FTMO Futures: Information and detailed review

A monthly subscription, not a one-off fee

This is the first thing to understand about FTMO Futures, because it changes the economics entirely: the Evaluation is sold as a monthly subscription, not as a single purchase. You pay every month while you are evaluating, and you can cancel at any time in the Client Area, keeping access until the period you already paid for runs out.

The practical effect is that there is no time pressure and no time limit — you can stay on Evaluation as long as your subscription is active — but the cost accumulates while you do.

Crucially, the subscription stops the moment you pass. Once the Trading Objectives are met it is cancelled automatically, and you are never charged for the Sim-Funded or Live Funded Account. There is no activation fee and no hidden charges beyond the monthly payment.

Payment is by card, PayPal or Revolut (the last for non-US clients), always in USD, stored and charged automatically each renewal. A declined payment pauses access immediately but preserves your balance and parameters, giving you a 48-hour grace period to fix it. Miss that window and the account is closed.

FTMO Futures is also still formally in Beta, which FTMO frames carefully: features will change, but the Trading Objectives of an account you have already bought will not. What you buy is what you trade.

It runs on NinjaTrader, Tradovate or TradingView, all sharing the same credentials, so you can switch platforms whenever you like with no request needed. Accounts are USD only, in 50K, 100K and 150K sizes, and — being futures — no leverage is applied.

Growth and Pro: the same process, different risk and reward

Both products run the identical three-step path (Evaluation → Sim-Funded → possibly Live Funded) with the same profit targets: $3,000, $6,000 and $9,000 by size. They diverge on everything else.

Growth is cheaper and looser: $119, $169 and $229 a month, a tighter EOD trailing drawdown of $2,000 / $3,500 / $5,000, and crucially no daily loss limit at all during Evaluation. Its consistency requirement is 40%.

Pro costs more — $139, $199 and $269 — and gives more drawdown room at $3,000 / $4,500 / $6,000, but adds a hard daily loss limit of $1,000 / $1,500 / $2,000. Its consistency rule is looser at 50%, and it offers higher payout caps and 100% withdrawals.

Read that trade-off carefully: Growth removes the daily limit but gives you less total room; Pro gives you more room but can end your day — and your Evaluation — on a single bad session.

Soft breach versus hard breach

The distinction matters more than the numbers, and it is where Growth quietly wins.

A soft violation closes your open positions and locks the account for the rest of the trading day. It reopens next session and you carry on. A hard violation ends the account.

On the Sim-Funded stage, Growth's daily loss limit is a soft breach — a bad day costs you the day, not the account. On Pro it is hard, in both Evaluation and Sim-Funded.

The Consistency Rule sits outside this entirely: it cannot be violated at all, only satisfied later by generating more profit.

Reset fees are $109/$159/$219 on Growth and $129/$189/$259 on Pro. There is no activation fee and no minimum trading days on either.

The drawdown trails on closing balances and then locks

The Maximum Drawdown is an end-of-day trailing limit measured against equity (balance plus open position P&L minus commissions), and hitting it at any moment ends the Evaluation.

It is recalculated at the start of each trading day as the highest closing balance of any preceding day — or the initial capital if that is higher — minus the drawdown amount. It can only rise, never fall.

FTMO's example on a $50K Growth account makes the mechanism concrete. Day 1's floor is $48,000. Close day 1 at $51,000 and day 2's floor becomes $49,000. Close day 2 lower, at $50,500, and the floor stays at $49,000 — the calculation uses the highest preceding balance, not the most recent. Close day 3 at $52,500 and the limit would compute to $50,500, above your starting capital, so it locks at $50,000 permanently.

Once locked, it stays locked for the rest of the Evaluation — unless you pay a Reset Fee, or you breach and wait for the next monthly subscription to start again.

A trading day runs 6:00 p.m. to 4:10 p.m. ET

Every rule here is measured against that window, which spans the overnight session. Positions cannot be held past the market close. Everything must be closed and all resting orders — stop-losses, limits, brackets — cancelled before 4:10 p.m. ET or the relevant market close, whichever comes first.

The platform will liquidate whatever is left, but FTMO says plainly that traders should not rely on that function.

One consequence worth appreciating: because nothing is held overnight, contract expiry needs no management. There is no rolling, no transitioning of open trades. You close for the day and start on the new active contract next session.

The Consistency Rule, and how fast you can actually pass

The Consistency Rule applies during the Evaluation only: your single best trading day must not exceed 40% of total profit on Growth, or 50% on Pro.

Exceeding it is not a breach. You simply keep trading until the best day dilutes to the required share.

It is also what sets the floor on speed. There are no minimum trading days, but the arithmetic of the consistency rule means the fastest possible pass is 3 trading days on Growth and 2 on Pro.

Progress is confirmed after the end of each trading day, so the Client Area refreshes once daily after 4:10 p.m. ET rather than in real time.

Getting paid, and the account limits

Payouts require 4 qualifying trading days, each with a closed P&L of at least $150. FTMO's example is instructive: four days of $180, $220, $120 and $190 gives you three qualifying days, not four — the $120 day does not count, and you are not yet eligible.

The minimum payout is $20, paid in USD via Wise, Revolut, bank wire, or instant transfer through Visa Direct and Mastercard Send. The payout ratio is 90/10 in the trader's favour on both products.

The mechanics are unusually trader-friendly: when you confirm a request, all positions close, the amount is deducted, and you can immediately resume trading while approval is pending.

