Is anyone using propfirms like FTMO after learning from Al's work?

I am exclusively trading with prop firms. Starting out, I had a lot of struggles with emotions and psychology while trading. I traded my personal account with micros, growing it tenfold, but then I hit a psychological barrier when the P/L numbers started mattering to me and I lost most of it.

I decided to step back, and give myself a monthly budget that I could comfortably spend on evaluations. For some reason, trading prop firms has a much lower psychological burden for me, and having a max monthly cost helped me ease my mind. 

There are a lot of prop firms out there right now, and a lot of them have almost predatory affiliate marketing schemes, resulting in a lot of positive reviews for prop firms that are bad for traders, but good for online marketeers. Know that affiliates make 10-15%, up to 25% of whatever you spend on these evaluations, and they have a lot of reason to sell you on them. So be careful selecting your prop firm. It's a good idea to read their FAQ sections all the way before selecting one. My major tip is to avoid any prop firm that limits your payout for the first couple of months. I've heard horror stories of people who traded for 3-4 months, built up a lot of profits, and then the prop firm refused to pay out. Most of the contracts I've signed, have some clausule in there that states that the prop firm doesn't have to pay out if they don't want to, for any reason. So pick a prop firm that will allow you to withdraw easily, so you can take the profits out as often as possible (while still keeping a reasonable buffer in the account).

Also know that during the evaluation and the start of your funded account, most prop firms have a drawdown that is trailing open positions. Let's say the drawdown of your selected account is $2500, and you're in a position that goes in your favor $1000, and then down to breakeven and you exit the trade breakeven, you have $1500 of drawdown left while you did not lose any money. This means you have to set quiet aggressive profit targets starting out. Once you build a buffer, you can start trading normally.

They're a good tool to learn how to trade with some skin in the game, but the goal should always be to take enough profits out of them to start your own account.

Some more tips:

• These are not 50k, 100k accounts, even though they are advertised as such. They're accounts of the size of the drawdown you get + the margin required for trading x amount of contracts. So treat them accordingly. A 50k account usually has $2500 of drawdown. Would you trade the emini with an account of $2500? Of would you trade micros?
• A lot of firms allow you to trade multiple accounts with a trade copier. Don't do that. If you can keep one "50k" account and build a buffer in it, you have access to 5 or 6 contracts, which is enough to make a lot of money. They sell multiple accounts to beginners looking to get rich quick. 

Michiel,

Thanks for adding so much detail into the answer. Can you share the propfirm you use? If you are uncomfortable sharing it publicly, please share it on my linkedin( https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravikanth-andhavarapu/).  

One other question I have is that most of the prop-firms use a Globex chart because they are on forex platforms(metatrader). Have you figured out how to trade the open on Globex charts in terms of tooling? Do you use a different charting tool like trading view?