The comparison I wish existed before I bought my first challenge
Forget the table. Here's the same information written out plainly, firm by firm.
FTMO
Structure: 2-step evaluation.
Daily loss limit: 5%.
Max drawdown: 10%.
Profit split: starts at 80%, climbs to 90% through the scaling plan.
Typical fee for a 100K account: around €540.
Everything you need to know about prop firms
Everything you need to know about prop firms
It’s Fairman 
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
FundedNext
Structure: 1-step or 2-step, depending on the program.
Daily loss limit: 3% to 5%, tighter specifically on the Stellar track.
Max drawdown: 6% to 10%.
Profit split: up to 95% with add-ons.
Typical fee for a 100K account: around $550.
Structure: 1-step or 2-step, depending on the program.
Daily loss limit: 3% to 5%, tighter specifically on the Stellar track.
Max drawdown: 6% to 10%.
Profit split: up to 95% with add-ons.
Typical fee for a 100K account: around $550.
It’s Fairman
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
FundedNext
Structure: 1-step or 2-step, depending on the program.
Daily loss limit: 3% to 5%, tighter specifically on the Stellar track.
Max drawdown: 6% to 10%.
Profit split: up to 95% with add-ons.
Typical fee for a 100K account: around $550.
Structure: 1-step or 2-step, depending on the program.
Daily loss limit: 3% to 5%, tighter specifically on the Stellar track.
Max drawdown: 6% to 10%.
Profit split: up to 95% with add-ons.
Typical fee for a 100K account: around $550.
It’s Fairman
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
FundingPips
Structure: multiple account models to choose from.
Daily loss limit: 3% to 5%, varies by model.
Max drawdown: 6% to 10%.
Profit split: up to 100% on some reward cycles.
Typical fee: industry-typical range, roughly $100 to $500.
Structure: multiple account models to choose from.
Daily loss limit: 3% to 5%, varies by model.
Max drawdown: 6% to 10%.
Profit split: up to 100% on some reward cycles.
Typical fee: industry-typical range, roughly $100 to $500.
It’s Fairman
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
Topstep
Structure: futures, not forex. Contract-based, not percentage-based.
Daily loss limit: doesn't really apply the same way — it's a trailing drawdown tied to contract value.
Max drawdown: trailing, contract-specific, not a flat percentage.
Profit split: different structure entirely, not directly comparable.
Typical fee: not comparable to the forex firms above.
Structure: futures, not forex. Contract-based, not percentage-based.
Daily loss limit: doesn't really apply the same way — it's a trailing drawdown tied to contract value.
Max drawdown: trailing, contract-specific, not a flat percentage.
Profit split: different structure entirely, not directly comparable.
Typical fee: not comparable to the forex firms above.
It’s Fairman
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
The point of laying it out this way isn't to crown a winner.
It's that "which firm is best" is the wrong question.
"Which firm's daily loss limit gives my actual trading style enough room" is the right one.
And you can't answer that without your own numbers sitting next to theirs.
It's that "which firm is best" is the wrong question.
"Which firm's daily loss limit gives my actual trading style enough room" is the right one.
And you can't answer that without your own numbers sitting next to theirs.
It’s Fairman
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
The daily loss limit math nobody runs before they buy a challenge
Say your strategy has a historical worst-case daily loss of 2.8%.
Based on your own journal, across a real sample of sessions. Not your average day. Your actual worst one.
A firm with a 3% daily limit gives you almost no cushion.
One day slightly worse than your historical worst — which will eventually happen, given enough sessions — ends the evaluation.
A firm with a 5% daily limit gives you roughly 2.2 percentage points of cushion above your known worst case.
Room for a day that's meaningfully worse than anything you've hit before, without automatic disqualification.
The math here isn't complicated. It's just rarely done.
Pull your own worst daily drawdown from your journal.
Only seriously consider firms whose daily limit sits comfortably above it — not just above your average.
Say your strategy has a historical worst-case daily loss of 2.8%.
Based on your own journal, across a real sample of sessions. Not your average day. Your actual worst one.
A firm with a 3% daily limit gives you almost no cushion.
One day slightly worse than your historical worst — which will eventually happen, given enough sessions — ends the evaluation.
A firm with a 5% daily limit gives you roughly 2.2 percentage points of cushion above your known worst case.
Room for a day that's meaningfully worse than anything you've hit before, without automatic disqualification.
The math here isn't complicated. It's just rarely done.
Pull your own worst daily drawdown from your journal.
Only seriously consider firms whose daily limit sits comfortably above it — not just above your average.
It’s Fairman
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
Working out your actual probability of breaching a daily limit, using your own trade data
This takes slightly more than a napkin, but it's worth doing once.
