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.
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.
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.