low. I have every reason to believe that anyone who is able to pass the challenge has no difficulty getting paid successfully. I really like FTMO and want to believe this is an isolated series of incidents. I just noticed they requested logs from the initial crypto incident and in the meantime I was able to get ahold of a live rep and document it with her. She suggested that perhaps they would offer to replace the time lost once I confirmed the issue was resolved. Still working with them and hope we can work something out. If we can I have a goal to work with them long-term, even if it takes another challenge. Will update everyone here with how this is handled, whatever the outcome.
Interestingly, the "MetriX" page is not reliably updating any more. (No, I haven't violated any drawdown; in fact, I have $1600 to spare.) It's supposed to update every 10 minutes. I've made $160 for the day already yet it shows $0.00, even though the "Last Updated" field changes on each refresh. That page is not meant to be up-to-the-minute but one could easily log in an hour after any trades, rely on the information shown there, and blow the daily limit. This would technically be the trader's own fault. It's a shame because the platform seems really nice and well-put-together. It's just that day-to-day the reliability may not be there after all. Will continue to update. I wouldn't have posted this on its own, except it was kind of an amusing coda to the post I made starting this thread.
Yes, I experienced the same Friday an hour earlier close on NQ than the regular session, unfortunately I was short, and planning to go flat into the close, but... nope. One question though: FTMO states that if at the end of the Challenge you are short of their target, but positive anyway, and didn't violate other rules, you can get a free Challenge for one more month. Is it a one-off offer, or you can have consecutive such free challenges, if you are still positive, but again short of their target?
Yeah the big exchanges close then too. The problem is the FTMO specifications didn't reflect their own actual market. And they seem to change randomly (the contract size thing). I'm concerned about how these specifications are maintained and how changes can happen. Don't know; haven't been lucky enough to encounter that. I may have blown up this account too. Sadly the damage was done early on. Was up by a few grand, got exuberant and started chasing losses until I was down by just as much. Was making some headway clawing my way back and just got clobbered by that Trump/China trade war thing the other day. I think I kept it above the max drawdown but only have about $5 left... might leave it there out of some kind of perverse pride not to violate, since I doubt there's a way to win from there. Still, if FTMO could find a way to reassure on these issues I would consider another. The plaftorm seems nice overall.
Just wanted to provide an update. Very happy with how they handled the original issue but now seeing trailing drawdown rather than fixed as described. Very concerning, cost me several grand and nearly marked my challenge as failed. (Reposted because I missed censoring one bit of PII from my screenshot.) So, in the end they did credit me for the time on the previous issue. Sadly I blew up that account though. The server/exchange also seems to have become much more reliable with greater availability. Having a different issue which is really concerning: FTMO daily (not overall) loss is acting as a trailing drawdown (from the high of the day, not from the daily opening equity). I've seen this in 2 challenge accounts now and have detailed documentation; support assured me I had plenty of room since I was close to breakeven, but as soon as I put on a trade the system claimed I was close to $2000 daily loss. Asking them to bust the 2 trades I closed rather than reversed as soon as I saw risk of triggering the limit, costing me $840 not counting the $3000 profit I missed out on. Confident FTMO will make it right but would recommend double-checking any supposed daily loss violation very carefully. .................................................... Long and gory details below, concerning 2 challenges I purchased during the recent sale. I started a new challenge and ran into an issue where the daily loss limit triggered differently than MetriX reported. Once that happened I looked closer and saw that it had been partially updating. This is different from the issue where it stops updating overall given one would not see that it's in fact not updating in order to report it. I ended up violating the overall limit though so I chalked it up to a glitch. But then in the other challenge, I encountered the same thing! Brand new account, so of course the permitted daily loss was $2500 aka at $47500 equity. Got up $800 in fairly short order, then unfortunately gave it back. When I paused to ensure I wasn't chasing, I looked at MetriX and it was showing me down $1014 even though my lowest equity was $49786. Contacted support, had to work a while to convince them it was real. But they assured me it would be good from there and I had to $47500 for the day. But then as soon as I entered a new trade and it dipped, it started me showing down further and further, edging toward $2500. So I closed everything immediately. I followed up again with support to add this to the ticket. Right now, I have absolutely confirmed from my end that FTMO daily loss is acting as a trailing drawdown, not as described. The value shown for max daily loss always matched my absolute high of the day, including daily profit, subtracted from my current equity. Screenshot attached. Annotated to show key points. I also gave them a screenshot of my trading client showing there were no lower wicks or anything. The dip at the end is where I was long 2 BTCUSD and closed it as soon as I saw the combination of support failing (right before the big rug pull, ha) and the incorrect value. It's really frustrating because my plan was to reverse, not exit, my position if that level failed. And sure enough it dropped $1500 or so. So now because I did only half of my play I'm down $840 rather than up $2000. I've asked them to credit the time for investigation (because I'm not touching the account until then) and to bust those last trades. I've done a number of challenges so far and never once asked for a trade to be reversed (barring that time the market closed early, but that worked out). Here, though, I was quite confident in my trade plan but couldn't afford the risk of a dead cat bounce triggering the daily limit even though I was nowhere close. I'm not asking for what I "would have" done. But I want to be back before I began executing my plan, which I only aborted due to this bug. Hopeful they will make this right and of course I will keep the community updated.