One warning FTMO gives explicitly: on a Pro Sim-Funded Account, requesting a full withdrawal can breach the Maximum Drawdown. The payout reduces your balance while the locked floor does not move.

Accounts, and what merging is not

Evaluations are unlimited — run as many as you like, each on its own monthly subscription. Sim-Funded Accounts are capped at three, shared across Growth and Pro, which works out to a maximum of $450,000 in simulated capital.

There is no total capital cap beyond that account limit. Holding more through separate registrations is not permitted.

Accounts cannot be merged. Each one is managed separately, with no exceptions.

FTMO Futures accepts natural persons only — if you are registered with FTMO as self-employed or a legal entity, you must contact support. FTMO Points cannot be used to pay the subscription, unlike on the CFD side.

The Live Funded Account is not something you apply for

Above Sim-Funded sits a Live Funded Account with real capital, and the route there is entirely at the discretion of FTMO's Trading Department, which contacts you directly if it decides to offer it.

There is a separate country list for it: traders in certain countries can use the full FTMO Futures product including payouts, but cannot progress to Live Funded. FTMO says it may contact eligible traders in those countries to assess options.

US residents are assessed on residency, not nationality, and the definition includes the 50 states plus territories such as American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Rules, instruments and costs

News trading is completely unrestricted, in every phase, with no blackout windows at all — a notable difference from FTMO's CFD products, where funded accounts carry a 2-minute restriction.

No stop-loss is required. Any strategy is permitted — discretionary, algorithmic or EA-driven — provided it is replicable on a live account and is not a Forbidden Trading Practice. FTMO flags the specific risk with third-party EAs: other traders may already be running the same one, which creates the same strategy across accounts.

Travel and VPN/VPS are allowed, provided you do not reside in a restricted country and keep sole control of your registration.

The 2% CME price-limit buffer

A rule specific to futures and easy to trip over. The CME sets a maximum daily price range per contract; hit it and the exchange may halt trading, widen the limit, or close it for the day.

FTMO adds a 2% safety buffer before that point, blocking new positions on the affected instrument. For most equity index futures the first CME limit is 7% from the previous settlement, so FTMO stops you at 5%.

The responsibility is explicitly yours: you must monitor the current price limits, which CME publishes and updates after each trading day.

You sign a non-professional attestation before data works

On first login you sign a CME Non-Professional Self-Attestation directly in the platform, confirming you qualify for non-professional market data rates. Your live data is only activated after you sign it.

FTMO says most of its traders qualify, and points to Tradovate's and NinjaTrader's own guidance for checking whether you are the exception.

Violations are handled proportionately rather than with a single penalty: trade removal, account termination, forfeiture of rewards, or permanent exclusion, depending on severity and history.

30 instruments, and the commission is the small part

FTMO Futures offers 30 instruments across metals, energies, equity indices, cryptocurrencies and FX from the CME Group exchanges — 19 E-mini and 11 micro contracts.

The cost per contract has three components, and FTMO's own share is the smallest: exchange fees, NFA fees, and FTMO's commission of $0.50 per side on minis and $0.20 per side on micros. FTMO deliberately does not republish exchange fees, since those change and any figure could be stale — check the exchange directly and add their fixed commission.

Level 1 market data is included in the subscription. Level 2 (Depth of Market) cannot be purchased while logged in with FTMO credentials.

Max contracts, counted in a specific way

Position size is capped at 5, 10 or 15 contracts by account size, across all instruments simultaneously — the same on both Growth and Pro.

The counting rule matters: one Standard or Mini contract counts as one, and ten Micro contracts count as one Standard/Mini. So a 5-contract limit allows 5 minis, 50 micros, or any mix — 4 standard plus 10 micro, or 2 mini plus 30 micro.

Those figures are the Evaluation ceiling. On a Sim-Funded Account you start with a lower base limit that scales up toward the same ceiling as you generate profit — so a funded account trades smaller than the evaluation did until you build a record.

Who you are actually contracting with

FTMO is headquartered in Prague, at Purkyňova 2121/3. US clients are served through JV Prop Corporation, an FTMO entity registered in Delaware — a detail worth knowing given that US residency is assessed separately for eligibility.

Summary: who this firm suits

FTMO Futures fits an intraday futures trader who closes flat every session and wants a subscription they can pause rather than a fee they lose.

It suits you well because the subscription model is genuinely different. There is no time limit on the Evaluation, no minimum trading days, and no activation fee — you can take as long as you need, and cancel when you want. News trading is entirely unrestricted, which is rare in futures prop. The micro contract counting (ten micros to one mini) gives real granularity on position sizing. And the ladder above — Sim-Funded, then a Live Funded Account with real capital at FTMO's discretion — is a path most competitors do not offer at all.

It suits you poorly if you hold overnight: everything closes at 4:10 p.m. ET, every day, with no exceptions. It is a poor fit if you want to accumulate large allocations, since three Sim-Funded accounts and $450,000 is the ceiling and accounts cannot be merged. And the subscription cuts both ways — a slow evaluation costs you every month it continues.

Three things to understand before buying. Growth has no daily loss limit but a tighter maximum drawdown; Pro has more room but a hard daily limit — that is the real choice, not the price. The drawdown locks at your initial capital and stays locked, so recovering from a breach means paying a reset fee or waiting for your next subscription month. And a full withdrawal on a Pro Sim-Funded Account can breach your drawdown, because the payout lowers your balance while the floor does not move.