Novice and Experienced Traders who are lacking the capital to earn large trading profits are flocking to online prop trading firms, looking to get funded. With the growing demand, more and more prop firms are appearing in the industry looking for a piece of the pie. As more prop firms appear, traders are asking, which funded trader programs are the best in the industry.
In this article, we will compare Traders With Edge and Fidelcrest to see who comes out on top. Although both Trader With Edge and Fidelcrest offer funded accounts to traders, they have different approaches to how they do it.
What we will cover in this article:
- Who is Fidelcrest and what challenges do they offer
- Who is Traders With Edge and what do they offer
- Normal vs Aggressive accounts
- Traders With Edge Customized Prop Accounts
- Head-to-Head Comparison.
- How does Traders With Edge compare to Fidelcrest?
- For the non-traders in the audience
Who is Fidlecrest and how does it work?
Fidelcrest is a prop firm that started in 2018 to help both the average retail trader and their investors make steady gains over long periods. Currently, they are offering the standard 2-phase challenge account with the option to purchase either a normal or aggressive account. Traders trade on a demo account, following strict trading rules, to reach the challenges profit target, before moving on to a funded account.
Fidelcrest Trading Challenge
Fidelcrest is a prop firm that offers its traders two main trading programs, the Micro Trader Account and the Pro Trader Account. For both of these accounts, traders are required to follow the predefined trading rules and trade for 10 minimum trading days.
Micro Trader Account
The Micro Trader Account types are the smaller of the fidelcrest trading challenge and consist of starting capitals between $10K and $50K. Traders are required to hit a profit target of 5% over a maximum trading period of 30 days while maintaining a max drawdown of 10% and a maximum daily drawdown of 5% on their first phase. The second phase is the same except traders have a maximum trading period of 60 days and the max drawdown is reduced to 5%.
Pro Trader account
The Pro Trader Account types consist of starting capitals between $150K and $1 Million. These accounts have higher profit targets when compared to the Micro Trader Accounts. Traders are required to hit a profit target of 10% over a maximum trading period of 30 days while maintaining a max drawdown of 10% and a maximum daily drawdown of 5% on their first phase.
The second phase is the same except traders have a maximum trading period of 60 days and the max drawdown is reduced to 5%.
For both the Fidelcrest accounts, during the second stage called the funded verification phase, traders receive a 40% profit share of the profits that are made during the second phase of their challenge account. Once traders are on a funded account, there are no longer profit targets and traders can trade at their own pace. Fidelcrest accounts offer leverage trading up to 1:00.
Who are Traders With Edge and how does it work?
Traders With Edge is a prop firm that was founded in 2022, making them a relatively new face in the industry. They were founded by an experienced team who understand that not all traders have the same trading strategy. Unlike Fidelcrest, Traders With Edge offers 3 different types of accounts for traders as well as customizations to each of the account types, allowing for a truly customizable challenge that is new to the industry.
Traders With Edge Challenge
Traders With Edge offer their traders 3 different funded trader programs. Traders are required to hit a target profit within the required trading period and must trade for as little as 5 minimum trading days.
Hare Challenge
The Traders With Edge Hare Challenge is the basic two-phase trading challenge that is offered by other prop firms. Traders are required to hit a profit target of 10% over a maximum trading period of 60 days while maintaining a max drawdown of 10% and a maximum daily drawdown of 5% on their first phase. The second phase is the same except traders only have a minimum profit target of 5% before obtaining a funded account.
Turtle Challenge
The Traders With Edge Turtle Challenge is a simple one-phase trading challenge. Traders are required to hit a target of 10% over a maximum trading period of 365 days while maintaining a max drawdown of 5% and a maximum daily drawdown of 2.5%. This challenge is ideal for traders who have great risk management skills.
Instant Funding
The Traders With Edge also offers Instant funding to traders who think they have great trading skills and don’t want to bother with a challenge. Although traders only receive a 50% profit split and can rapidly scale their account size by hitting the profit targets of each level doubling or even quadrupling the account balance.
