A session where nothing goes wrong
Here is a trader who never has a losing day, never sizes beyond what the account shows as available, and finishes the session green.
Four separate rules. None of them requires a losing day, and the account is in trouble on a session that made money.
These rules do not test whether you traded well. They test whether you traded inside a shape, and the shape sits in a document most people read once, at signup.
The rules, one at a time
Two separate questions, and most people check neither
Reads as: "trailing maximum drawdown, evaluated on account equity"
The first question is what it is measured against. Against closed balance, only completed trades count. Against equity, every tick of an open position counts while it is open, so a trade that goes far against you and recovers has already been measured at its worst point. The second question is where the trail stops. Some stop once the account is up by the drawdown amount, some never stop at all. Same headline number, four different rules, and the answer decides how much room you have right now. The full breakdown.
A cap on the loss you are exposed to, not on the size you hold
Reads as: "maximum risk per position", "maximum exposure", "a stop loss is required on every order"
This is not the contract limit. A position cap counts contracts; this counts money, so the same two contracts are inside the rule with a four point stop and outside it with a twelve point stop. It caps how much you may have at risk the moment the order goes in, usually as a share of the drawdown allowance or as contracts against a stop distance, and it is checked at entry. Take an account with $2,000 of drawdown and a stated 2% cap: that is $40 of risk per trade, which on NQ at $20 a point is one micro contract with a two point stop. Traders cross it by sizing off the account label instead of the allowance, by adding to a runner after the check was done, or by holding two correlated instruments the firm counts as one position. The trade can close green and the account can still be gone.
A green day that does not count as a day
Reads as: "minimum trading days", "a qualifying day requires at least $X in profit"
Where a minimum number of trading days is required, the requirement itself is usually stated plainly. The rule that catches people is the definition of a day that counts. Where a qualifying day needs a stated minimum profit, a day you finished up a small amount is not a day at all and the counter does not move. The effect runs the wrong way: the rule pushes a trader who is already up into trading for the sake of the counter, which is how a passed account becomes a breached one. Check the minimum, check whether losing days still count toward the total, and check whether the requirement applies again after funding.
One word, four different rules underneath it
Reads as: "no single day may exceed X% of total profit", "consistent lot sizing"
A 40% cap means nothing until you know what the 40% is measured against. Against the profit target it is a fixed number you can compute on day one: 40% of a $3,000 target is $1,200. Against total profit it is a moving number, because a large day raises its own ceiling and the total you now need along with it. Against the payout amount it applies to money already made.
Then check whether the rule stops at days. There is often a cap on a single trade, which a runner breaks precisely when it works, and a size consistency rule requiring positions to stay within a band of your average, which turns cutting size after a loss into a violation rather than good practice. Some versions bite only at payout, so nothing blocks you until you ask for the money. They stack: an account can satisfy the daily cap and fail the trade cap in the same session. The arithmetic in full.
The same $1,000 limit, measured from three different places
Reads as: "maximum daily loss", "daily drawdown"
The number in the headline is the easy part. What decides when you hit it is the point it counts down from, and there are three common answers. From the day's opening balance, the limit is a fixed floor you can write down before the session. From the previous day's closing balance, it is almost the same thing, until a position is carried overnight. From your peak equity during the session, it is not a floor at all: it follows you up all morning and locks in behind you.
Take a $1,000 limit on an account that opens at $50,000. Anchored to the open, you fail at $49,000 whatever happens in between. Anchored to the intraday peak, a morning that reaches $51,200 moves your floor to $50,200, so giving back $1,000 of that $1,200 gain ends the day, on an account that is still $200 up on where it started. Same limit, same session, and a trader who checked only the headline number is wrong by $1,200 about where the line is. The full breakdown.
The contract ceiling is tied to a number that moves
Reads as: "up to N contracts"
Where the contract limit scales with balance or with remaining drawdown, the headline number is the ceiling at the top of the range, not the allowance you have right now. Adding to a winner is the usual way people cross it, because the position grows after the check they did before entering.
The window is wider than the event
Reads as: "no trading around high-impact news"
The window starts minutes before the release and ends minutes after it. In some versions it covers holding an existing position rather than only opening one, which means a trade entered hours earlier breaches a rule while you do nothing at all. The list of what counts as high impact is often somewhere other than the rules page.
The day does not start or end when yours does
Reads as: "all positions must be closed by HH:MM", "daily limits reset at HH:MM server time"
Two clocks, both stated, not always on the same page. A runner held thirty seconds past the flat-by time is a breach regardless of the result, and what decides how much that matters is whether the platform closes you or the firm records a violation. The reset clock decides which day a loss belongs to, so a position carried across it is measured against a fresh allowance you never intended to open.
