Why You Should Use cTrader For Your FTMO Challenge

Welcome back to the Disciplined FX blog – my name is Andrew Bloom and if you haven’t met me before, I am a Ph.D. student in the field of business with a concentration in entrepreneurship and I’ve been a day trader for about four to five years and a day trader of forex markets for about 2-3 years. I also started Disciplined FX last year to help teach traders from all walks of life how to become profitable in forex markets while focusing on building habits that support discipline and using mechanical trading in order to develop that routine mindset when you’re actually in front of the charts.

[This post contains FTMO affiliate links]

So I’m going to make a guess as to why you’re here today – I’m going to wager that you’re looking for a good reason for either cTrader or mt4 mt5 and you’re hanging out on the fence there. You’re not really sure which one to go for as you’re submitting your FTMO application.

Personally, I believe there’s one very good reason why you should pick cTrader (See my post on their best features, here) instead of mt4 mt5 , the typical gold standard platforms for day trading any market, but the reason why isn’t gonna be why you think it should be.

Hear me out on this.

What Traders Look for in a Platform

Let’s quickly talk about what people are looking for in a platform.

So you might be looking for things like the ability to program your own strategies using expert advisors, or the ability to set alarms to use a variety of indicators. Now, these are all worthwhile elements of a good platform but something that I think really takes the cake is the ability to easily and intuitively place a trade at any given moment and ensure that your order will be submitted the way you want it to.

Ultimately, we want to make quick orders, especially if you’re a scalper like me or a day trader who is waiting for a very fine and precise moment to enter the trade.

Regardless of what platform you use you’re going to want to have an order form that you are comfortable with and able to use on the spot to put in your stop loss, take profit targets, as well, and you can trust that that order will be placed correctly.

Why Do You Need a Great Order Form?

So why am I focusing on orders?

The reason is that I don’t think you actually need to be deciding on a platform for your FTMO challenge because I don’t think you should be using FTMO‘s platforms.

Instead, I think it’s really useful – and this is true also in professional day trading – to use either your own broker’s charts or a charting software that you trust, such as Trading View, where you’ve done proficient backtesting.

You’re going to want to use another chart for making your decisions for your prop trading orders.

For me, I use Oanda‘s trading charts.

Why cTrader FTMO

It means I’m also using their prices which are relatively close enough to the kinds you’ll find on the FTMO platforms but what’s important for me is that I’ve backtested my mechanical strategy on these charts many, many times and I’m using that data to inform the kinds of risk percent per trade as well as statistical components to help me make decisions as to when, for example, I should maybe stop trading on a challenge and look for a retry if something unusual occurs.

I want to use Oanda‘s charts to figure this out because that’s going to be where that information is consistent.

What I do when I trade with FTMO or any other prop firm is just use their platforms as order forms.

I just want to set up the stop loss, take profit, put in the position size, and set it, forget it. Let it unravel on its own.

This is the reason why I think cTrader is the better option than mt4 mt5 – it’s because their order forms are so intuitive. They let you calculate how much you want to risk on your trade based on your account size. They do the math for you and most importantly they let you select your take profit and your stop loss based on pips – you don’t have to know the price ahead of time.cTrader

It takes out that step of having to measure your trade and figure out the price levels, which is such a boon when you’re a scalper like me and you’re thinking in pips.

Some Downsides to Selecting cTrader

Now, the one downside though to using cTrader is that you can’t use their mobile app for your challenge.

If you want to do more mobile trading you’re going to have to use mt4 mt5. However, mt4 and mt5’s mobile order form is like a risk management nightmare in and of itself. I do use it for my own trading because I’ve grown accustomed to it but I don’t recommend starting out on mobile trading with mt4 or mt5 if you’re just getting started with them for the first time.

As you take your challenge, however, let’s assume you’re able to sit in front of a computer. You’re able to use multiple charts. You can easily set your brokerage’s chart as your analysis chart, if you will, on one screen and use cTrader on the other where you can easily submit orders. The one thing i will recommend though is to be careful of jumping across different currency pairs as those orders will switch – they will go back to some kind of default order such as the last trade you took.

There might be settings to change this, but so far my experience has been to be sure you know what your orders are so that in case you’re jumping around, looking for a pair to trade with, you can change that order form again if it gets clicked out.

The Ideal Set-Up

So here’s the ideal outcome: you signed up for your prop trading challenge you clicked cTrader as your platform of choice. You’re using your brokerage’s charts on one screen and you have c Trader on another. You make your decisions on your own broker’s charts – those were the ones you use to backtest – and you just submit your position size you use your stop loss and take profit to calculate how much you want to risk for this trade. Lastly, you fill out your position size accordingly. They do the math for you right there and when you see the signal to go on your broker’s charts, you submit the order on cTrader and that’s it.

You don’t touch anything else. You don’t use their charts to trade with and it’s a very simple, quick process.

So that’s the number one reason why I suggest cTrader over mt4/mt5 is that you’re not actually going to use them as a platform. Instead, you’re just using them as ordering services where you can set up your trade position very quickly, easily, with the math calculated out for you and get on with your trading day or your day in general.

Overall, I like cTrader. (See my post on their best features, here) They have nice charts. But for the purpose of trading like a professional, I believe it’s best to use prop firm’s platforms only as places where you enter your orders – not where you analyze charts.