The5ers is consistently underrated in the prop firm conversation, largely because traders who have only experienced FTMO's rule structure find The5ers' model unfamiliar. That unfamiliarity is a mistake. The5ers offers a static drawdown structure — the single most meaningful difference from FTMO and most other firms — and a scaling pathway that can take a trader to $4,000,000 in funded capital. For traders whose strategies involve natural retracements, swing positions, or multi-day holds, The5ers is frequently a better environment than FTMO, not a worse one.
This article covers every material rule across The5ers' two main programmes — Hyper Growth and Bootcamp — and explains what each rule means for how you should trade the evaluation.
The Most Important Difference: Static vs Trailing Drawdown
Before the specific rules, this distinction needs to be stated plainly because it changes everything about how you manage risk.
FTMO uses a trailing drawdown. Your maximum loss floor rises with your equity peak. If you build your account to $108,000, your floor climbs to $97,200 — not the original $90,000. You can be in profit and simultaneously have less room to absorb a retracement than you had at the start of the evaluation.
The5ers uses a static drawdown. Your maximum loss floor is set at account opening and never moves. On an $100,000 account with an 8% drawdown limit, your floor is $92,000 on day one and $92,000 on day forty regardless of how much your equity has grown above the starting balance. A trader who has built the account to $115,000 still has $23,000 of drawdown room — they cannot be squeezed into a failing position by a good run of performance.
This structural difference is why traders with strategies that involve holding through retracements, running positions overnight, or trading momentum that extends and then partially reverses are better suited to The5ers. On FTMO, a strong early run followed by normal market choppiness can breach the drawdown floor even if the trader is overall profitable. On The5ers, it cannot.
Hyper Growth Programme — Rules
Hyper Growth is The5ers' flagship two-phase evaluation. The rules are as follows.
Phase 1: 8% profit target. 4% maximum daily loss. 8% maximum overall drawdown (static). No time limit. No minimum trading days.
Phase 2: 5% profit target. 4% maximum daily loss. 8% maximum overall drawdown (static). No time limit. No minimum trading days.
After passing both phases, you receive a funded account. The5ers' initial funded account size corresponds to your evaluation size. The programme then scales through a series of milestones — reaching 10% profit on your funded account triggers a capital increase, and this continues up to a potential $4,000,000 in managed capital for consistent performers.
The 4% daily loss limit is tighter than FTMO's 5% and requires attention. On a $100,000 account, your maximum daily loss is $4,000 — not $5,000. Traders who size positions based on FTMO parameters without adjusting for The5ers' tighter daily limit will find themselves closer to the boundary than expected.
Bootcamp Programme — Rules
Bootcamp is a single-phase evaluation designed for faster funding access. The rules: 6% profit target, 4% maximum daily loss, 8% maximum overall drawdown (static). No time limit. No minimum trading days.
Bootcamp suits traders who want to test the evaluation environment before committing to Hyper Growth, or who have a strategy with a higher hit rate and lower average return per trade — reaching 6% in one phase is achievable faster than 8% + 5% across two phases for many strategies. The funded account terms are equivalent once you pass.
The No Time Limit Rule — What It Really Means
The5ers places no time limit on either evaluation phase. This is structurally different from FTMO's 30 and 60 day windows and has real implications for how you approach the evaluation.
The obvious benefit: you cannot fail because the calendar runs out. A trader who hits a difficult market period can simply wait for conditions to improve rather than being forced to take suboptimal trades to meet a deadline. This removes the week 3 and week 4 pressure that ends a disproportionate number of FTMO challenges.
The less obvious risk: open-ended timelines produce complacency. Traders who know they have unlimited time often trade at half their normal frequency, second-guess clean setups, and drag evaluations through multiple market cycles. A Hyper Growth Phase 1 that should take four to six weeks sometimes takes four months — not because the market was unfavourable but because the trader never committed to a consistent schedule.
