The rules they do not put on the pricing page
48 terms across 15 firms that can cost you an account or a payout after you have paid — 28 of them close the account outright. Every one is quoted from the firm’s own pages, with a link to where we read it.
Consistency
Limits on how much of your profit may come from one day or one trade.
Striking System: four warnings and the account is gone
On eligible Master Accounts a trade idea that reaches roughly 1% of account size in floating loss generates a warning. The consequences escalate: first warning takes the profit from that trade idea, second halves your reward split, third cuts it to 20%, fourth breaches the account. Crucially the warnings do not reset after a payout — they follow the account.
Zero requires 7 profitable days in every 30
The Zero model requires a minimum of 7 profitable days per 30-day period, and a day only counts if it closes at least 0.25% up. A profitable but inactive month can therefore fail an account that has broken no loss limit.
One day cannot be 40% of your profit
On on-demand payouts, no single trading day may represent more than 40% of your total cumulative profit before you can request a withdrawal. One outsized day therefore delays the payout rather than earning it — you have to trade on to dilute it.
Consistency is checked only when you ask to be paid
The consistency rule is applied at the moment a reward request is submitted, not during trading. You can trade the whole period believing you are compliant and find out at payout that you are not.
Trading one instrument too heavily is itself a breach
Once you have ten or more closed trades in a Payout Cycle, Finotive checks concentration: if 70% or more of those trades — or 70% or more of your total exposure — are on the same symbol in the same direction, that is Excessive One-Sided Position Concentration. Requesting a payout while the condition is active records a Conditional Strike and cuts that payout to 10%. Their own wording says it does not require a 50/50 buy-sell balance and does not prohibit trading one instrument, but a specialist who only trades gold long will meet it.
Instant Funding carries a consistency rule you choose at checkout
Instant Funding is sold with either a 15% or a 20% consistency requirement, picked as an add-on when you buy, and the profit split moves with it. No other route in the range has one. It is a term of the product rather than a rule published on a rules page.
Winning too fast adds a minimum-days requirement to your funded account
On every evaluation model, taking more than 60% of the profit target in a single trade idea means a minimum of 4 profitable days is applied to the Master account you go on to receive. A good trade during the challenge therefore changes the terms of the funded account it earns you.
The Best Day Rule can hold up your pass or your payout
On the 1-Step, your Best Day may not represent more than 50% of your Positive Days’ Profit — the sum of closed profit and loss across all profitable days. Importantly FTMO state that exceeding it is NOT a breach: the account survives, but you have to keep trading and generating profit until the best day falls back to 50% or less before you can pass or be paid. One outsized winning day therefore delays you rather than ending you. The 2-Step has no Best Day Rule at all.
During the challenge you are not told when you break these rules
Finotive states plainly that during Challenge and Pro Challenge it will not issue real-time dashboard alerts, email alerts, platform notifications, Early Soft Warnings, Formal Warnings or Conditional Strike indicators for the warning-based and conditional-strike rules. Findings are collected and handed to you in a Challenge Phase Progression Report after you pass the stage. You can therefore trade an entire challenge building up findings you have no way of seeing.
Drawdown
How the loss limit is measured, which is rarely the headline number.
Trailing drawdown follows your high-water mark
The 6% maximum drawdown trails your peak equity rather than sitting at your starting balance. Get up 5% and your floor rises with you, so a normal retracement from a good run can close the account even though you are still in profit overall.
Only 5% total drawdown, fixed to the starting balance
Maximum overall loss is 5% of the initial balance. That is roughly half what most firms allow, and it does not rise as you profit — the floor stays where you started.
Daily loss limit is only 2%
The daily loss limit is 2% — under half the industry norm. On a $100,000 account that is $2,000, which a single leveraged position can reach inside a normal session.
The instant routes use a trailing drawdown, the others do not
Instant Funding (5%) and Instant Pro (8%) measure maximum loss on a TRAILING basis, so the limit follows your equity up and never comes back down. One-Step, Two-Step, Phoenix and Sprint are static. Two accounts with the same headline percentage can therefore fail in completely different ways.
On Zero, floating loss alone can end the account
Zero carries a Max Open Risk of 1%: your floating profit and loss may not go below -1% of the account. You can be within the 3% daily and 5% trailing limits and still breach on an open position that has not been closed.
Both routes say 10% max loss; only one of them means the same thing
On the 2-Step the 10% maximum loss is STATIC — measured from your starting balance and fixed. On the 1-Step it is END-OF-DAY TRAILING: each day the limit is set to your highest previous midnight balance minus 10%, so it ratchets upward with your profits and never comes back down. Two accounts advertising the same number can fail in completely different ways, and the comparison table is the only place FTMO puts them side by side.
