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Hey Matthew,
Thanks for sharing your experience. You are doing a fantastic job. Imagine you were trading with your own capital. Who cares you missed 3k, right? You ended on a profit.
Anyway, Samuel will give you feedback on your settings, but one question from me: Why do you use a SL of 200 pips?
Is that based on some tests you did and you concluded that the range should be that big?
Thanks for the reply, Petko!
Unfortunately, right after the EAs made that $13,000, it had a 7-day losing streak and created a -$3,000 loss from the initial balance on the account. Then it went back up to a measly $900.00 profit the next day and that’s when I pulled the plug for the free retry. ($16,000 is the profit target in this situation with true forex funds)
In a previous post on a different thread, I was doing a similar process with 10 – 100 pips SL and TP. I was struggling to find enough strategies that fit the acceptance criteria.
Samuel suggested I increase it to 20 – 200 SL and TP.
I was able to find enough strategies then and so I kept that criteria ever since.
This is a good point. If I cut my losers early it would be better.Assuming I’m able to get the criteria to generate enough.
Maybe a stop loss of 10 – 100 and a take profit of 101-200 or a take profit of 20 – 200 or something like that would be better.
Looking forward to Samuel’s reply as well if you have the time to do so. 🙂
This week the currency markets have moved net zero. As a result so had my FTMO challenge balance chart. See below:
I have two left in the FTMO challenge. Hopefully, over this period the markets will be trending so that I can complete the challenge.Hey Alan, yes I have had the exact same problem this week with stagnation on my accounts. But this is normal, it’s looking good just keep doing what you are doing.
Hey Mathew, well done on the several retry’s and with your 200k account. This is no small achievement.
As soon as I saw you say you were going to switch things up I knew what was coming 😉
Bummer to lose the entry cost but valuable experience, definitely do some demo for a bit before trying again.
Everything looks good to me regarding your reactor settings btw, I’d focus more on your 2 validations. However you were doing well so an overhaul isn’t what you are after but more some small variations.
I’ll take a closer look this weekend and make some suggestions for you to try (on demo 😉
Hey Mathew,
From reviewing your posts I have the following suggestions:
1 – I would personally be increasing your validation 1 to at least 3 months
2 – I would also suggest including demo incubation of at least some form in your system (Maybe even just replace the second validation period with using a demo account instead)
3 – Although I see the sense in the stability of you sticking to JPY pairs this could lead to over correlation so it may be an idea to try adding some other pairs or mixing this up a little, just a thought
Much more importantly though is to stick to your plan at all times:
I suggest the following outline:
1 – Create your system
2 – Test you system on demo for a sufficient period of time until you are confident in it
3 – Only when you feel ready should you try a challenge or prior to that I would even suggest a small money account and limit your risk to the cost of your prop firm fee (ie fund an account with a couple of grand and try a challenge on that but limit your overall drawdown to 500 dollars for example, then check out your stats using fxblue)
Saying that however what you were doing seemed to be working well, you cant really aim for a certain profit target each month but rather to just stay in the game as you were doing, who knows if you had kept doing what you were doing then next month just may have been your month where the market gave you what you were after. Periods of drawdown and stagnation occur in the best of systems, sometimes its a matter of just following your plan. IF it is a good plan then eventually things should come good.
Most people who get through the challenge wont be just starting it and passing it first time btw. Ideally there be several free retries before the market deliver on their system but even retakes are gonna be required on good strategies too. Also really getting through a challenge although great is nothing compared to consistently making small profit with managed drawdowns, its just a good month really.
“thanks Samuel for your input, I got a lot closer to passing an FTMO challenge because of you!”
