In a few words, FTMO is an online proprietary company that provides capital to traders, explicitly — successful traders who pass a challenge. The company’s sole mission is to seek out successful forex traders and turn them into Fund Managers by allowing traders to trade FTMO’s funded accounts and receive up to 80% of generated profits while risking no funds of their own except for the small fee.

For example, if you can make 10% on a $200,000, you can end up with $16,000 paid out to you. Sounds appealing, doesn’t it?

But you must first pass a trading challenge with strict rules for a target profit you need to meet, how many days you can trade, how much you can lose on any day, and how much you can lose at any point during the overall challenge.

That sounds hard, but it is not impossible – I know that because I managed to pass the challenge. So, I want to share some tips and tricks that I personally think are the most important if you want to try and take on the FTMO challenge.

5 Tips on How to Pass the FTMO Challenge Successfully

1. Make Sure Your Strategy is Profitable

This may seem like the most obvious thing ever to some, but repetition is the mother of all skills. You need to make sure beforehand that you will be able to trade profitable for long periods of time and keep the drawdown within limits stated in the challenge requirements.

You need to have positive results to show for at least a 3-month period.

2. Get Results First on Your Live Account

I always recommend all inexperienced traders start with a demo account first, but for the FTMO challenge having good performance with a demo account is not enough.

Demo trading is not the same as making decisions when you have your own money on the line. So, you need to make sure that your strategy is working on a real account, even if it is a cent one.

Psychology is crucial for trading. Your consistent results will show that you are emotionally ready for the FTMO challenge.

3. Make Sure You Have the Right Tool(s)

If you are using indicators and/or EAs in your trading process, you need to make sure that those are good-quality strategies. If it is an indicator, it’s a must that it shouldn’t be repainting or lagging. If it is an EA, it’s a must to ensure that it is not based on risky strategies such as martingale or grid. These techniques will 100% drain your account at some point, and you will lose a challenge.

4. Double-Check Access to the Tool(s) You Use

It would help if you also made sure that the versions of the software that you have are unlimited and not locked. Otherwise, you are risking getting into a situation where your indicator or EA will stop working mid-challenge. If you are using paid services, make sure that your subscription will not expire at the most inopportune moment.

You can create a profitable working strategy with free tools – that’s for certain. For example, for my challenge, I used high-caliber indicators that I downloaded for free HERE

5. Adapt Your Strategy

You’ll likely need to adapt your strategy or risk management plan to meet the challenge’s goals. You will need to hit a 10% return on your initial FTMO demo account balance and avoid losing more than 5% of your account in a day or 10% of your account overall.

So if you’re used to risking 2% a trade and you take three trades a day, then you’ll want to reconsider risking less of your account so as to avoid losing 5% or more should all three of those trades result in a loss.

Similarly, suppose your trading history or backtest of your strategy shows that you only manage to return 9% or less each month with what you’re currently risking. In that case, you may need to increase the amount you risk or change your strategy so that you return more while also risking less.

Conclusion

All these tips combined are what ensured me passing the challenge (admittedly, on my second try, but I’m still proud of myself). I told you this before, and I will repeat it: there is nothing more important for a trader than discipline. Even the most exquisite, expensive tools will not help you if you are not ready to put in good work, and the simplest free tools can be beyond useful – not that there is something wrong with paying for good trading software, of course. But you have to always remember that your most valuable resource and the best trading tool you have is yourself.