Contributor, Benzinga
September 26, 2023
OFP Funding
Overall Rating:
securely through OFP Funding's website

Based in London, U.K. and a part of OverviewFX Ltd, the Overview Funding Program, also known as OFP or OFP Funding, began operations in February of 2022. Unlike other prop firms that cater to financing retail traders, OFP does not require its clients to pass tests or challenges to obtain control of the trading funds it provides. In addition, the company has no profit target requirements, and it offers several different account types in various currencies and funding sizes. The company has recently added accounts with a 60% and 80% split structure, which could make the firm a more viable alternative for certain traders, although OFP does not allow copy trading external accounts or the use of Expert Advisors (EAs) with the MetaTrader platforms that many online traders prefer to use.

Best For
  • Undercapitalized professional traders
  • Multi-asset traders
  • News traders
  • Scalpers and position traders
Pros
  • Funding of up to 5 million pounds with multiple accounts
  • Most trading strategies allowed including scalping and news trading
  • Access to trading in forex, indices, commodities, stocks, bonds and cryptocurrencies
  • No profit targets
  • Available leverage ratio of 100 to 1
  • Supports MetaTrader 4 and 5 platforms
  • Highest instant funding profit split
Cons
  • No EA automated trading software allowed
  • No copy trading external accounts

OFP Funding Ratings at a Glance

Customer Service
Security
Minimum Investment and Pricing
User Experience
Overall

OFP Funding Product Offering

OFP offers four different account types with a maximum leverage ratio of up to 100:1. All accounts are kept by OFP and controlled by demo accounts that permit a maximum daily drawdown of 5% with a total drawdown of 10% and a maximum trader value score of 25%. 

Each of the four different account types can be opened with your choice of three major accounting currencies: USD, EUR and GBP. Every account type has different initial fee pricing and profit split details. Profits are disbursed from the accounts every 28 days, and all positions must be closed out to receive a payout, or any payout will be deferred. 

Once you have purchased control of an OFP account you will gain access to an IC Markets MetaTrader 4 or 5 (MT4/5) demo account that you can also access on your mobile device and that you will use to control the OFP account. If you prefer to use a different trading platform from MT4 or MT5, you can trade through IC Markets’ web terminal accessed via its official website.

You can trade a wide range of assets once you purchase your OFP account, including:

  • Forex: You can engage in forex trading in up to 61 currency pairs including major, minor and exotic pairs.
  • Commodities: WTI and Brent crude oil, natural gas, cocoa, coffee, corn, cotton, orange juice, soybeans, sugar and wheat.
  • Indices:  Trade 23 of the world’s most active stock market indices, including the China50 and Japan225 indices.  
  • Metals: Trade silver against the USD and EUR and gold against the USD, EUR and AUD. You can also trade palladium and platinum against USD.  
  • Bonds: Trade bonds like U.S. T-Notes and T-Bonds, U.K. Long Gilts, Japanese 10-year bonds, BTP Italian bonds, and Euro Bund, Bobl and Schatz bonds. 
  • Crypto: Trade CFDs on 18 of the largest cryptocurrencies quoted against the U.S. dollar, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. 

OFP Funding Customer Service

With respect to customer service, OFP relies primarily on its social media presence to interact with clients and the general public. In addition, the company’s website offers a live chat option, but it did not yield an immediate reply when tested by this reviewer. 

No phone contact could be found on the firm’s website, but you can readily view OFP’s Facebook page, and its Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, XYouTube or Telegram channels. According to online user reviews, the social media support options the company provides work well. 

A Discord link was provided on the OFP website, but the invitation to join the channel had already expired when tried for this review, so its value could not be assessed. 

OFP Funding Security

The profit split provided by OFP is based on trading done by you in a demo account. The funding company keeps all the capital you will be controlling in its own trading account that mirrors trades you make in your demo account. 

Your only risks in opening a demo account with OFP are your time and the amount you paid upfront for your account, which is really more of a fee than a deposit. 

Once you begin trading, and if your demo account is consistently profitable, OFP reserves the right for its in-house trading team to mirror your trades if they meet the criteria of the OFP Master Trading Account. This requirement could expose your trading strategy to reverse engineering.

OFP Funding Minimum Investment and Pricing

The best prop firms like OFP Funding do not require you to put up your own funds in a trading account. You instead pay an upfront fee to purchase access to a demo account that you trade in while OFP mirrors your trades in its own funded account. 

The size of the fee you need to spend to gain proprietary trading control over an OFP account depends on the amount of funds you would like to begin trading with and the profit split structure you select. Each of the OFP accounts has a recurring monthly profit split payout every 28 days. 

You can purchase control of accounts with larger amounts of trading capital with the same profit split structure. Also, the exact fees you need to pay for control of an OFP trading account vary according to the currency the account is denominated in. The OFP accounts denominated in USD, along with their profit splits and up-front fee costs, are summarized in the table below.

Account Type80% Instant Monthly60% Instant Monthly40% Instant Monthly26% Instant Monthly
$10,000$277$209$154$103
$25,000$443$333$246$171
$50,000$876$658$487$348
$100,000$1,675$1,258$931$686

For example, the minimum amount you can spend to control a trading account funded with $5,000 and a 26% monthly profit split payout would cost you a $73 fee, which is the entry-level amount for an Instant Monthly account with this prop firm. Selecting the same account size with an 80% payout would cost you a $185 fee. 

