FTMO CFDs vs FTMO Futures

FTMO’s futures (Indepth review here) evaluation is a single step, and so is one of its CFD challenges. Compared like with like, the differences are narrower than the marketing suggests — and sharper where they matter.

For a decade FTMO has been the firm the rest of the prop industry is measured against, and it built that standing on contracts for difference. Its futures programme, still in beta, arrives in the same livery, and it is structured as a single evaluation followed by a funded stage. The fair comparison is therefore not the two-step challenge most reviewers reach for, but FTMO’s own one-step product, which is built the same way.

Set side by side, the two share more machinery than the brochures imply: a trailing drawdown, a best-day rule, a ninety-per-cent split, and a fee that does not come back. Where they part company — the cost of time, the room to lose, and what a trader may do with the hours in a day — the gaps are wide, and the widest of them is disguised by the fact that the rules carry the same names. Figures below are from FTMO’s published material as at 11 September 2026.

The money up front

The refund argument that dominates most FTMO write-ups does not apply here. It belongs to the two-step challenge, where the fee comes back with the first payout. On the one-step product the fee is gone the moment it is paid, exactly as it is on futures. What remains is a straight question of shape: one sunk payment against a meter.

That makes the comparison a matter of speed. A trader who passes a futures evaluation inside a month has paid $169 and beaten the one-step fee comfortably; one still going in the third month has drawn level, and after that is paying for the privilege of not having passed. The one-step trader’s cost is fixed on day one and indifferent to how long the attempt takes. Which is better depends entirely on a variable neither party can see in advance, and traders are reliably optimistic about it.

The free trial is the quieter advantage. Fourteen days of the CFD evaluation at half the profit target costs nothing and tells a trader whether the rules suit them. Futures offers no equivalent, so the first $169 buys the information as well as the attempt.

The rules, compared properly

The mechanism is shared: FTMO’s one-step CFD challenge trails end-of-day too, recalculating at midnight Prague time from the highest balance achieved and never moving back down. That similarity is worth noting and then setting aside, because a common mechanism operating over $10,000 and over $3,500 is not the same rule in any sense a trader experiences. The futures evaluation asks for sixty per cent of the profit on thirty-five per cent of the cushion. In ratio terms the one-step wants $10,000 of profit against $10,000 of room, an even one to one; futures Growth wants $6,000 against $3,500, nearer seventeen to ten. The lower target is what the advertising leads with. The thinner cushion is what the trader meets.

One myth does die here, and it works in the futures product’s favour: a consistency rule cannot fail an account. FTMO states plainly of the futures rule that it “cannot be violated; it can always be passed later by generating additional profit”, and the CFD best-day rule works identically — an outsized session does not end the attempt, it defers the finish until the rest of the record catches up.

What $3,500 actually buys

The abstraction breaks down as soon as the drawdown is converted into distance, and futures makes that conversion unavoidable. FTMO’s specifications state that on these accounts “no leverage is applied”: position size is not a dial but a count of contracts, each worth a fixed sum per point. So the buffer translates into an exact adverse move, and the numbers are sobering.

Adverse move that exhausts the whole $3,500 Growth drawdown on a $100,000 account, at $50 a point on ES, $20 on NQ, $100 per dollar on gold and $1,000 per dollar on crude. On a Pro account, with $4,500, add about a quarter.

The ten-contract ceiling, then, is not a risk control. At the permitted maximum, seven points of S&P — a minute’s work on an ordinary morning, less on a lively one — ends the account. FTMO’s limit describes a position no rational trader on this product could hold. The binding constraint is the drawdown, and it permits one or two minis, or their equivalent in micros, for anyone who intends to survive a bad session. That is what the micro contracts are for, counting ten to one against the limit, and on a $3,500 buffer they are not a convenience but the sensible unit of account.

Set that beside the CFD one-step and the gap is stark. The same $50-a-point exposure has $10,000 behind it rather than $3,500 — two hundred points of room instead of seventy — and CFD position sizing is continuous, so a trader can risk whatever they choose per point and spread the buffer across as many attempts as their method needs. Futures offers no such dial below one micro.

It is also worth reading FTMO’s “no leverage is applied” precisely. It means no multiplier is applied to the account, not that the position is ungeared: a single E-mini S&P contract carries a notional value two to three times the simulated capital of the entire $100,000 account. The gearing is in the contract, not in the account setting.

The best-day rule inverts after the evaluation, and in the futures product’s favour. On futures it applies only while passing and falls away entirely once sim-funded. On the CFD one-step it follows the trader onto the funded account and stays there, permanently capping any single session at half of cumulative positive-day profit. For a trader whose income arrives in bursts, that is a lasting constraint on one product and a temporary hurdle on the other.

Payouts run the other way. The CFD one-step pays ninety per cent from the first day with no cap and no qualifying-day requirement — there is not even a minimum number of trading days on this product. Futures pays the same headline ninety per cent but conditions it: four qualifying days above a minimum daily profit, at least half of any withdrawal drawn from new profit in the current cycle, a $3,000 ceiling per payout on a Growth account, and only half the profit above initial capital available at all. A futures trader collects more often and less; a CFD trader waits and takes the lot.