Traders have 180 days on the first level to reach a profit of 10% but can scale in as little as 5 trading days. After the initial level, there is no time limit on how fast traders need to make a profit. As traders are funded from day 1, traders are expected to show proper risk management skills
Unlike Fidelcrest, who only allows traders to use EAs if using eas and trading profits is beneficial to Fidelcrest, traders can use EAs and trading robots for both the Hare and Turtle challenge but not for the Instant Funding accounts. Currently, Traders With Edge is the only prop trading firm that offers such a wide range of products for its traders.
Normal and Aggressive Accounts
Both Traders With Edge and Fidelcrest offer a standard and aggressive account with their different account types. These accounts require traders to achieve double the profit targets for each phase but offer double the drawdown.
Head-to-Head Comparison
Who offers the Cheapest (Normal) Challenge?
In general, the Fidelcrest account fees range between $102 USD for their $10K Challenge and $2995 USD for their $1 Million challenge. To compare apples with apples, Traders With Edge account fees range between $69 USD for their $5K Challenge and $550 USD for their $100K challenge.
The cheapest overall account is offered by Traders With Edge which comes in at $55 USD for their $5K Turtle challenge.
50K challenge:
For a more direct comparison, we will also compare the price of each firm’s $50K challenge. The Fidelcrest 50K Challenge costs traders $464 USD while the Traders With Edge $50K Hare challenge costs $330 USD. While talking to the Traders With Edge customer service, I also found that you can obtain a 10% discount by just asking, bringing the cost down from $330 to just $297.
What is your piece of the pie?
You’ve passed these challenges and now are making a profit with your trading strategy on a funded account. What can you expect your cut to be?
Well, all Fidelcrest standard accounts offer traders an 80% profit share on their profits and a 90% profit split on their aggressive accounts. Traders with edge offer 80% on all of their challenge accounts, both normal and aggressive, and a 50% profit share on their Instant funding accounts.
However, Traders With Edge allows you to increase your profit share by 10% on all account types through customizations. Both of these firms offer some of the highest profit-sharing schemes in the industry.
The Edge of Traders With Edge
With flexibility in mind, Traders With Edge offers their traders a wide range of different account types to accommodate different trading techniques of their traders. To take this a step further, they have also introduced customizations with all their accounts which allows traders to take a trading challenge that fits their trading style.
Traders With Edge isn’t the first prop firm to offer their traders customizations, however, they seem to have the best implementation.
Customizations include:
- Increase max drawdown by 50%, i.e 10% max drawdown becomes 15%
- Remove the daily max drawdown
- Double leverage
- Hold trades over the weekend
- Change trailing max drawdown to a static max drawdown
- Remove required stop loss
- Increase profit share by 10%, i.e 80% profit split becomes 90%
With a combination of these customizations, traders can trade strategies that they would not normally be able to. For example, traders can use swing trading strategies on the Hare challenge as they would be able to hold trades over weekends and have a larger drawdown to work with.
Customer Support
Trading at funded trader account providers can be frustrating at times, especially when you run into technical difficulties, or have questions about your account or the trader agreement.
That is why it is important to have a firm that offers good customer support and a great customer support team. Both Fidelcrest and Traders With Edge do a great job at offering customer support through their live chat feature on their website. You can also find several different FAQs and guides on their websites for all their account types.
For the non-traders in the audience
If you are not a trader I’m not sure how you have made it this far into the article but don’t worry, these prop firms offer something for you as well.
Affiliate Program
Both Traders With Edge and Fidelcrest offer an affiliate program. The Traders With Edge affiliate program pays out up to 20% on challenges and 30% on purchased courses. If your referred trader purchases an account, you are credited for the lifetime of the trader. The Fidelcrest affiliate commission rate pays up to 15% and offers a $5,000 bonus for reaching the next level.
Teaching Program
Traders With Edge offers to sell courses for the educator on their community website, providing course creators exposure to large audiences while also providing traders with quality education
Conclusion
Both Traders With Edge and Fidelcrest are prominent trading prop firms, available for all types of traders, including forex traders, to take advantage of. When put head to head, Traders With Edge and Fidelcrest, much like every other prop trading firm out there, look similar. However, when we dive deeper, we can start to see some differences that could be the difference between a funded account and a failed account.
Although there is nothing wrong with the classic two-phase challenge, we can see that Traders With Edge is better than Fidelcrest for any trader that is looking for more than just the classic challenge.
