Alpha Capital Group Review
Alpha Capital Group are a community of successful funded proprietary traders. Pass an evaluation for a chance to trade on a funded account up to $200,000 and keep 80% of the profits that you generate.
At Alpha Capital Group, they provide capital up to $200,000 (increasing to $2,000,000 with scaling on the Alpha Pro Plan) for successful traders who can show a capacity for market reaction, risk management, and most crucially, profit generation.
In order to help traders of all skill levels on their path to getting a funded account and becoming one of their proprietary traders, they provide traders a platform that includes educational videos, market insights, trading techniques, one-on-one coaching sessions, and unique trading technology.
After all, it is in their best interests that you succeed, because when you make profit, they make profit. Therefore, they go above and beyond to ensure that you have everything that you need to pass the trading challenge.
Process
The Alpha Capital Group funding evaluation process is very simple and goes as follows:
- Choose Your Evaluation
- Click Get Funded
- Sign Up
- Receive Your Login Details
Funding Evaluations
You can choose from any of the Alpha Capital Group challenges to show them how profitable your trading strategy is and how well you can manage risks. There are 3 types of Alpha Pro evaluations, either 50K, 100K or 200K. The profit targets required to pass the evaluation are as follows:
- Phase 1: 8% total profit target
- Phase 2: 5% total profit target
For example, $50,000, 8% Profit target = $5,000. The account balance must be equal to $58,000, including account equity, meaning all positions must be closed.
If you successfully pass the evaluation stage, you can get an account funded with up to $200,000 and share 80% of the profits. This is generous, although some other prop firms such as FTMO have a 90% profit share for top traders.
| Funding Journey | Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Funded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profit Target | 8 % | 4 % | No Profit Target |
| Profit Share | N/A | N/A | 80 % |
| Daily Drawdown | 5 % | 5 % | 5 % |
| Max Drawdown | 10 % | 10 % | 10 % |
| ZERO % Commissions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Trade Through News | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hold Over The Weekend | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Fee Fully Refunded | N/A | N/A | Yes |
Whatever account you choose, you get benefits like 0% commission, limitless no-cost retries, leverage of 1:100, and refundable fees when funded. Additionally, the Alpha Pro Challenge grants you full access to the Alpha Capital Group dashboard, which has all of the resources you need to stay on top of your day trading activity.
To take part in the challenge, you must pay the specified cost. Then, you aim to achieve additional profit targets throughout the following 60 days (4% within the following 60 days), as well as a number of profit targets within the first 30 days (8% within the first 30 days). If you meet these goals and the required level of proof, Alpha Capital Group will refund your initial money and open an account in your name.
When your account is funded, you can start withdrawing 80% of the profits. As long as you don’t go over the daily drawdown (5%) or maximum drawdown (10%) limitations, you can still access the account.
You might be offered another chance if you are unable to complete Alpha Capital Group’s challenge goals in the allotted time. You may try again if your portfolio was profitable during the window. As long as your portfolio is still successful, you can attempt as many times as you like.
You must pay to re-enter the Alpha Capital Group prop challenge if you don’t reach the profit goals in the allotted time and don’t qualify for a retry.
As with all prop trading firms, there are some trading rules that you will need to follow in order to not fail the challenge. Before you proceed, make sure you are aware with the requirements for passing the evaluation and the criteria that govern them. This includes gain goals, maximum drawdown, maximum daily loss, etc.
On a funded live account, the trading rules are identical to those used in the evaluation. The risk criteria will be the same for both the assessment phase and live funding, depending on the plan you’ve chosen. The profit target rule to make as much profit as you can is the only one that is eliminated.
Trading Strategies
You are allowed to use hedging and scaling in strategies. This prop firm also does not impost any restrictions on overnight trading, weekend holding or trading during major news releases. This is a huge advantage over many other prop firms who are not as lenient when it comes to the trading strategies that they allow.
Dangerous martingale money management strategies where you open larger position sizes to try and recover from a loss are not allowed. This is the case with most prop firms. Reason being, martingales can get lucky and work for a short period of time but they are inherently dangerous. More often than not, they will blow a trading account eventually.
Taking advantage of unrealistic fills is not allowed and will lead to account failure. Strategies that are prohibited:
- Latency Trading
- Arbitrage Trading
- High Frequency Trading
- Martingale Trading
Expert Advisors
The prop firm do allow automated trading with prop firm EA’s but you need to get them pre-approved by the support team before using them on your account.
Copy Trading
Be aware that they do not allow copy trading or group trading. They want to find traders who have their own strategies, not those who are relying on others.
