City Traders Imperium is a London-based prop firm with an incredible reputation. Their reputation is rivaled only perhaps by FTMO, and if you’re looking for a prop firm that offers great support to their traders and a very generous scaling plan, this prop firm should definitely be on your radar.
In this City Traders Imperium review, we’ll take a look at the various programs it offers and how realistic it is for profitable traders to get funded with this firm.
City Traders Imperium Review: The Funded Trader Program
The funded trader program at City Traders Imperium is of two types: an evaluation model and a direct funding model.
Evaluation accounts
In the evaluation model, the following options are available:
- $10,000 for £109
- $20,000 for £199
- $40,000 for £379
- $50,000 for £449
- $70,000 for £649
In each of the programs, your evaluation account is actually much less than the account size you’ll receive if and when you’re funded.
The evaluation accounts start at $2500 at the $10,000 level and go up to $17,500 at the $70,000 level.
You have one whole year to hit your profit target of 7%. You must also avoid a maximum relative drawdown of 5% in the process.
The relative drawdown will increase as your account balance grows. For example, if you’re on the $10,000 challenge account, once your account balance reaches $10,300, your maximum relative drawdown is now $10,300 – $500 or $9,800.
You get a 1:10 leverage to trade Forex pairs and gold. If you purchase an evaluation of $20,000 or more, you can also trade indices.
Once you pass the evaluation, you’ll enter the Portfolio manager level, where you’ll be able to scale your account every time you hit 10% profits.
Direct funding
If you want to skip the evaluation altogether, you can pay a higher fee and get a direct funding account from City Traders Imperium. These are the account sizes available:
- $20,000 for £999
- $40,000 for £1,799
- $50,000 for £2,199
- $70,000 for £3,099
In all of the direct funding accounts, funded traders can trade Gold, Forex pairs, and indices.
There is a max loss of 5% on each account, and your account will scale up every time you make 10% profits.
You can withdraw your profits once a month. Any time you withdraw, you don’t lose any progress from hitting the 10% growth target.
For example, if you’re trading the $20,000 account and you make $1,000 (5%) in the first month, you can withdraw your profit share at the end of the month.
Then, if you make another 5% the next month, you can still withdraw your share of the $1,000 and your account is scaled up to the next level of trading capital.
Scaling up with City Traders Imperium
The real appeal that funded traders will find with City Traders Imperium and their Forex funded trader programs is the excellent scaling they provide.
If you start with the $2,500 evaluation($10,000 funded account), City Traders Imperium will scale you up to $450,000 in 9 stages every time you hit the 10% profit target. That means you effectively need to make 90% total to get to trading nearly half a million dollars.
In all the other funded accounts, growth scales all the way up to $2,000,000 in varying numbers of stages. The higher up you start, the less stages you’ll need to cross before reaching $2,000,000.
The maximum you’re allowed to trade is $4,000,000 by going through two successful scaling plans.
When you start trading with City Traders Imperium, you’ll get 50% of the profits. As you scale up, your profit share increases to 60% and eventually 70%.
To put things into perspective, City Traders Imperium provides a neat table of the payouts you’d receive every time you hit the required profit target.
For example, if you chose the $2,500 evaluation, your payout when you hit 10% at the $450,000 stage would be $27,000.
If you started at any of the other tiers, your payout when you reach a 10% profit target on the $2,000,000 account would be $140,000.
Trading Rules
City Traders Imperium is quite flexible with its trading rules.
You can hold trades overnight, over the weekend, and even use EAs to trade. This allows Forex traders to use a number of trading strategies.
It also makes City Traders Imperium especially appealing to swing traders.
Aside from that, you just need to avoid the drawdown, and you must have a maximum stop loss of 1.5% of your account per position.
Note that the keyword here is position, not trade.
So if you wanted to go long on the EUR/USD with 3% of your account, you could place a trade at one key level with a 1.5% stop loss, and open a second trade at the next key level with another 1.5% stop loss.
So your total risk on your EUR/USD trade is 3%, but your risk per position is 1.5%.
Also, since the evaluation period is an entire year, there are 30 minimum active trading days required for your profit target to be considered hit.
