FTMO vs Lux Trading Firm
As you’re looking for your online prop firm funded accounts, you’ll no doubt have stumbled across FTMO in your search. Although probably the most notable firm in the industry, it’s certainly worth undertaking a compare and contrast before settling on a chosen prop firm to ensure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck. After all, there’s potentially a lot of money at stake!
In this article, we’re going to provide a high-level comparison between Lux Trading Firm and FTMO, so you can see objectively whether you’re making the right decision when it comes to choosing a prop firm to be working with.
We’ve aimed to be as objective as possible in this article and provide facts/numbers rather than speculation or bias.
We’ll look at:
- Capital Allowance
- Capital Scaling
- Time Limits
- Real Money Or Demo Accounts
- Profit Targets
- Maximum Loss Limits
- Trading Platforms
- Risk Management
- Education
- Trading Strategies
So, let’s get into it…
FTMO Vs Lux Trading Firm – What’s The Difference?
As mentioned, you’re most likely familiar with FTMO, and you’ve perhaps attempted a trading challenge or two with them in the past. They certainly have the largest marketing reach in the industry. With that being said, there is a range of differences between Lux Trading Firm and FTMO, ranging from significant to fairly inconsequential.
The primary difference is the fact that FTMO provides demo trading accounts for their clients. This means that your trades are never being replicated on live trading capital. Lux Trading Firm provides real trading capital, which means that you’re actually holding real assets under management, and you have real liquidity at your fingertips.
Although this may seem irrelevant, you should be aware of what this means for the prop firms. FTMO can only profit from traders failing their funding challenges. Winning traders only cost the firm money, having to pay real withdrawals from fake profits. To contrast this, Lux Trading Firm only profits from consistently profitable traders in the market and makes no money from losing traders. Therefore, both companies in question have vastly different motivations when it comes to their growth strategies…
Let’s get into the specifics…
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Available Capital for Traders
- Lux Trading Firm – Lux has a maximum funding allowance of $10,000,000 of real trading capital per trader.
- FTMO – FTMO has a maximum funding allowance of $2,000,000 of real trading capital per trader.
Takeaway – Lux Trading Firm provides real capital and 5x more than FTMO currently offers traders.
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Capital Scaling
- Lux Trading Firm – Lux Trading Firm offers capital scaling up to $10,000,000 per trader. This is done with no time limit or cycles. Every time a trader locks in 10% profit on their account balance, they will receive 100% more trading capital. I.E if you make £50,000 profit on a £500,000 trading account, you will be given another £500,000 to manage. This progression can happen in between 5 and 7 steps, depending on your starting account size.
- FTMO – FTMO offers capital scaling up to $2,000,000 per trader. This is done in 4-month cycles, whereby the trader needs to obtain a 10% gain across 4 consecutive months. The trader must also take 2 withdrawals during this time period. The scale-up works in 25% increments every 4 months, provided you meet the desired criteria.
Takeaway – Lux Trading Firm provides 5x more capital, a faster capital scaling system, and 4x larger increments of capital growth when compared to FTMO.
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Time Limits
- Lux Trading Firm – With Lux, you have unlimited time to pass your trading challenge. This is done to be inclusive of all types of traders, market conditions, and trading strategies. We’ve worked with many profitable traders that may struggle to get their profit targets over the line in 20 days, but over 6 months are wildly profitable.
- FTMO – With FTMO, you’ll have a maximum of 30 calendar days for the first stage evaluation and 60 calendar days for the second stage. This equates to around 20 trading days and 40 trading days respectively.
Takeaway – Lux Trading Firm sets no time limit, whereas FTMO sets a strict time limit on challenges.
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Demo Trading Or Real Money?
- Lux Trading Firm – With Lux, you’ll be trading real money once you have passed your trading challenge and been awarded your funded account. This means that you’ll be trading in real market conditions, and you’ll have a real track record, audited by KPMG, to provide if you seek other funding opportunities in the future.
- FTMO – With FTMO, you’ll be trading simulated money and a demo market.
Takeaway – Lux Trading Firm provides real capital, whereas FTMO provides demo capital.
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Profit Share
- Lux Trading Firm – With Lux Trading Firm, you’ll have a 75% profit split. The remaining 25% of the profit will go to Lux. This may be reviewed in the future and increased when possible, however, we only make profit from profitable traders as you’re trading our real capital so competing with 95% profit splits would be unattainable.
- FTMO – FTMO provides a profit split of 80% as default. If you manage to participate in their capital scaling plan, this may be increased to 90%.
Takeaway – FTMO provides a larger profit share than Lux Trading Firm.
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Challenge – Profit Targets
- Lux Trading Firm – Lux Trading Firm has a default profit target of 8% during the challenge phase and 4% in the verification stage. Once funded, there are no profit targets in place.
- FTMO – FTMO has a default profit target of 10% during the first stage of the challenge, followed by a 5% profit target during the second stage of the challenge.
Takeaway – Lux Trading Firm has lower thresholds for profit targets than FTMO. In theory, this makes them easier to achieve for traders.
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Maximum Loss Limits
- Lux Trading Firm – Lux Trading has a maximum loss of 4% for traders. If this is breached, you’re able to purchase an account reset.
- FTMO – FTMO has a maximum daily loss of 5% and a total loss limit of 10%. If this is breached, you must purchase another trading account challenge to seek funding again.
Takeaway – FTMO has a larger loss buffer than Lux Trading Firm. Although this isn’t a positive, many traders will see it as one as they’re able to get deeper into drawdown.
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Trading Platforms
- Lux Trading Firm – You’ll have access to MetaTrader 4, TraderEvolution, and TradingView.
- FTMO – You’ll have access to MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, and cTrader.
Takeaway – Both prop firms provide a fairly even offering here. If TradingView is your analysis platform of choice, as it is for most traders, Lux Trading potentially has a more opportune offering.
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Risk Management
- Lux Trading Firm – You’ll have access to a Risk Manager, a Risk Desk and a backend analytics platform to help manage risk on your funded capital.
- FTMO – You’ll have access to the backend analytics platform in the dashboard area.
Takeaway – Lux Trading Firm provides a dedicated mentor and risk desk, as you’d find in a fund, as well as the same analytics FTMO provides.
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Education
- Lux Trading Firm – Lux Trading offers daily workshops, daily market analysis, live streams, a trading mentor, and a risk desk to educate traders and bring the best out of them.
- FTMO – FTMO offers some analysis apps, available in the back end, along with a performance coach that can be booked for trading psychology sessions.
Takeaway – Both prop firms provide a fairly even offering here.
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Trading Strategies Allowed
- Lux Trading Firm – You’re able to trade any strategies you like.
- FTMO – Again, you can trade any strategies you like.
Takeaway – Both prop firms provide a fairly even offering here.
In Summary – The Difference Between FTMO & Lux Trading Firm
This concludes our review of the offerings of FTMO and Lux Trading Firm. If we adopt a very basic scoring system of which prop firm appears to have the best offering per metric, Lux Trading would score a 6 and FTMO would score a 2. Of course, FTMO has a much larger media presence in the industry, but we are purely considering what is actually being offered to traders seeking funding. All the small aspects and differences aside, the main difference is the simple fact Lux Trading Firm offers real trading capital to their traders. This means the firm needs traders to succeed to make a profit. In short, this means that Lux Trading is motivated to help you succeed by making the rules as simple and easy to achieve as possible, helping to manage risk, and actually holding traders’ hands along the way by way of a mentor.
By trading real capital, you’re able to have your track record audited and open the door to taking on additional AUM in the future.
Interested in working with Lux Trading? Get started now!