The 40% Instant Monthly account that lets you control $5,000 in trading capital costs a $103 fee, while the 60% $5,000 Instant Monthly account costs a $139 fee. 

On the pricier end, choosing a $100,000 account with an 80% monthly profit split would cost you an initial fee of $1,675. If you instead wanted the same $100,000 account size but were willing to accept a 26% monthly profit split, it would cost you a $686 fee.  

OFP Funding User Experience

Due to OFP’s user-friendly website and support for the MetaTrader 4 and 5 trading platforms, the user experience for OFP accounts is mostly very good. This assessment is further supported by the fact that OFP has managed to accumulate an impressive overall 4.3-star user rating at Trustpilot as of this review, although getting over 800 reviews in a relatively short operational time does seem surprising. 

Screenshot of OFP’s user-friendly website. Source: OFPFunding.com

MT4 and 5 are the most widely used trading platforms in the online retail forex trading business for good reason. The MT4/5 interface is preferred by retail traders worldwide for its extensive onboard technical analysis tools and other important features. 

The MT4/5 platforms also support full trade automation via programmable EA software that OFP forbids you to use under the threat of account suspension. The firm’s total lack of support for EAs, as well as for copy trading external accounts, does diminish OFP’s overall user experience, as does its weak customer service offerings.

On the brighter side, you can use the OFP Dashboard which gives you access to useful account and performance data. This information includes your account balance, equity, risk/reward ratios and drawdowns. 

While the OFP user experience with the MT4/5 trading platforms and its dashboard is largely excellent, other than the lack of EA support, it would make sense to familiarize yourself with some of the trading restrictions and rules you need to adhere to once you have purchased a funded account. 

For example, you can use just about any strategy you have determined to be profitable with several notable exceptions. The following strategies are not permitted at this prop firm: 

  • Gap trading
  • Latency arbitrage
  • Long-short arbitrage
  • Reverse arbitrage
  • Reverse/opposite account trading
  • Hedging
  • Tick scalping/trading
  • Martingale trading
  • Grid trading
  • News straddling methods

According to the OFP website, this list does not include all tactics that can potentially violate its trading policies, but only those that have been most frequently observed. Any account flagged for using such strategies or an unsustainable trading style is subject to suspension.  

The three rules you must follow to trade with an OFP Funding account are listed below:

  1. Rule #1: Your equity and balance must not be less than or equal to your daily maximum balance minus account margin. The account margin is 5% of the initial deposit observed each day beginning at 0 hrs GMT. For example, if your account size is $50,000, then a 5% margin amount would be $2,500, which would be your maximum daily loss in the account.  
  2. Rule #2: You can only incur a maximum drawdown of 10% of the initial account balance. For example, if you are trading with a $10,000 account, the account balance cannot drop below $9,000. 
  3. Rule #3: Known as the Trader Value Rule, this rule specifies that no single trading day can account for 25% or more of the total Profit and Loss accumulated from the purchase of the account or the last payout earned. If the account has a score equal to or above the 25% level, then the payout will be postponed until the next account review date and added to the next payout. 

If you break Rule #1 or Rule #2, then your account will be subject to closure, although Rule #3 can be broken without the suspension of your account. While these rules may sound somewhat restrictive, they do tend to offer a good framework for novices and can also help keep seasoned proprietary traders disciplined.   

OFP Funding vs. Competitors

Now that it allows 60% and 80% profit splits, OFP may be among the best prop firms for new and experienced online traders, as long as you do not want to copy trade external accounts or use an EA you have purchased or developed yourself. If you have the discipline and can trade profitably within OFP’s specified parameters without the support of an EA, you can continue trading in the same account indefinitely. 

The main drawback of using this prop firm versus some of its competitors is its refusal to allow the use of EAs, despite supporting the excellent MT4/5 platforms. Many online traders rely upon EAs to reduce their time spent at trading screens and enhance their ability to respond quickly to market shifts once they have their trading strategy programmed into an EA. 

Despite those issues, OFP has very little direct competition offering the instant funding feature of its business model. Very few (if any) other prop trading companies offer such quick funding without requiring traders to pass challenges, evaluations or verifications. The chart below displays information about some of OFP Funding’s main competitors you can review for comparison purposes.    

OFP Funding Overall

OFP gets a very good 4.0-star rating in this review largely because of its user-friendly website and its instant funding business model. This model allows quick funding for proprietary online traders without challenges, profit targets, verifications or other measures that would potentially discourage many traders from obtaining adequate funding.

While the company’s profit splits were previously well below industry standards, the recent introduction of accounts with 60% and 80% profit split terms should be better received. This change has allowed the company to alter the prop firm landscape, and OFP now poses a far more significant threat to its competitors.  

Even though OFP has been on the scene for a relatively short period of time, it has received mostly positive reviews in online forums like Trustpilot. The firm’s support of MT4 and 5 is also a big plus, despite its ban on the use of EAs and external copy trading, although you can still copy the trades of other OFP traders.