Say your average risk per trade is 1%.
You take roughly 6 trades in a typical session.
Your historical losing-trade rate is 45%.
You can estimate the probability of a bad enough run to breach a 5% daily limit using a basic binomial approach — treating each trade as roughly independent, each with a 45% chance of a full 1% loss.
Getting 5 or more losses out of 6 trades, at a 45% per-trade loss rate, is a genuinely low-probability event on any single day.
But "genuinely low" across 20 or 30 evaluation days stops being negligible.
Run this once for your actual numbers.
It tells you something a gut feeling never will — roughly how many sessions, statistically, before a daily-limit breach becomes a real possibility rather than a hypothetical one.
This takes slightly more than a napkin, but it's worth doing once.
Say your average risk per trade is 1%.
You take roughly 6 trades in a typical session.
Your historical losing-trade rate is 45%.
You can estimate the probability of a bad enough run to breach a 5% daily limit using a basic binomial approach — treating each trade as roughly independent, each with a 45% chance of a full 1% loss.
Getting 5 or more losses out of 6 trades, at a 45% per-trade loss rate, is a genuinely low-probability event on any single day.
But "genuinely low" across 20 or 30 evaluation days stops being negligible.
Run this once for your actual numbers.
It tells you something a gut feeling never will — roughly how many sessions, statistically, before a daily-limit breach becomes a real possibility rather than a hypothetical one.
It’s Fairman
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
FTMO's scaling plan, and the actual growth math behind the headline number
FTMO's scaling structure rewards four consecutive profitable payout cycles.
Each one needs to show at least 10% account growth.
In exchange, your split moves from 80% up toward 90%, and the funded size itself can grow substantially from there.
Run the compounding.
Four consecutive cycles of just the minimum 10% growth takes a starting balance up by roughly 46% over those four cycles alone.
That's 1.10 to the fourth power.
And that's before the improved 90% split is even applied to what comes after.
That's the mechanical case for staying with one firm long enough to scale, rather than firm-hopping every few months chasing whichever new promo code is circulating.
The catch is the word "consecutive."
One losing cycle resets that specific counter in most versions of this kind of plan.
It's a real reward. But it's conditioned on a streak.
Which means your personal losing-streak probability, not just your average win rate, determines how realistic reaching it actually is.
FTMO's scaling structure rewards four consecutive profitable payout cycles.
Each one needs to show at least 10% account growth.
In exchange, your split moves from 80% up toward 90%, and the funded size itself can grow substantially from there.
Run the compounding.
Four consecutive cycles of just the minimum 10% growth takes a starting balance up by roughly 46% over those four cycles alone.
That's 1.10 to the fourth power.
And that's before the improved 90% split is even applied to what comes after.
That's the mechanical case for staying with one firm long enough to scale, rather than firm-hopping every few months chasing whichever new promo code is circulating.
The catch is the word "consecutive."
One losing cycle resets that specific counter in most versions of this kind of plan.
It's a real reward. But it's conditioned on a streak.
Which means your personal losing-streak probability, not just your average win rate, determines how realistic reaching it actually is.
It’s Fairman
Re: Everything you need to know about prop firms
FundedNext versus FTMO, distilled to the two numbers that actually matter for a scalper
Both are reputable. Both get recommended constantly. Forum threads treat them almost interchangeably.
For a scalper specifically, two numbers separate them more than the marketing copy does.
FundedNext's daily loss limits, on some of its faster-access programs, run tighter than FTMO's standard 5%.
That matters disproportionately for scalpers.
A tight daily limit combined with high trade frequency means more cumulative chances per day to bump against it.
FTMO's evaluation is slower — two full phases.
But the daily limit gives more room per session.
If the probability of a breach is meaningfully a function of how many trades you take per day, a high-frequency scalper is statistically safer on the looser daily limit, even if it costs more time to get funded.
Speed and room are trading against each other here. Not stacking together.
Both are reputable. Both get recommended constantly. Forum threads treat them almost interchangeably.
For a scalper specifically, two numbers separate them more than the marketing copy does.
FundedNext's daily loss limits, on some of its faster-access programs, run tighter than FTMO's standard 5%.
That matters disproportionately for scalpers.
A tight daily limit combined with high trade frequency means more cumulative chances per day to bump against it.
FTMO's evaluation is slower — two full phases.
But the daily limit gives more room per session.
If the probability of a breach is meaningfully a function of how many trades you take per day, a high-frequency scalper is statistically safer on the looser daily limit, even if it costs more time to get funded.
Speed and room are trading against each other here. Not stacking together.
It’s Fairman