FTMO

FTMO now sells two routes to a funded account, and they use different drawdown mathematics. The classic 2-Step is a 10% profit target in the FTMO Challenge followed by 5% in Verification, with a 5% maximum daily loss and a 10% maximum loss — both static, fixed against the initial balance, so a $100K account can never breach below $90K no matter how high equity climbs first. The newer 1-Step is a single 10% target with a tighter 3% maximum daily loss and a 10% maximum loss that trails end-of-day, rising as your balance does. Static drawdown is the model we recommend for swing strategies, and FTMO's 2-Step is the cleanest implementation of it among the large firms; the 1-Step's trailing floor removes that advantage in exchange for a shorter path. Sizes run $10K to $200K. The firm's own pages state there is no time limit on either path; third-party trackers say there is no minimum trading days requirement either, which we could not confirm on a primary page. Normal and Swing account types apply to both paths — Swing lifts the overnight, weekend and news restrictions at the cost of lower base leverage.

The headline 90% split is not the starting split. Funded traders begin at 80% and reach 90/10 only through the Scaling Plan, whose criteria FTMO publishes in full: at least 10% net profit across four consecutive monthly cycles, at least two rewards taken in that window, and the account in profit at the moment of scale-up. Meet them and the account grows by 25% every four months, with the split moving to 90%. The ceiling is $2 million in total allocation across all of a trader's accounts — a figure we had previously understated. The challenge fee is refunded with the first reward, which for a $100K account is a meaningful rebate against a fee that third-party trackers place somewhere between €440 and €540; we could not load FTMO's live pricing page during verification, so treat any specific fee as approximate until you see it at checkout.

The first reward can be requested on or after the 14th day after the first trade on the funded account; subsequent rewards follow a similar cadence, with on-demand flexibility on the timing. FTMO reviews each request within one to two business days and sends the reward within one to two business days after the invoice is approved. Rails are bank wire, Visa Direct and Mastercard Send up to $20,000, Skrill up to $3,000, and cryptocurrency. Crypto and Skrill often land the same day; bank wires can take up to five days depending on the receiving bank and country. Against the crypto-native firms in our coverage — Breakout's daily on-chain USDC, HyroTrader's 24-hour USDT — this is slow. Against the forex-heritage peers, it is reliable in a way that a decade of published payouts makes hard to argue with. We score payout speed at 4.2 for exactly that reason: dependable, not fast.

Crypto at FTMO is a CFD symbol list — roughly ten pairs, BTC and ETH plus majors — at low single-digit leverage that drops further on the Swing account. On the Normal account, crypto positions cannot be held overnight or over the weekend, which for a 24/7 asset class is a structural handicap; anyone holding crypto through a weekend needs the Swing variant. The forbidden-practices page is the most detailed in the industry and worth reading before purchase: a two-minute blackout either side of high-impact news on the affected instruments, a ban on gap trading around news and market close, and EAs permitted unless they overload the server (the stated threshold is 2,000 requests a day) or replicate a forbidden practice. The largest change since our April review is corporate. FTMO closed its acquisition of the broker OANDA on 1 December 2025, its founders became OANDA co-CEOs in March 2026, and US residents — previously excluded — have been accepted since around August 2025 through OANDA's NFA-regulated infrastructure, with MT5 access preserved. No other prop firm owns a regulated broker. It does not change the CFD nature of the crypto product, but it moves FTMO into a different category of counterparty risk from every other firm in this list.