Only copy trading between your external account and your account with Alpha Capital Group Limited is permitted. Any traders who are discovered copying the trades of other traders will be investigated for any agreement violations, which might result in the loss of the funded account.
Trading Days
Phase 1 completion may take up to 35 calendar days for traders. After that, you’ll enter Phase 2, where you’ll have up to 60 days to finish the challenge. Within each phase, traders are required to trade for a minimum of 5 days.
Maximum Daily Loss
The daily loss cap is determined using 5% of the opening amount for each trading day. This is the balance of the Account as of broker time’s daily candle closing.
For instance, if your equity is $101,000 and your account balance is $100,000, your maximum daily risk for the next day will be 5% of that amount ($100,000), or $5000. Additionally, any winnings on your P/L that are carried over from the previous trading day will be added to your daily loss cap. In this instance, $5000 plus $1000 is $6000.
The daily loss cap would still be $5000 for this particular day, but you may lose an additional $1000 of the floating earnings for a total loss of $6000.
Alternatively, if the account balance is $100,000 and your equity is $99,000 (at the close of the daily candle), the maximum daily risk for the following day would be 5% of the starting balance of the day ($100,000) equal to $5000, and the losing positions on your P/L results carried over from the previous trading day will be subtracted from your daily loss limit ($5000 – $1000 = $4000 in this case).
The original daily loss cap for this day would be $5000, but since there is a carried loss of $-1000, that amount would be subtracted from the daily loss cap, leaving $4000 available to lose before the account is labelled as failed in accordance with the daily loss cap.
Maximum Drawdown
All of the Alpha Capital Group challenges have a 10% maximum loss from the initial starting amount. The maximum loss, for instance, on a 100K Challenge is $10,000. If the account balance or equity falls below $90,000, this rule is broken.
Scaling Plan
The Alpha Pro Plan’s maximum capital growth is $2 million. Scaling requests can be made by traders whose trading account experiences a 10% growth. 10% of the scale will be applied. This enables the trader to take full profits, scale transactions simultaneously, and compound account growth.
Position Size
On funded accounts, each account size is subject to the maximum lot exposure shown in the table below. Maximum lot exposure is the sum of all permitted lots and position sizes that may be open on the account at any given moment.
For instance, if your exposure is limited to 100k and 40 lots, you can either open one 40-lot transaction or two 20-lot trades, but you cannot open two 25-lot trades because the combined exposure would be 50 lots, exceeding the 40-lot maximum.
- $10k = Max 5 lots
- $25k = Max 10 lots
- $50k = Max 20 lots
- $100k = Max 40 lots
- $200k = Max 80 lots
Profit Withdrawals
On funded accounts, profit withdrawals are permitted every two weeks. No minimum withdrawal amount is necessary. You can send Alpha Capital Group a withdrawal request on the 14th and 28th of the month.
Within three business days, all withdrawals will be processed and reimbursed. Bank wire transfer will be used to send profit withdrawals.
In order to provide clients with minimal exchange rate fees while obtaining profit withdrawals in their home currencies, they have teamed with a deliverable FX institution.
Retry
If a trader meets all other trading requirements and the time restriction but hasn’t achieved the desired profit aim, the trader will then be qualified for a free retry.
The Aggressive plan offers an unlimited number of free retries. You will automatically qualify if the account is profitable and no other rules have been broken.
Brokers
This prop firm has their own proprietary trading broker in ACG Markets, giving traders:
- Institutional trading conditions
- Prime of prime liquidity
- Ultra-low latency
- Sub 30ms targeted execution time
- Raw spreads from 0.1 pips
The broker has very favourable trading conditions including tight spreads, zero commission fees and quick trade execution speeds. That being said, some traders may prefer to go with a household name such as Eightcap. You can trade with them on other prop firms such as SurgeTrader.
Platforms
The award-winning Meta Trader 5 platform is used for trade execution, offering traders a customizable trading platform, top-notch tools for technical analysis and fundamental research, along with lightning-fast execution. You can use a plethora of built-in trading tools to conduct expert market analysis across multiple chart types and timeframes.
Charts, trade orders, and execution methods should all be adjusted until they precisely match your approach. With some of the most precise technical analysis currently available on the market, boost your trading via MT5. You may access in-depth financial news from top news organisations and a thorough economic calendar accessible from directly within the platform
There are literally thousands of free and paid add-ons that you can install to enhance the functionality of the MT5 platform. The possibilities are endless for traders with all types of trading style. However, if you prefer the older MT4 platform, then you might want to consider True Forex Funds as an alternative prop firm. Otherwise, you could copy trader from your own MT4 or cTrader account to MT5 as a work around.
