You can lose the $500, and you can also pause for two weeks
Axi Select is a broker capital program, Seed through Pro M, on a live MT4 or MT5 account at Axi in Sydney. The daily line is 5% and each stage pauses at a 10% maximum drawdown. The first hit of that 10% is a two-week quarantine, not the permanent end FTMO applies when a $100,000 2-step account touches $5,000 on the day or $90,000 on the static floor. Later hits are a different conversation. Do not read the quarantine as a free redo of a reckless week.
The targets inside a stage are 5% and 5%, not FTMO's 10% and 5%. Twenty minimum trading days replace FTMO's four. You keep 100% of the profit on your own deposit and up to 90% of the multiplier allocation. Settlement is monthly, on the 1st. FTMO pays 80% to 90% starting 14 days after the first funded trade, on the firm's capital, after you have paid $540 to try.
One oversized loser can freeze the month
Progression needs an Edge Score that runs from about 50 into the 90s, scoring skill, risk, consistency, and experience. A single ticket that is huge relative to the live deposit can drop that score and freeze multiplier progress for a month even when the 10% pause never printed. FTMO will simply fail the account if the ticket spends the day. Axi can leave the account alive and still refuse to add capital. Those are different punishments, and the second one is easy to miss because the balance is still there.
There is no news blackout and no weekend ban. EAs are fully allowed on the live book, without a prop-style request cap dressed up as a rule. Open a Venasri account if you want the live Axi login and a separate FTMO login scored on different clocks. The Axi day reseats at 00:00 Axi server time. FTMO reseats at 00:00 CE(S)T.
0.50% of the multiplier is not 0.50% of your $500
This is the sizing error. A $500 deposit risked at $250 is half the trader's own cash and may be a small slice of a multiplier stage. The Edge Score is watching the shape of the risk, not only the firm's 10% line. A 20-pip FX stop at $10 per pip needs 0.25 lots to risk $50, which is 10% of a $500 deposit and a sensible unit only if the allocation you are actually trading is large enough to carry it. Write down which balance the 5% refers to before you click.
FTMO's $500 unit on a $100,000 challenge is 0.50% of firm capital you do not own. Losing ten of them ends a day of someone else's money. Losing two reckless bets on Axi can end your deposit and your score in the same hour. Bot controls are allowed here in a way many prop desks restrict, and they should still cap the order to the unit you wrote down for the stage, not for the dream allocation.
Pause yourself before the quarantine does
Equity Guard on an Axi stage should flatten near 4% of the balance the stage is actually measuring, inside the 5% day, and you should scratch well before a 10% stage loss so the two-week pause is your decision. On a $100,000 allocation that 4% flatten is $4,000, and the 10% pause is $10,000. On a $500 deposit those percentages are $20 and $50. The FTMO 2-step flatten remains $4,250 of a $5,000 day that ends the account for good.
The $540 you do not pay Axi is not profit. It is the absence of an entry fee, replaced by cash that can go to zero and by a month that can go nowhere if the score drops. FTMO is a paid audition for a static floor. Axi is a live account with a multiplier that has to be earned in public, 20 days at a time.