If you are a beginning or underfunded retail trader with a profitable manual trading strategy and want to avoid jumping through all the hoops most other prop firms insist on to get funded, you might want to seriously consider getting in touch with OFP today. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Q

Is $100 enough to start in forex?

A

Starting out trading forex with only $100 is possible at many online retail forex brokers, but doing so does come with limitations. That amount of trading capital is considered very small, and it will not only restrict the size of your trades but it will also increase the risk of quick losses that can wipe out your entire account. You might want to practice trading in a demo account until you feel comfortable trading forex with a more substantial capital amount or consider trading in micro lots to manage your modest account size more effectively.

 

Q

How do forex traders make money?

A

Forex traders make money through the buying and selling of currency pairs with the goal of profiting from favorable exchange rate changes. Forex traders can make money by either buying low and selling high when they go long a currency pair or by selling high and buying low when they go short. They leverage their positions to amplify potential profits, but that leverage can also magnify losses. Since forex trading involves taking risks, keep in mind that not all your trades will be profitable.

 

Q

Is forex trading legit?

A

Yes, forex trading is a legitimate financial activity conducted in the global currency marketplace. The over-the-counter wholesale market is largely unregulated in most countries, although online retail forex trading does have oversight from financial authorities in many jurisdictions. Make sure you exercise prudence when trading forex and only operate via a reputable broker since some scams and fraudulent schemes do exist.

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Jay and Julie Hawk

About Jay and Julie Hawk

About Julie: 

Julie Hawk earned her honors undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan before pursuing post-graduate scientific research at Cambridge University. She then started work in the private sector as a business systems analyst for a major investment bank, where she qualified as a Series 7 Registered Representative and received comprehensive training in various financial products. Further honing her skills, she attended the prestigious O’Connell and Piper options training course in Chicago, mastering professional option risk management techniques.

Julie then transitioned into the role of a professional Interbank forex trader, currency derivative risk manager and technical analyst, ascending to the position of vice president over a 12-year career in the financial markets. Julie’s illustrious banking career spanned working for major international banks in New York City, London, and San Francisco, where she served as an Interbank dealer, technical analyst, derivative specialist and risk manager. Her responsibilities included educating, devising customized foreign exchange hedging and risk-taking strategies, and overseeing large-scale transactions for esteemed banking clients, including corporations, fund managers and high-net-worth individuals. As part of her responsibilities, Julie managed substantial portfolios of forex options, spot, and futures positions as a currency options risk manager, earning recognition for executing innovative and highly profitable forex derivative transactions. Julie also spearheaded educational conferences on currency derivatives.

During her banking career, Julie attained world-class expertise in technical analysis, including Elliott Wave Theory, and pioneered research into automated trading and trading signal systems. An active member of the San Francisco Writers’ Guild, Julie also authored trade strategies, educational material, market commentary, newsletters, reports, articles, and press releases. She became a sought-after market expert who was frequently interviewed by financial magazines and news wires such as REUTERS.

Following her retirement from the banking sector, she dedicated 15 years to online forex trading, mentoring and freelance writing for TheFXperts, which she co-founded with her husband Jay. Julie is the co-author of “Forex Trading: A Beginner’s Guide” and “Technical Analysis for Financial Markets Traders,” in addition to five other books on financial markets trading and personal finance. She now focuses on writing articles on financial markets for platforms like Benzinga, although she continues to trade forex online and mentor fellow traders as part of TheFXperts’ financial team.


About Jay:

Jay Hawk grew up in Chicago and Mexico City where he became bilingual in English and Spanish. After taking formal training as a classical guitarist at prestigious music conservatories in Europe, Jay then embarked on a remarkable journey into the financial markets, cultivating his notable expertise through hands-on experience that began on the Midwest Stock Exchange.

His financial career progressed as he started actively participating in various exchange floor trading activities in the Chicago futures and options pits, where he worked his way up the ladder, serving as a clerk, trader, broker, investor and fund manager. Jay then ran a retail stock brokerage desk and managed funds for large institutional investors, leveraging his discretionary trading skills to yield profitable results for clients.

This ultimately led to Jay holding exchange seats and operating as a market maker on options exchanges in Chicago and San Francisco, initially on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Jay also played a significant role in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s evolution, where he contributed to launching and actively trading the first listed currency futures options. After transitioning to the West Coast, Jay then held a seat and ventured into trading stock options and their underlying stocks on the Pacific Options Exchange.

Jay’s comprehensive understanding of fundamental economic and corporate analysis continues to inform his trading and investment activities and has led to his subsequent success as an expert financial writer. Together with his wife Julie, he co-authored “Stock Trading: A Beginner’s Guide”, “Commodity Trading: A Beginner’s Guide” and “Fundamental Analysis for Financial Markets Traders,” among their published books focusing on financial markets trading, market analysis, and personal finance. 

As an integral member of TheFXperts’ team, Jay now excels in trading forex online for his personal account, mentoring aspiring traders and writing for financial platforms like Benzinga where he specializes in covering topics related to the stock and commodity markets, as well as investing, trading and reviewing online brokers.