The clock

Here the one-step comparison is less flattering to the CFD product than the two-step one would be, because the swing account — the option that removes FTMO’s weekend and news restrictions — is not offered on the one-step at all. FTMO says so directly: modification to swing “is unavailable because the Swing account type is not offered for the FTMO Challenge: 1-Step.”

The consequence is that a funded one-step trader is on a standard account with standard restrictions. Positions must be closed before the weekend, or before any rollover break running longer than two hours. And around high-impact releases, no trade may be opened or closed — pending orders, stop-losses and take-profits included — in the window from two minutes before to two minutes after. A stop triggered inside that window is a breach of the agreement, which is an uncomfortable rule to trade around.

Futures takes the opposite bargain. News trading is unrestricted, with no blackout window at any stage, but the day ends absolutely: every position closed and every resting order cancelled “before 4:10 p.m. ET or the relevant market close, whichever is sooner”. The platform liquidates what remains, though FTMO warns traders “should not rely on this function.”

One clarification is owed, because the rule is more often misread than read. The futures trading day runs from 6 p.m. ET to 4:10 p.m. ET the following afternoon, so the overnight Globex session is available, London morning included. What is forbidden is carrying a position through the afternoon close. This is a session constraint, not an American-hours one.

A second restriction deserves attention for the same reason. FTMO adds a two-per-cent buffer to the CME’s daily price limits: on equity indices, where the exchange limit is seven per cent, new entries stop after a five-per-cent move. Breach it and the firm “has the right to terminate the trading account.” The rule engages precisely on the disorderly days intraday traders spend the year waiting for, and does so with a sanction rather than a shrug.

So the honest summary is not that one product is freer. The CFD one-step lets a trader hold through the night and the week but polices the two minutes either side of every release; futures ignores the calendar entirely but ends each day at the close.

The counterparty

FTMO is a brand distributed across several companies. The CFD evaluation is sold by FTMO Evaluation Global s.r.o. of Prague, the funded stage contracted separately with FTMO Trading Global s.r.o., both under Czech law and European consumer redress; the global futures product follows suit. American futures traders do not: their contract is with JV Prop Corporation, a Delaware company, under New York law, with binding arbitration, a class-action waiver and a one-year limitation period. Neither product is regulated, as both sets of terms say plainly, and in both cases the agreement governing the money is unlocked only after the evaluation has been passed and paid for. That structure deserves an article of its own and will get one.

Which strategies survive the rulebook

The rules are not neutral between styles of trading. Four approaches sit comfortably inside the futures product:

• Opening-range and opening-drive work, where the edge is spent within ninety minutes of the cash open.
• Mean reversion around VWAP, anchored to the session by construction, and producing the flat distribution of daily results a consistency rule rewards.
• Scheduled events, genuinely open here and restricted on a funded CFD one-step account — inflation and payrolls on the indices, and the two trades belonging to futures alone: Wednesday’s crude inventories and Thursday’s gas storage.
• Systematic trading, provided the system flattens before the close and is the trader’s own. Copy trading is barred, and a popular third-party advisor can cost a funded account.

What does not survive is easier to state:

• Anything held overnight, and multi-day trend continuation — and on the one-step CFD account, anything held over a weekend either.
• Martingale and grid structures, which collide with a trailing drawdown on both products.
• Any method treating the platform’s own protection as its stop-loss, which is explicitly forbidden.
• The recovery sequence after a bad morning: on Growth the soft limit suspends trading for the day; on Pro the hard limit ends the account.
• Order-flow trading, since Level 2 depth of market is unavailable on FTMO credentials — an awkward omission, given that the tape-readers are the constituency such a product ought to court.

The verdict

Compared like with like, FTMO Futures is gentler in places than its reputation suggests. It shares the one-step’s ninety-per-cent split and its forgiving treatment of a consistency breach, asks for less profit, permits news trading outright, and drops the best-day rule the moment a trader is funded — where the CFD one-step carries that rule for the life of the account.

What it charges for is time, and what it withholds is room. Three months of subscription overtakes the one-step fee. The drawdown may trail in the same way, but $3,500 behind a fixed-size contract is a different instrument of discipline from $10,000 behind a position a trader can size freely: seventy points of S&P on a single mini, seven at the contract ceiling. Payouts arrive capped and half-withheld, and the day ends at the close whatever the position is doing. It remains in beta, with the firm itself warning of technical trouble.

For a trader whose method lives and dies inside a session, and who values an unrestricted news calendar and a live CME order book, the futures product is the better of the two — provided they pass quickly. For anyone who holds positions overnight, wants uncapped payouts, or cannot say with confidence how long the attempt will take, the fixed fee and the wider cushion of the one-step remain the safer purchase.

Sources: FTMO CFD and futures terms and conditions; trading objectives for both products; the futures comparison table, contract-limit and account-specification FAQs; the CFD pricing page and news-trading FAQ. All ftmo.com, accessed 11 September 2026. Point values are CME contract specifications. Terms change frequently; verify before acting. This article is for information only and is not financial advice.