EA, bot and copy trading rules

What "EAs allowed" usually means

It usually means an expert advisor you wrote or configured, trading a strategy a human could trade, at a speed a human could manage. What it usually excludes is anything exploiting the firm’s pricing rather than the market.

The distinction firms are reaching for is whether your profit comes from a view about price or from a defect in their feed. That line is not always obvious in advance, which is why the specific bans are worth reading rather than inferring.

The specific bans and why they exist

Latency arbitrage means acting on a price the firm has not updated yet, using a faster feed. It is banned everywhere because the profit is taken directly from the firm’s pricing infrastructure and has nothing to do with the market.

Tick scalping, sometimes called tick hunting, means taking very large numbers of tiny profits from spread and fill mechanics rather than direction. Firms ban it because the simulated fills that make it profitable would not exist in a live book.

Reverse arbitrage or hedging across accounts means running opposite positions on two accounts so that one passes whatever the market does. It is banned because it converts the evaluation from a test into a coin flip the firm always loses.

Grid and martingale systems are restricted at many firms rather than banned outright. They usually survive right up until they do not, and the loss when they fail is the kind that breaches every limit at once.

Commercial or widely sold EAs are restricted at many firms for a different reason. If hundreds of traders run identical logic on the firm’s book, the firm carries one enormous correlated position rather than hundreds of independent ones. This one catches honest traders most often, because buying a well reviewed EA feels like diligence rather than a rule breach.

How firms detect automation

Execution timing is the clearest signal. Orders placed at consistent millisecond offsets, or reaction times faster than a person can physically click, identify automation immediately in a trade log.

Then position sizing that is identical to many decimal places across dozens of trades, entries spaced at exact intervals, and activity that continues through the night in a pattern with no gaps for sleep.

Firms also compare across accounts. Identical trade sequences appearing on multiple accounts within the same second is the signature of copy trading, and it is trivially detectable because the firm can see every account at once rather than only yours.

Reviews normally happen at payout rather than continuously, which is why an automation problem tends to surface at exactly the moment you ask for money. The question is not whether your automation is visible. It is whether it is the permitted kind.

Copy trading between your own accounts

Copying between accounts you own is treated very differently from copying someone else. Many firms permit the first within a stated limit and ban the second outright, because copying another person makes the account holder and the trader different people, which collides with the identity terms.

Where copying across your own accounts is allowed, there is usually a cap on total exposure per symbol across all of them. Running the same strategy on five accounts can breach an exposure rule none of the individual accounts came close to.

Copying across different firms is generally not prohibited, since each firm governs only its own accounts, but the exposure and identity rules at each still apply independently. A signal service you subscribe to is copying another person regardless of how it is delivered, and is treated as such.

VPS and VPN are not the same question

A VPS is nearly always fine and often encouraged, since a dropped connection helps nobody. Some firms restrict which regions you may host in, because latency to their servers is part of what the arbitrage bans are protecting.

A VPN is a different matter. Several firms treat it as an attempt to disguise your location, which puts it under the country eligibility terms rather than the automation terms, and that is a breach rather than a warning. If you use one routinely, check this before funding rather than after.

The practical risk is that a VPN you use for everything, and never thought about, quietly changes your apparent country between signup and KYC. That mismatch is enough to void a payout at firms with strict eligibility terms, and the reason will be recorded as a country breach rather than anything to do with the VPN.

Running a bot without losing the account

Ask in writing before you fund, describing what your automation does in one paragraph. A firm willing to answer that clearly is worth more than one with a permissive sounding rules page.

Avoid anything whose profitability depends on fill quality rather than direction. If backtests improve dramatically when spread is reduced, the strategy is extracting value from execution, and that is the category firms ban.

Keep your own logs independently of the platform. If automation is queried at payout, a record of your logic and its decisions is the difference between a conversation and an assertion.

And if you run the same bot at several firms, vary nothing about it to disguise the fact. That is not a rule anywhere, and traders who try to obscure automation give a firm a far better reason to void an account than the automation itself would have.

Common questions