Yes — FTMO allows trading bots and Expert Advisors (EAs), and has said so publicly for years. You can run an EA on an FTMO evaluation and on a funded FTMO Account, on MetaTrader 5 and the firm's other supported platforms. But the permission comes with real conditions: the strategy has to be genuinely yours, it must not exploit the demo environment the evaluation runs on, and it must respect the same loss limits as any human trader. Rules also change, so treat this article as a map, not the law — the only binding source is FTMO's current terms and FAQ, which you should read yourself before attaching anything to a chart.

That paragraph is the honest version of what many “FTMO EA rules” articles bury under a sales pitch. The rest of this guide unpacks the conditions: what FTMO actually restricts, why an EA that is technically allowed can still cost you the account by breaching loss limits, and the questions worth putting to any bot vendor — including us — before you pay for anything.

What FTMO permits

FTMO's position on automation has been consistent: algorithmic trading is allowed. The firm does not care whether an order comes from a finger or from code. What it cares about is behaviour — that the account is traded by the person who bought it, that the strategy would work on a real market rather than only against a demo server, and that the trading objectives (profit target, maximum daily loss, maximum overall loss) are respected however the orders are generated.

In practice that means the ordinary setup — an EA you own or licensed, attached to a chart in your own MT5 terminal or on your own VPS, trading your evaluation under your login — is within the rules as they have long stood. Nothing about automation itself is prohibited. The trouble starts with how a bot is used, and with a handful of specific practices FTMO names as forbidden.

What FTMO restricts

The restrictions cluster into two families: practices that mean someone or something else is effectively taking the test for you, and practices that only make money because the evaluation runs on a demo server. The table below summarises the categories that appear in prop firms' prohibited-practice lists — read it as orientation, not as a quotation of FTMO's current terms.

What about copying between your own accounts?

Copying trades between accounts you personally own has historically been treated differently from copying someone else's — but the details matter, they differ between evaluation and funded phases, and they change. If your setup involves a trade copier in any form, describe it to FTMO support precisely and keep the written reply. A support answer in your inbox outranks every blog post, including this one.

Allowed is not the same as safe

Here is the part most articles skip: the bigger practical risk is not running an illegal bot. It is running a perfectly legal one that was never designed for prop-firm arithmetic. FTMO's classic structure caps daily losses at around 5% and overall losses at around 10% of the initial balance (confirm the current figures for your own account type), and the daily figure usually counts floating losses on open positions. An EA sized for a personal account, where a 15% drawdown is unpleasant but survivable, can end an FTMO evaluation in one afternoon without breaking a single written rule.

Strategy style matters too. Martingale and grid systems — which respond to losses by adding exposure — are not, as far as published rules have generally gone, banned outright. But they are structurally at war with a daily loss limit: the exact moment the system wants to double up is the moment the limit is closest. Legal and suicidal are not mutually exclusive.

A bot built for evaluations should therefore be rule-aware, meaning at minimum:

• It sizes positions from the account's live equity and remaining drawdown headroom, not from a fixed lot table.
• It tracks floating P&L against the daily loss line, not just closed trades.
• It stops trading for the day before the daily limit is reached, with a deliberate buffer rather than a photo finish.
• It knows evaluation and funded phases can carry different restrictions — for example around high-impact news — and behaves accordingly.

This is the design problem RSForex Bot's prop mode was built around — per-trade risk caps, a daily-loss buffer and drawdown tracking compiled into the executor rather than left to the user's memory. That is an honest description of the engineering, not a promise: no software can guarantee an FTMO pass, and trading gold with any bot involves a real risk of loss.

Seven questions to ask any bot vendor

Whether you are evaluating our software or anyone else's, the same interrogation applies. A vendor who cannot answer these plainly is telling you something.

Verify the current rules yourself

Prop-firm rules are living documents. Categories get renamed, thresholds move, and practices that were tolerated get named and banned. Before you run any automation on an FTMO account, and again whenever your account changes phase, do four things:

1. Read the current FTMO terms and conditions and the FAQ sections covering automated trading, prohibited practices and third-party services — not a summary of them, the pages themselves.
2. Describe your specific setup to FTMO support in writing (the EA, any VPS, any copier, anything unusual) and keep the reply.
3. Re-check when you move from Challenge to Verification to a funded FTMO Account — some restrictions differ between phases.
4. Re-check after any announced rule change; enforcement usually follows the announcement quickly.

FTMO's terms, prohibited practices and automation policy are controlled entirely by FTMO and change over time. Nothing here is legal advice or a statement of FTMO's current rules — verify against FTMO's own site before trading. RSForex Bot is independent software and is not affiliated with or endorsed by FTMO.