Automating an FTMO Instant account: the rules your automation must follow

An FTMO Instant account is an FTMO Account from the moment you buy it, with no evaluation first. So the rules FTMO keeps for its funded accounts apply from your very first trade. Most of them are easy for a person to remember and easy for an automated strategy to break.

From FTMO's Instant Account page, Trading Objectives and FAQ, checked on 25 October 2026. FTMO changes its rules from time to time, so check its pages before you trade.

The five rules

1. Daily loss: 3%. Each day at midnight Prague time, FTMO takes your balance and subtracts 3% of your starting capital. Your equity, open trades included, must stay above that level all day.

2. Maximum loss: 10%, trailing as trades close. The line sits 10% of your starting capital below your highest balance from closed trades, and it moves up the moment a trade closes at a new high. It never comes down, not even when you withdraw a reward.

3. News. On the instruments a release affects, no trade may be opened or closed from 2 minutes before until 2 minutes after selected high-impact news. That includes a stop or target filling inside the window. A trade opened earlier may be held through it.

4. Weekends. FTMO Accounts of the Standard type have restrictions on holding positions over the weekend. FTMO's FAQ gives the exact rule.

5. Consistency: 30%. To claim a reward, your best day can be no more than 30% of your total profit since your last reward. Going over isn't a breach; you keep trading until other days catch up.

Where automated strategies get caught

A strategy tested on a chart knows nothing about these rules. Its backtest holds trades over weekends and lets stops fill whenever the price gets there, news or not. On an Instant account, either one can end the account. And because the maximum loss trails every new high and ignores withdrawals, the room you trade with shrinks after each payout.

So the tool placing the trades has to know the rules: close or stand aside around news, close before the weekend, and measure the maximum loss the way FTMO does, trade by trade.

How Aphna handles it

Set the account type to FTMO Instant and Aphna measures the maximum loss from your highest balance as each trade closes, never lowered by a payout. Switch on FTMO funded account rules and Aphna closes its trades before the weekend and before any market break of more than 2 hours, and a few minutes before high-impact news, and opens nothing new close to either. Your daily limit is checked before every trade. Set Aphna's limits a little inside FTMO's own.

FTMO rules explained, with a calculator for your own levels · How automating a TradingView strategy on FTMO works