How does the FTMO technical infrastructure work?

FTMO Australia provides services of simulated trading and educational tools for traders. The  objective of FTMO Australia is to provide traders with conditions as similar as possible to the real market in all parts of the Evaluation Process,  Free Trial, and FTMO Account. In the Free Trial, you can check our trading setup and try it out for free and we always recommend our clients to try it before jumping into the Evaluation Process.

Are there differences in execution of the demo trades of the demo trades for different clients?

All execution settings are the same for all clients regardless of whether it is Free Trial, FTMO Challenge, Verification or FTMO Account. Although we aim to have the same settings everywhere, minor differences can occur between different trading platforms based on their technical limitations. We do not differentiate among any group of clients.  All clients take advantage of the same execution and accounts settings on a trading platform per stage, with no difference at any stage, regardless of their trading performance.

Can I experience any execution delays?

Execution delays are always present in real market trading. It happens on all trading platforms and trading servers. To simulate this on FTMO Australia’s servers, we apply a delay which reaches up to 200 ms. Other factors that contribute to execution delays are geographical location from the server/data centre, internet connection, and latency. Such execution delays are not set up on an individual basis but indiscriminately for all clients on a particular platform. You can always view the execution speed in your platform terminal – journal.

Aside from this delay used to simulate real market conditions other technical factors beyond our control may contribute to execution delay as well. These mainly include differences between how an individual trading platform is set up, geographical location from the server/data centre, server load, internet connection, order flow queue and latency. These factors are inherent to the technology solution used and are beyond our control.

Why does FTMO Australia charge a commission on some asset classes?

In order to best emulate how financial markets operate and in line with market standards, we also include simulated commissions when executing trades (i.e. the respective simulated commission affects the amount of the fictitious capital on the FTMO Account). All commissions applied to each symbol can be found by everyone on our website and on the trading platform. This is another important part of getting close to how the real market works and testing trading skills in the most accurate conditions as if they were in the real market. We pride ourselves on having one of the industry’s lowest and most competitive commission structures.

Does FTMO Australia apply hidden markups or added slippage?

We do not add hidden markups or additional slippage. In general, slippage is the difference between the expected price of a trade and the price at which the trade is executed. The executed price can be a result of various factors, such as price gaps, the technical delay simulating real market conditions as explained above, a natural execution delay that can occur when the trade server has to process a large number of positions at the same time (such as during highly volatile market moves during significant market-moving news releases) or a combination of these factors. Slippages can be both positive and negative without any preference (the same technical delay is applied to all order executions).