My experience with the 5ers
wanted to document my experience with the firm, so anyone can go over it and draw their own conclusions.
Over about four months, I passed The5ers' two-phase High Stakes evaluation and traded the funded account up to a $3,000 payout. I requested that payout on June 4th. Roughly two weeks later, it was denied and my account was terminated. The reason they gave me was that during the risk interview, I hadn't disclosed my earlier use of an Expert Advisor, an open-source position-sizing calculator.
It's worth being clear about what that tool actually is. The5ers' own support confirms that on a High Stakes account, a position-sizing tool that sets your lot size and lets you drag visible stop loss and take profit levels is permitted, as long as it doesn't copy trades, or run other restricted automation. Its not prohibited software.
As for the interview itself, I was asked how I execute my trades, and I answered honestly that I trade from my phone, which is how I'd been trading throughout the funded account. I wasn't asked about the methods I'd used on earlier evaluation attempts, and I didn't think to mention a tool that I had stopped using from months earlier, because it didn't seem material to how I was trading at the time. The firm treated that as a failure to disclose. One can reasonably argue I should have volunteered more. But the tool was permitted under their own rules so what this really comes down to is a disclosure judgment about a permitted category of tool. The response to it was anything but proportionate, and that's the part I find hardest to accept.
The way it was handled only made things worse. I requested the payout on June 4th and my risk interview was scheduled for 2 weeks after, a day after which the termination notice arrived. Every request I made for the specific evidence behind the decision went unanswered, the risk team took days to reply and said little when they did. A clearer explanation didn't come until 19 days after my payout request. After a lot of back and forth with the risk team I got an opportunity to get on a call again, the only question they asked was whether I'd used an EA which I answered directly, and I even showed them where the tool came from because I didn't have it setup on any of my devices. No other discrepancies were brought up during the call.
To make matters worse, now that the account is closed, I can't review my own execution data at all. Only their risk team can see the logs the decision rests on. So I've been left in the position of being told my trading history contradicts what I said, while having no access to the very data they're citing, and no reliable way to reach the people who hold it.
When I add it all up, this is what it came to: a terminated funded account, a denied payout I had earned, no refund of my evaluation fees and, above all, 5 months of wasted time.