FTMO provides simulated trading services and educational tools for traders. Since the beginning of FTMO, our objective has been to provide traders with conditions as similar as possible to the real market in all parts of the Evaluation Process (1-Step FTMO Challenge or 2-Step FTMO Challenge), Free Trial, FTMO Account, and the FTMO Instant Account. In the Free Trial, you can check our trading setup and try it out for free, and we always recommend our clients try it before purchasing any of our products.
Any account provided by FTMO is an account with fully fictitious funds, including the FTMO Account; however, it uses real market quotes from liquidity providers. Please note that liquidity providers do not provide FTMO with any real money (liquidity), only with the market quotes. Our clients therefore never actually perform any trades on live markets.
In a separate process, FTMO also trades on its own account (outside of the FTMO platform) with real financial means. While performing its own trades, FTMO may also use trading data obtained from its clients’ FTMO Accounts. FTMO continuously monitors and analyses the trades executed by FTMO Traders in the demo environment and subsequently evaluates whether trades will be executed for FTMO’s own account. This execution occurs without any impact on FTMO’s clients and their simulated trading. These two processes are separate, and in no way is the FTMO Trader influenced by FTMO’s trading. To learn more about the execution policy & trading conditions, please see our blog article.
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’s servers, we apply a delay which reaches up to 200 ms. Other factors that contribute to execution delays are the geographical location of the server/data centre, internet connection, and latency. Execution delays are not set up on an individual basis but indiscriminately for all clients on a particular platform. On MetaTrader 5, you can view the execution speed in your platform terminal, journal section.
Why does FTMO 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. 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 apply hidden markups or added slippage?
We do not add hidden markups or additional slippage. Trades are executed according to the pricing visible on the trading platform. In the case of slippage, the executed price was affected due to the technical delay that we explained above. Slippage can be both positive and negative without any preference.
How does copying trades affect FTMO Traders?
In case FTMO wishes to replicate a client’s trades, the replication technology runs in a separate environment without interfering with the client’s account. The trading conditions remain the same on the client’s platform, regardless of whether the client’s trades are replicated or not.