Unrealised loss is capped per symbol, not just per account
Floating Drawdown is measured as the unrealised loss across all your open positions on the SAME symbol, combined, as a percentage of the initial balance. The threshold is 1.5% on Instant Funding and 2.0% during Challenge and Pro Challenge. On Instant Funding the first breach is a Formal Warning; from the second onward, each event is a Strike and a payout cut to 10%. You can be well inside your account drawdown and still breach this by holding several open positions on one instrument.
Payout
What can reduce, delay or void money you have already made.
Five strikes and the account is closed permanently
Most rule breaks at Finotive are not instant failures. Each confirmed breach records one Strike and cuts your Reward Payment to 10% for that entire Payout Cycle. Five cumulative Strikes close the account permanently. The consequence is therefore cumulative across your whole time with the firm — a Strike you took months ago still counts toward the fifth.
Five trading days before your first payout
The first withdrawal needs at least $100 profit and a minimum of five trading days. Passing quickly does not mean being paid quickly.
Two payouts per 30 days, per challenge
You may request up to two payouts every 30 days on the same challenge. Profits made after the second request wait for the next window.
A payout can be refused for poor risk management alone
Blue Guardian reserves the right to terminate an account or deny a withdrawal request where it considers that a customer has abused margin availability or has not applied an appropriate risk management strategy. No threshold is given for what counts as appropriate, so this is judgement exercised after the profit has been made.
On the 1-Step, taking a payout resets your loss limit downward
Their own wording: the trailing limit can only increase, never decrease — but when a Reward is withdrawn and a new FTMO Account is provided, the Maximum Loss Limit fully resets, returning the first-day limit to 90% of the initial capital. A trader who has built a cushion of profit gives that cushion up by taking money out.
Automation
EAs, copy trading, VPS and latency.
Tick scalping is banned, manual or automated
Tick scalping is prohibited whether performed by hand or through an EA, bot or script. This is separate from the EA rule — using an allowed EA to run a disallowed strategy still breaches.
- ThinkCapitalCloses the account
Copy trading closes the account the moment it is detected
Their stated procedure for copy trading on simulated funded accounts is immediate: the account is terminated and all open positions are closed on detection. There is no warning step and no appeal window described.
Copy trading is allowed only between your own accounts
BrightFunded permits copy trading only between accounts owned by the same individual. Copying another person, or being copied, falls outside that permission — so a shared strategy between two traders is not covered even where both are paying customers.
Grid trading and tick scalping are named as exploitative
Their terms list Grid Trading, High-Frequency Trading, Tick Scalping and Arbitrage — along with any strategy that does not adhere to live market conditions — as exploitative and not to be used. Grid trading in particular is a strategy plenty of traders run without thinking of it as an exploit.
News
What you may do around a high-impact release.
- Funding TradersCloses the account
News trading banned on Instant accounts only
On Instant Funded accounts, opening, closing or holding a position inside the restricted window around high-impact news is not allowed. Evaluation accounts are treated differently, so the rule you read may not be the rule on your plan.
News trading banned on the larger CFD accounts
News trading is not permitted on $100,000 and $200,000 CFD accounts during either the challenge or the earning phase. The smaller accounts are not covered by the same restriction, so the rule depends on the size you bought.
- ThinkCapitalCloses the account
News trading is banned unless you bought the add-on
Trading is prohibited from two minutes before to two minutes after a scheduled news release unless you purchased the News Trading add-on, or your challenge permits news trading by default. The restriction applies to the funded phase as well as the evaluation — this is not a challenge-only rule — and their own help pages describe accounts being terminated for breaking it.
Five of the six routes ban news trading outright
One-Step, Two-Step, Instant Funding, Phoenix and Sprint all bar trading the news. Only Instant Pro permits it. Sprint goes further and bars trading around the market open and close as well. Which route you bought decides whether an ordinary news trade is a breach.
News profits are deducted rather than simply disallowed
Once funded, positions may not be opened or closed within 5 minutes either side of a high-impact red-folder event on the affected currency, and profits made from news are deducted. Trades opened more than 5 hours before the event are excluded from the restriction.
Hedging around red news is banned for 15 minutes either side
Straddled, offsetting or equivalent hedged exposure on the same or correlated instruments is prohibited within fifteen minutes before or after Red or Amber events on the Forex Factory calendar, earnings and geopolitical events, where the purpose is to capture the volatility. Note the window is measured both ways: a hedge placed a quarter of an hour before the release is inside it.
Betting the account on a news event is named as abuse
Their terms describe a prohibited "Boom or Bust" approach — where the success or failure of the account rests on one trade, or a series of trades connected to a major news event — and separately name excessive risk taking exacerbated by news events. Both are assessed after the fact, on the shape of your trading rather than on a number you can watch.
Identity
Accounts, devices, IPs and who is really trading.
- Funding TradersCloses the account
Copy trading between your own Instant accounts is not allowed
Using copy-trading software between FT Instant accounts is prohibited, even when every account is yours.
