FTMO rules explained: daily loss, maximum loss and the Prague reset

Prop firms change their terms, and rules differ by plan size, phase and promotion. FTMO’s own rules page is authoritative — always check it against the plan you hold before you trade.

FTMO states both of its risk limits as a percentage of the account you bought rather than as flat dollars, which is what makes them easy to reason about: on any plan size, the daily loss limit is 5% and the maximum loss is 10%. A larger account does not give you more room in relative terms — it gives you the same rules with bigger numbers, which is why traders who scale up tend to blow the larger account faster. The percentage did not change; the dollar value of a normal-sized mistake did.

The part that catches people is not the size of either limit. It is that the two limits measure different things over different windows, and that only one of them resets.

The daily loss limit

The daily loss limit is the most you may be down across a single trading day: 5%. Cross it once — not on average, not for a week, once — and the account is failed regardless of how the rest of the challenge went. It resets at the start of the next trading day, which means it is the limit you interact with most and the one worth building a personal buffer under.

Treat it as measured on equity, including open positions, unless the firm tells you otherwise. That is the safe assumption at every prop firm, and it changes what a "small" open loser means: a position sitting deep underwater can consume most of your daily room before you have closed anything and decided to take the loss. The number the firm reads is not the number your realised P&L shows.

The maximum loss, and where the floor sits

The maximum loss is the floor under the whole account: 10%. Unlike the daily limit it does not reset — it is the total, cumulative distance you are allowed to fall. How far you are from it is the single most useful number a funded trader can keep in front of them, and it is not shown on a broker platform, because a platform knows your balance but not the level the firm is measuring it against.

Edgekeeper loads this account as a floor that trails your closed balance. The floor keeps trailing for as long as the account is open — profit permanently raises it, and it never freezes. That is a deliberately conservative reading: a floor that follows your balance upward can only ever tell you that you have less room than a fixed floor would, never more. If your plan's maximum loss is a fixed level rather than a trailing one, edit the account and the app will use yours — but a warning that arrives early is the only kind worth having.

When the trading day actually resets

The day rolls over at 12:00 a.m. Europe/Prague, not at midnight where you live. For a trader in the Americas that is the middle of the afternoon or earlier, which means a late-session trade can belong to the next trading day — with a fresh daily loss limit — while a trade taken an hour before it still belongs to the day you have already spent room on.

This is not a technicality. Traders regularly take a revenge trade after a losing session believing they are already flat for the day, and get failed because the clock had not turned yet. Know your reset time in your own timezone and treat the hour before it as a different risk environment than the hour after.

Trading days, payouts and the split

10 trading days is the minimum on this rule set before a payout can be requested. Any day with a trade on it counts, whatever the result. The profit split is 80/20.

A minimum-days rule exists to stop a single lucky session from passing an evaluation, and it has a useful side effect: it makes the fastest possible pass slower than most traders expect, which removes the incentive to size up early. If you cannot pass without oversizing, you cannot hold the account after you pass either.

What most often ends an FTMO account

• Recovering a losing morning in one afternoon. The daily loss limit does not care that the trade was going to work. Two oversized recovery attempts is the most common failure sequence at every firm on this list.
• News risk on a position held through the release. An equity-measured daily limit and a five-second spread widening are a bad combination. Being flat is a position.
• Ignoring the cumulative floor while passing the daily test. You can lose an account without ever breaching a daily limit, by losing a little more than you make for three weeks. The maximum loss is a slow rule, which is exactly why it is invisible until it is not.

Tracking a FTMO account

The reason these rules are worth reading closely is that none of them are checked by your platform. Your broker shows you a balance; the firm is watching a floor, a daily limit and a share of profit that your balance alone does not tell you about. Edgekeeper loads this rule set onto an account and does the arithmetic on every trade you log: how much daily loss room is left right now, where the drawdown floor currently sits, how many qualifying days you have, and whether one big day has put the consistency rule between you and a payout.

It also warns you before you write the trade, not after. The point is not to be a scoreboard — it is to be the thing that says "this trade takes you inside the last third of your daily loss" while you can still decide something about it.

Track a FTMO account in Edgekeeper — free

These are the exact rules Edgekeeper loads. Create the account and every trade you log updates your daily loss room, your live drawdown floor, your qualifying days and your payout eligibility — and warns you before a trade takes you past a limit. One prop account is free, forever, no card.

Other prop firms

New to these limits? Start with daily loss vs. trailing max drawdown.