FAQ
Straight answers.
If your question isn’t here, ask a human: support@fortitude.trade.
About Fortitude
Is Fortitude a signals service?
No — and that distinction matters more than it sounds. FIS doesn't hand you a call to act on manually; it publishes quantified market context with the full reasoning attached, and the Performance Coach is architecturally prevented from ever telling you what to buy. If you want FIS to go further, you can opt in to auto-execution on your own connected account — that's automation you explicitly authorize and can revoke, not a signal group you're subscribed to. If you want someone to just tell you what to buy, we are genuinely not for you — and neither is anyone else who claims to be.
Do you hold or touch my money?
Never. Fortitude never takes custody of your capital, full stop — your money always stays at your broker, in your own name. That's true whether you trade manually or opt into FIS auto-execution: we place orders through your broker's own connection under limits you set, we never move funds ourselves, and we never hold anything.
Can FIS trade on my behalf?
If you choose to let it. Connect your broker and opt in, and FIS can execute within risk limits you set yourself — that authority is yours to grant and yours to revoke in one click, and it's never assumed. It isn't portfolio management and we never touch your funds; it's your account, running your rules, faster than you could by hand. Full detail on how it works: see the Execute pillar on the Platform page.
Will Fortitude make me profitable?
We won't promise that, and you should distrust anyone who does. Most retail traders lose money — the loss-rate disclosures are on every regulated broker's website. What Fortitude does is measurable: it makes your discipline visible, your risk consistent, and your patterns impossible to ignore. What you do with that is, honestly, up to you.
What do I need to get started?
An email address. The Free tier — including the complete Introduction to Trading & Investing course — requires no card. Connecting a broker account is optional and only needed for live journal sync.
Which brokers does it work with?
The Trading Floor and live journal sync connect via cTrader, with MT4/MT5 journal import supported through an EA. If you trade elsewhere, you can still import your history and use everything except live sync.
Is my trading data safe?
Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and we don't sell personal data. This marketing site uses privacy-conscious analytics only (Google Analytics with IP anonymization, plus cookieless Vercel Analytics) — no advertising cookies, no tracking pixels. The full details — including exactly which processors we use and why — are in the privacy policy, in plain language.
How is this different from a trading journal?
A journal records what happened. Fortitude scores what happened, detects the behavioral patterns inside it (revenge trades, size drift, overtrading), quantifies market context going forward, and puts a coach on the result. The journal is one instrument in a larger machine.
Can I cancel? Are there refunds?
Cancel anytime in one click from your account — access runs to the end of the paid period. Annual plans cancelled within 14 days of first purchase may be eligible for a pro-rated refund. No retention calls, no dark patterns.
How can I pay?
Card, PayPal, or cryptocurrency. Annual billing is a single upfront payment at 20% off.
Who is behind Fortitude?
Fortitude is operated by Syrax Global FZCO, a registered company based at the Dubai World Trade Centre. Editorial responsibility for everything published here sits with a named person rather than a brand — that, the registered entity, and the standards our content is held to are all set out on the About page. We deliberately publish no personal trading track record; we publish method instead.
About trading, generally
Can you actually make money trading?
Some people do, but the published data shows most do not. Regulated brokers are required to disclose the percentage of retail accounts that lose money, and those disclosures typically sit between 74% and 89%. That figure is the honest starting point for the question: trading is not a reliable income source for most people who attempt it, and anyone presenting it as one is selling something. What the data does not say is that it is impossible — only that the base rate is poor and that treating it as a guaranteed outcome is unsupported.
Why do most retail traders lose money?
The evidence points to behaviour rather than knowledge. Trading mechanics — market structure, risk arithmetic, order types — are freely available and can be learned in weeks, yet retail loss rates have not improved in the decade that this material has been free. What separates outcomes is consistency under pressure: position sizes that drift after losses, stops moved while a trade is losing, and trades taken to recover a previous loss rather than because a setup existed. These are behavioural failures, and they persist in people who can describe them accurately.
How do prop firm funded accounts work?
A trader pays a fee to attempt an evaluation, which typically requires reaching a profit target of around 8–10% without breaching a maximum drawdown near 10% or a daily loss limit near 5%. Passing grants a funded account trading the firm's capital, with profits split between trader and firm. The key structural points are that the evaluation fee is revenue for the firm regardless of outcome, published pass rates are commonly in the low single digits to low double digits, and a funded account is terminated on any rule breach — including while profitable. Terms vary substantially between firms and change frequently.
Is Smart Money Concepts (SMC) legitimate?
The underlying premise is legitimate; the way it is commonly sold is not. It is uncontroversial that large participants need counterparty liquidity, that stop orders cluster at obvious levels, and that price moves toward those pools. What has not been demonstrated is that retail traders can identify these footprints in advance from a chart alone, without order-flow data, at a positive expectancy after costs. There is no published, independently replicated evidence establishing an edge for the retail application of SMC. It is a useful shared vocabulary for describing price; it is not a decoded secret, and material sold as such is often freely available at its original source.
Do I need to pay for trading education?
Usually not, at least not to learn the mechanics. The overwhelming majority of technical trading concepts — market structure, Smart Money Concepts, risk arithmetic, position sizing — are published free by their original sources and are frequently repackaged and resold by third parties who add nothing. Before paying, check whether the same material exists free at source. Where paid education can add genuine value is structure, feedback on your own executed trades, and accountability — none of which is the same as access to information.
How much money do I need to start trading?
Less than most marketing implies, but the more useful question is how much you can afford to lose entirely. Because risk should be a fixed small percentage of the account per trade, a very small account produces position sizes too small to matter, which is what drives undercapitalised traders to over-leverage and lose quickly. There is no threshold that makes trading safe. The only defensible answer is capital whose complete loss would not affect your circumstances.
Is trading gambling?
It depends entirely on whether there is a defined edge and defined risk. Trading a documented strategy with consistent position sizing, a known expectancy and a pre-set stop is a probabilistic activity with managed risk. Trading on impulse, sizing by feel, moving stops and increasing size to recover losses is functionally gambling regardless of the instrument. The distinction is not the market — it is whether the process is defined in advance and followed under pressure.
How long does it take to become a profitable trader?
There is no reliable published figure, and anyone quoting a specific timeline is guessing. What can be said is that the learning curve is not primarily informational — the mechanics can be understood in weeks — so time-to-profitability is governed by how long it takes to trade consistently under pressure, which varies enormously between individuals and for many people does not arrive at all. Progress is better measured by whether risk stayed consistent and rules were followed than by whether a given month was profitable, because short-run profit is dominated by variance.
Terms used above are defined in the trading glossary. Nothing here is financial advice.