VPNs and IP masking are prohibited outright
ETF prohibits VPNs, proxies and any IP-masking technology on trading accounts. Traders who use a VPN routinely for privacy, or who travel, can breach without placing a bad trade.
- ThinkCapitalCloses the account
Trading like someone else can be treated as copying
ThinkCapital reserves the right to deem that users are coordinating or copying trades if multiple users place trades in the same instrument, in the same direction, within one minute of each other, or if instruments, entries and exits are identical or substantially similar. No agreement between the traders needs to be shown. Two people following the same public signal room can meet this test.
Country
Eligibility rules beyond the published country list.
Sanctions lists apply beyond the named countries
Services are not offered to residents of jurisdictions on the FATF and EU/UN sanctions lists, in addition to Vietnam and the UAE which are named. The named list is therefore a floor, not the whole restriction.
Your country can be blocked by the payment provider, not the firm
Eligibility depends on Rise, the reward provider, as well as on ETF itself. If your country is on Rise’s restricted list you cannot receive rewards even where the firm would otherwise accept you — and the list can change without the firm changing anything.
Platform
Where a platform is unavailable to you.
Do not log in from the US, even on a VPN
VPS and VPN use is generally allowed, with one exception: traders travelling to the United States should not log in to MetaTrader or cTrader from there, and should not set a VPN location to the US. It is a platform licensing restriction, not a trading rule, and it is easy to trip by accident.
- Funded Trading PlusVoids profit
MetaTrader 5 is unavailable to US traders
The firm accepts US traders, but MetaQuotes software is not available to them through IF Pro Ltd. You would trade on another platform — worth knowing before you buy if your strategy depends on MT5 tooling.
MetaTrader 5 is unavailable to traders in the US and Canada
Their checkout states that MT5 is unavailable for clients from the USA and Canada. This is a platform restriction rather than a country ban — MatchTrader remains available — but if you were counting on MT5, the account you buy will not run it.
Re-entry
Rules that join separate trades together if you go back in too soon.
Re-entering within 10 minutes counts as the same trade
Close a losing trade and open another in the same direction on the same instrument within 10 minutes, and both count as ONE trade idea. The losses add up against your risk limit. Lose $700 on XAUUSD Buy, re-enter five minutes later and lose $500, and the firm assesses that as a single $1,200 loss. The window starts when the losing trade closes; open after 10 minutes and it is a separate idea. You cannot split a large risk into several small trades and argue each one was under the limit.
Doubling up after a loss triggers a risk review
Closing a position on an instrument at a realised loss and then opening a new position on the same instrument in the same direction with at least twice the volume of the losing trade is flagged as Realised-Loss Recovery Over-Sizing — behaviour Finotive describes as gambling-style recovery, which may trigger an internal Risk Review. The ordinary act of sizing up to win a loss back is what the rule is aimed at.
Risk per trade
Caps on what one trade — or one trade idea — may lose.
Positions on the same pair are assessed together
Multiple positions open at once on the same instrument in the same direction are treated as one trade idea, and their floating AND realised losses are combined. Their own example: three EURUSD buys losing $300, $200 and $250 on a $25K account with a 3% limit reach the $750 cap and breach — even though one position is still open and none individually came close.
A winning trade does not offset a losing one
Within a single trade idea, profit on one position does not reduce the loss assessed on another. Each trade idea is measured on its losses only. Hedging inside the same idea therefore does not protect you from the limit.
The risk limit depends on your model and account size
Risk Per Trade Idea does not apply to every plan. On 2 Step Flex it is 3% at $25K and 2% above $25K, and does not apply below $25K. On Zero it is 3% below $50K and 2% at $50K and above. It does not apply at all to 1 Step Flex, 2 Step Standard or 2 Step Pro. The rule you read may not be the rule on the plan you bought.
Risk is judged per trade idea, and judged by a person
FTMO recommends keeping risk to about 1% per trade idea, with roughly 1–1.5% of the initial balance as the maximum it advises. This is guidance rather than an automatic cut-off — there is no threshold that closes the account by itself. What matters is that FTMO monitors activity and can intervene where it judges the behaviour excessive or gambling-like, and that it assesses a trade IDEA rather than individual tickets. Splitting one oversized bet across several positions does not make it several small ones.
Exposure
Position size, hedging and how much may be open at once.
Opposite positions across accounts count as manipulation
Acting alone or with others, including across multiple accounts or identities, to place trades aimed at manipulating trading circumstances — their example is simultaneously entering opposite positions — is a breach. This catches the common tactic of hedging one account against another to guarantee that one of them passes.
On Zero, holding over the weekend breaches the account
The Zero model forbids holding trades over the weekend, and their objectives page states plainly that the account will be breached. Every other Funding Pips model allows overnight and weekend holding, so this is a property of the product you bought rather than a house rule.
This list is only as complete as our reading. 15 of the firms we track have been through a rulebook pass; the rest are still to do, and a firm missing from here has not been cleared — it has not been checked. See every firm we track.