Thanks for the shout out btw Matthew, it’s all your hard work that’s getting it done of course. You did exactly as you should which is test any suggestions properly for yourself and then move forward with them if they are working for you. Great to see the improvement in results
My plan for FTMO funding: I know that drawdowns/stagnations can last for a month or even two months before the trend will continue so my plan is to do a $10,000 challenge every month until I am funded. I will also use FXblue to monitor my daily, and projected weekly and monthly stats to help me decide if I need to increase position size in order to reach the $1000.00 goal. I am also thinking about not using any balanced portfolio containing the U.S. dollar as I am thinking drawdowns from news events could be larger. It should be possible to get funded after a few months of sticking to the plan and the first month or two of profits from a funded account should return my investment. Its like any business, you first have to make an investment to get the business up and running and then you can recover your investment from its profits. Once my investment has been recovered I can then start to use the profits to scale up to larger FTMO challenges. I am also thinking about diversifying my FTMO challenges and future funded accounts with different fx pairs in balanced portfolio configurations. I equate this plan as to starting a small business, growing the business and diversifying the product line. I will also move my profits to my own brokerage account so I am not fully dependent upon FTMO. I am just going to use FTMO to grow my own brokerage account, again to diversify.
Hey Alan,
Your plan is sensible enough to me.
I am assuming that you have demo tested the system you will be using for this long enough to feel confident that over this period you have a high probability of passing and keeping the account?
I’d personally be testing on a small live account first to limit the cost and using fx blue to track how you would have done. But everyone has a different risk tolerance. I just don’t want anyone losing money unnecessarily, of course at least the losses are capped and if you are comfortable with the worst case scenario going in then either way I am sure a lot will be learned for the cost in the worst case and ideally you will land an account 🙂
I have $200 to go to reach my FTMO $10,000 challenge and 6 trading days to do it in. Up to this date I have been trading 9 strategies equally divided between, EURUSD, EURJPY, and USDJPY. At the beginning of week 11/20 through 11/26 I removed all EA’s and replaced with new EA’s. With only 6 trading days left I have now removed two weak strategies. I will not replace them as I am not 100% confident new strategies will perform well over the next 6 trading days. However, the remaining 7 strategies now have between one week and three weeks of history showing PF > 2 and have made more than $40.00 each to date. Hopefully, these 7 strategies will carry me above the $1000.00 challenge goal by 12/6/2022. May the force be with me!
Great work Alan, keep doing what you are doing and stick to your plan. You still have the verification to get through and then consistent trading after that so definitely smart to stick with the same methodology throughout and do not sway from this as you are doing.
I am in a similar position with not much left to hit a profit target on a prop form challenge but only a week left to go, had a couple of weeks stagnation so hoping the market delivers for both of us this week, if not we will both get free retries at the least. Can’t do much more that hope the market delivers at this point really.
Hi Samuel,
Thanks for the encouragement! I found it interesting to hear that you are also close to passing the FTMO Challenge. My challenge also went through a two week stagnation period as a result of the U.S. dollar stagnating. The potential problem I see coming up this week that could destroy my challenge is NFP report coming out on Friday. I am considering closing all trades just before the report and holding off for a couple of hours until the market settles down. I know the report could help my challenge but at the same time it could destroy my challenge. Hopefully I will pass the challenge before Friday and I won’t have to worry about it. The thought has also come to mind is that perhaps the best time to begin an FTMO Challenge is the Monday following NFT report. That way I could go through the complete challenge without having to worry about this report.
Hey Alan, yeah on my account I got a really great 1st week and then stagnation for weeks 2 and 3 and hoping for a boost over the finish line this week.
I just focus on trading my own accounts these days as I don’t like being so penalized for drawdowns that are actually fine, but I occasionally do a small prop challenge (or even just an ftmo free trial) for fun and bit of a challenge 🙂
I did quite a few of them a while back and got through several challenges but back then I was changing things too much and didn’t have the legs to get through the validation phase. Hence why I recommend stick with whatever your plan is and definitely don’t mix things up mid way as it’s highly unlikely to work and you will just lose all the effort of passing the challenge.
They are a challenge to get through (right the way through) even if consistently profitable, can definitely be done of course though. Just got to stick to a good plan and be patient even if it takes several free retries.
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