Set a self-imposed target of completing Phase 1 within 40–50 calendar days and Phase 2 within 30. These are personal targets, not firm requirements. But they provide the structure that the evaluation itself does not enforce, and structure is what separates traders who complete evaluations from traders who let them drift indefinitely.
Risk Settings for The5ers Evaluations
The tighter daily loss limit requires specific calibration. The parameters that work consistently across Hyper Growth evaluations: maximum 1% risk per trade, no more than 3 trades per day, personal daily loss hard stop at 2.5% (leaving a buffer below the 4% limit). This is more conservative than the rules require — intentionally so. The 4% limit leaves less margin for error than FTMO's 5%, and the buffer absorbs the spread cost, slippage, and correlated position exposure that pushes real daily loss above the theoretical calculation.
On position sizing: The5ers accounts typically start at $100,000 for the standard Hyper Growth entry point. A 1% risk on a $100,000 account is $1,000 per trade. At a 20-pip stop loss on EUR/USD, that is approximately 0.50 standard lots — well inside what the platform can execute cleanly. Size from the stop loss distance, not from the maximum leverage available.
For Bootcamp, the same parameters apply. The 6% target over one phase means you are aiming for approximately 1.5% per week on a four-week schedule. At 1% risk per trade with a 50% win rate and 1:2 average reward, two trades per day produces that return comfortably. The numbers work with conservative inputs — there is no need to push sizing to hit the target.
How The5ers Compares to FTMO
The comparison that matters is the drawdown structure, covered above. Beyond that, three secondary differences are worth noting.
Profit target differences. Hyper Growth Phase 1 targets 8% versus FTMO's 10%. Phase 2 targets 5% — the same as FTMO's Verification phase. The lower Phase 1 target is a meaningful advantage for strategies that generate steady, moderate returns rather than high-variance spikes.
Daily loss limit. The5ers is tighter at 4% daily versus FTMO's 5%. This requires tighter position sizing and personal stop-outs set lower than the rule limit. Traders who have calibrated for FTMO and move to The5ers without adjusting frequently find themselves at the daily limit on days that would have been comfortable under FTMO rules.
Scaling ceiling. The5ers' scaling programme reaches $4,000,000 in managed capital — significantly higher than FTMO's scaling pathway. For traders with multi-year ambitions in funded trading, this ceiling matters.
For a full head-to-head comparison with specific rule tables, see our FTMO vs The5ers article and the full prop firm comparison table.
Weekend Holding and EA Trading
The5ers permits holding positions over the weekend and supports algorithmic trading strategies. Both are restrictions or grey areas at some competing firms. If your strategy involves holding positions through the close of Friday's session — a common approach in swing trading and macro-driven strategies — The5ers is one of the cleaner environments to operate in. You do not need to flatten positions before the weekend or build a workaround into your execution.
EA traders should verify current policy directly with The5ers before deploying an automated strategy on an evaluation account. The general principle is that proprietary EAs and semi-automated tools are permitted, but high-frequency and latency-arbitrage approaches are not. The boundary is similar to other reputable firms: the evaluation is testing consistent discretionary or systematic trading, not infrastructure advantages.
Is The5ers Right for You?
The static drawdown structure makes The5ers objectively better for traders whose equity curves involve regular retracements — which is most strategies. The only traders for whom FTMO is clearly preferable are those running strategies with very linear, consistent returns who want the higher profit split pathway or the larger brand recognition. For everyone else, The5ers' rule structure is worth serious consideration before defaulting to FTMO on the basis of familiarity alone.
If you have previously failed a FTMO evaluation due to the trailing drawdown mechanics — building a lead early in the evaluation and then being squeezed by a normal market retracement — The5ers is worth examining as a direct alternative. The drawdown mechanics that end FTMO challenges simply do not exist in the same form on The5ers. That is not a minor detail. For affected trading styles, it changes the evaluation outcome entirely.