Instruments
You can trade forex, indices and commodities with ACG Markets. If you are looking to trade futures, then you can check out The Trading Pit. For anyone who want to trade cryptos on a funded account, there is TopTier Trader. This prop firm does offer up to 1:100 leverage on the Alpha pro 2 stage evaluation which is amongst the highest available.
Alpha Traders Dashboard
This is a trader’s ideal dashboard with a variety of statistics included for them to keep track of everything they need to navigate the markets throughout the trading day all from one convenient place. The collection of metrics includes account analysis, account results, trading journal, trade mate, and more.
For every professional day trader, this is an important dashboard to review performance, make sure you are meeting targets and identifying areas in which you can improve. Everything you need to support you in your trading day is offered there such as advanced analytics, economic calendar, charts and market news.
Here you can conduct your own full review of your evaluation or funded accounts performance, from most profitable asset class, lots size even the time of day you win or lose the most. Track your Progress against profit targets and max daily loss objectives so you are clear as to where you stand every step of the way.
The trading dashboard has the following features:
- Free access to the platform, valued at $497
- Includes Trade Mate panel
- Sessions zone and VWAP indicator
- Pivot point indicator
- 30-day account performance reports
- Custom-built trading journal
- Live market news feeds
- Economic calendar
- Monthly trading competitions
Alpha Academy
For beginner and expert traders alike, Alpha Capital Group provide techniques and instructional programmes to aid in the growth of each trader. This results in Alpha traders that have the skills and knowledge to make informed trade decisions.
To help traders develop a practical grasp of trading the financial markets, the school will include a broad range of instructional courses, trading methods, indicators, EAs, and tools.
Since every trader must start somewhere, they have established the Alpha Academy to guide individuals looking to enter the market on the proper footing. The Alpha Academy is also made to help traders who have been trading for some time but still struggle with risk management, profitability, or feel like there is room for improvement in some area of their trading.
Trading Technology
To help all of their traders, the prop firm established their own trading tools. Pick one of the assessments to benefit from a selection of robust trading tools for spotting buy and sell opportunities. This includes technical indicators such as pivot points and a risk calculator to lower risk and boost consistency.
TradeMate
The TradeMate panel is meant to boost the trader’s execution efficiency while removing frequent errors related to risk and proper position sizing. Before making the trade, the trader will be allowed to review the trade information.
The Trade Mate panel will appropriately compute the necessary lot size to result in the correct intended risk amount once the trader inputs the desired risk in terms of a £/$ amount or a percentage along with their Stop loss price.
Session Zones & VWAP
This indicator will clearly display the High & Low of each session for the Asian, London, and New York sessions on the chart and can be used to set price targets.
Volume weighted average pricing (VWAP) takes volume and price into account. VWAP gives pricing points with high volume more weight than Moving averages do. In turn, this enables you to recognise key entries and exits, evaluate relative strength, and comprehend price points of importance.
Pivot Point Indicator
This indicator will plot daily support and resistance levels based on dynamic pivot points, as well as weekly highs and lows, on the chart. These price ranges, both high and low, can be used to anticipate market turning points and to help determine entry and exit locations.
Competitions
Alpha Capital Group run monthly trading competitions which are free to sign up for. You can compete against other traders in the community to win a free evaluation account and get exclusive discounts.
| Maximum capital | $2,000,000 |
| Profit split | 80% |
| Scaling | Yes |
| News trading | Yes |
| Weekend trading | Yes |
| Automated trading | Yes |
| Free trial | No |
| Maximum leverage | 1:100 |
Overall, there is a lot to like about Alpha Capital Group and the all-in-one prop trading solution they provide from funded accounts to the in-house brokerage. They have very competitive conditions with a range of diverse accounts to choose from. The initial fees are reasonable and the profit share in line with the industry standard although not the highest you will find. However, there is a healthy-looking scaling plan and you do get access to trade various asset classes on the excellent MT5 platform with a wide range of tools, including one of the best trading dashboards of any prop firm.
Successful traders can apply for funding from Alpha Capital Group if they can show that they can make profit while taking reasonable risks. They are searching for traders who can show they have the capacity to respond to the markets, control risk, and most importantly, make money.
To help traders learn more about potential areas for growth, they have established trading education. Customized in-house trading tools have been created to enable traders of all experience levels with a clear focus on reducing risk and enhancing trade execution effectiveness.
In conclusion, if you are looking for a prop firm that provides funded accounts with straight forward rules and everything you need to trade without any hassle, they are certainly worth consideration.