Realistically, you’ll need at least 30 days to get to 7% growth if your maximum drawdown is just 5%. Since the drawdown is so tight and so is the leverage, you’re not going to be able to risk any more per trade to be able to make profits any faster.
In a way, this is a blessing for Forex traders because it automatically caps your risk tolerance. If you don’t risk too much in a single position, you’ll be much more comfortable with taking losses, and you’ll be able to keep a level head to continue following your trading strategies.
What makes City Traders Imperium different from other prop firms?
The key differentiating factor between City Traders Imperium and other prop firms is the level of scaling that’s available with this proprietary trading firm.
There are very few prop firms out there that really put their money where their mouth is and offer their traders accounts of this size.
Most “normal” prop firms that have a 2-step challenge such as FTMO and The Funded Trader Program offer accounts only as big as $200,000 or $400,000 and the maximum capital you can trade with them is $500,000 through combining accounts.
Ment Funding offers a $2,000,000 account for $15,000.
City Traders Imperium blows everyone out of the water by allowing their successful traders to scale their trading capital all the way up to $4,000,000 by combining two Portfolio manager accounts.
Another way that City Traders Imperium sets itself apart from other prop firms is the whole one year that they allow their traders to pass the challenge.
There are only two other prop firms that offer such large trading periods: The 5%ers offers a 6 month challenge and Ment Funding offers unlimited time to pass the challenge.
Nearly every other prop firm challenge is designed to encourage you to overtrade and fail, but The City Traders Imperium challenge removes the most pressing factor: the time limit. This allows you to practice good risk management and only take trades that are sensible.
Is it practical to get funded accounts with City Traders Imperium?
The discussion in the last section leads into this question very well. As long as you have good risk management and you trade consistently(meaning according to your trading plan), you can let your edge play out over time and gradually hit the target required to pass the evaluation phase.
The same goes for direct funding and the Portfolio manager phase: if you let your edge play out over time, it’s fairly easy for Forex traders to make 10% on their account size.
Even if you skipped the evaluation phase and went for direct funding, letting your edge play out over time will help keep you in the portfolio manager phase and prevent you from losing your funded account.
How many trades will it take for portfolio managers to level up?
Whether you trade gold or Forex, since your leverage is so limited, scaling up with this prop firm will take a few more trades than with every other prop firm that offers more leverage.
Your max stop out is 5%, so you don’t want to risk more than 0.5% per trade. This allows you breathing room to take 10 bad trades before losing your account.
Assuming you have a conservative RR of 1:1.5, you would need to take about 14 winning trades in a row to reach the 10% target.
14 winners in a row may seem like a long shot, but if your strategy is good, you can let your edge play out over time and easily hit the 10% growth target.
Educational Content
Another factor that really sets City Traders Imperium apart from most other Forex prop firms is the extensive library of educational content.
City Traders Imperium has a library of five Forex trading courses that are designed to help retail traders build their edge in the market while they trade for a proprietary trading firm.
These are the available courses:
- Intro To Forex
- Bank Levels Trading
- STT Strategy(you have to apply to be able to join this course)
- Corrective Strategy(you have to apply to be able to join this course)
- Trading psychology and risk management
The educational material at City Traders Imperium is impressive. The courses have practical trading ideas that you can really implement as a professional trader. In fact, City Traders Imperium actually encourages their portfolio managers to use these strategies in their own funded accounts.
What other traders have to say about City Traders Imperium
City Traders Imperium has stellar reviews on TrustPilot with an average score of 4.8 as of this writing. Most retail traders who have left a City Traders Imperium review talk about the extended time period to pass the challenge, the great educational material, and responsive customer support.
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Conclusion: Is City Traders Imperium Legit?
City Traders Imperium is one of those rare proprietary trading firms that encourages their customers to become trading professionals instead of profiting off of one-off trades. Their model is designed on you to succeed if you are consistently profitable rather than receiving a large one-off payment through high-risk trades.
If you want to take a trading challenge but feel the time limit is putting a damper on your trading performance, consider checking CTI out.
Sign up here