FTMO is one of the largest proprietary trading firms offering funded accounts. Their leverage rules determine how much buying power you get relative to account size. Understanding these rules before taking their evaluation saves time and money.
FTMO Standard Account
FTMO offers leverage of 1:100 on forex, 1:50 on commodities, and 1:30 on indices on their standard funded accounts. A 100,000 dollar funded account with 1:100 forex leverage provides 10 million in notional buying power.
The Drawdown Rules
FTMO enforces a 10 percent maximum daily loss and 10 percent maximum overall loss on funded accounts. This means your effective leverage is limited by drawdown rules, not by stated leverage. At 1:100 leverage, a 0.1 percent adverse move on full size hits your daily limit.
Count the daily reset carefully as well, it is based on server midnight, not your timezone, and positions held across it book against the new day.
Leverage Is Not Risk
Traders conflate 1:100 leverage with taking 100 times the risk, and the distinction matters. Leverage sets margin per lot; risk is position size times stop distance. A 0.10 lot EUR/USD position with a 20-pip stop risks about 20 dollars whether the account allows 1:30 or 1:500. High leverage buys capital efficiency, nothing more. What protects you is sizing, which is why the drawdown rules, not the leverage line, decide survival inside any prop firm.
The Evaluation Gauntlet
Before any funded account there is the challenge: a 10 percent profit target within 30 trading days, then verification at 5 percent within 60. Fees run from roughly 155 euros for the smallest size to over 1,000 for large accounts, refunded with the first payout if you pass. The targets are achievable with modest risk; the clock is what kills candidates, pushing them into outsized daily swings that violate the loss rules by week two. Fail once and you pay the fee again.
The Profit Split
FTMO offers 80 percent profit split (85 percent after scaling). The firm keeps 20 percent. This means every 1,000 dollars profit pays you 800 dollars. The split is the real cost of using their capital.
Scaling and Payout Realities
FTMO scales accounts by 25 percent of profit every four months of consistency, on paper growing a 100,000 dollar account toward 400,000. Payouts process on demand after the first 30 days. The arithmetic catch: a strategy making 4 percent a month nets 3.2 after split, and one bad day that breaches the loss rule ends the account regardless of prior profit. The consistency the model demands is the same consistency most retail traders lack, which is the real filter.
Trading on Welachain Instead
On Welachain, you keep 100 percent of profits. Leverage up to 30:1 on majors with negative balance protection. No evaluation to pass, no daily loss limits imposed externally, no profit split.
The trade-off: you use your own capital rather than someone else's. But if your strategy works, the math favors independent trading. On a 10k funded account, 20 percent monthly profit means 2,000 dollars kept on Welachain versus 1,600 after FTMO split.
The best path: build your track record on Welachain's own capital, then decide whether prop firm funding adds value or just adds a 20 percent haircut.
Run the comparison honestly before paying any evaluation fee. Take your last 60 trades, compute the return and the maximum daily loss, and apply both the FTMO rules and the no-split alternative. If the strategy survives the rules, funding can amplify it. If it does not, the fee bought you a diagnosis, and Welachain at 1 percent risk per trade is the cheaper place to act on it.