Passing and being paid are two different tests
Reads as: "payout window", "minimum balance", "profit split"
An account can clear the target and then sit against a second set of conditions, usually written somewhere other than the rules page: a request window rather than any day you choose, a buffer that must remain in the account afterwards, a first payout capped below later ones, a split that changes with the payout number. None of these is unreasonable on its own. The problem is that they are found one at a time, after the trading is done, and each one moves a finish line you thought you had already crossed.
Rules that are not arithmetic at all
Reads as: "at our sole discretion", "prohibited trading practices"
This is where DCA lives, dollar cost averaging, which on a losing intraday position means adding contracts to make the average price better. Where a rulebook names it, it appears under that name or as averaging down, with martingale for the version that doubles size each time and grid trading for the automated one. Some firms ban it outright, and the stated reason is not a dislike of the style: it is the fastest route to a single loss larger than the account can absorb, because the position grows while the trade is wrong. That much is measurable, and it is worth knowing whether your firm bans it before you find out in a review. The rest of this section usually is not. Rules that describe behaviour in adjectives and reserve judgement to the firm leave no calculation that tells you in advance whether you are inside them. Every firm needs some version of this for genuine abuse. What matters is how much of the rulebook is discretionary rather than measurable, because that portion is the part you cannot plan around at all.
And one that is never written down: the rules are checked separately and never against each other. An account with $2,000 of drawdown and a $1,000 daily limit gives you $1,000 today. The same account with $600 of drawdown left gives you $600, and the daily limit is irrelevant. The binding constraint changes during the session, and no rules page contains that sentence, because it is the interaction rather than a rule.
The whole argument, in one line
A strict rule you can compute is easier to trade than a lenient rule you cannot.
Nobody needs the most generous drawdown in the industry. They need to know what theirs measures. Almost every rule above has a version that can be planned around and a version that cannot, and the difference is rarely how strict the number is.
It is whether the number exists, where it is measured from, and whether you can check it yourself before you place the trade. Use the switch.
Same ten rules, twice. A rulebook written in numbers lets a trader plan. A rulebook written in adjectives means the only way to find the line is to cross it.
Two incentive structures worth asking about
Every rule on this page reads differently once you ask what the firm is paid for. What follows is not a description of how firms operate. It is two structures drawn at their extremes, so that the questions underneath them have something to point at. Real businesses sit somewhere between the two, and most combine them.
At the A end of the range, the firm earns when the trader earns, so a rulebook that costs it good traders costs it revenue. At the B end, revenue is collected before the account is ever traded. Neither end makes a firm good or bad. A firm at the B end can run a fair, clearly written evaluation, and a firm at the A end can still write a rule you cannot compute. The reason to think about the structure at all is that it tells you which questions are worth asking, and the four below are the ones a firm can answer plainly if it wants to.
Four questions that surface it:
- Does the firm state that funded traders are routed to, or copied into, live capital?
- Is there a stated source for payouts beyond incoming evaluation fees?
- Are payouts processed automatically once eligibility is met, or does each one pass through a manual decision?
- How quickly is a payout stated to arrive: same day, or an open-ended window?
An answer is a claim, not proof, and none of it can be verified for you here. What you can observe is whether the answers exist in writing at all. A firm that publishes clear answers to all four has made itself easy to hold to them, and that is the part you can actually check before you pay.
The ten-minute check
Open your own rules page and answer these. Tick each one you can answer. If you finish with gaps, that is the finding, and it is better found now than at a payout request.
Ticks are remembered in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.
No firm is named here, and none of these rules is universal. Every one exists at some firms and not at others, in versions that are not interchangeable. Nothing on this page describes any specific company's current terms.
The examples are worked illustrations, not measurements. This is not advice about which firm to use, how to trade an evaluation, or how to size a position, and we are not affiliated with any proprietary trading firm. Your own contract is the only authority on your account.
Common questions
Are these rules a scam?
Not inherently. A firm taking real risk needs limits, and most of these rules have a defensible reason to exist. The problem is not that they exist, it is that they are presented as a headline and applied as arithmetic, and the difference between the two is where accounts end.
Why do I keep reading about people not getting paid?
A common pattern in these reports is a trader who hit the profit target and then met a separate eligibility condition they had not counted on: a minimum number of days, a consistency requirement, a request window, or a balance buffer. Passing and being paid are two different tests, and they are not always documented in the same place.
Which firm should I use?
We do not rank firms and we are not affiliated with any. What we can offer is the comparison above, which lets you judge a rulebook yourself rather than take anyone's word for it, including ours.
Can a firm change the rules after I start?
Most terms allow for changes, and the notice period varies. It is worth checking how changes are communicated and whether they apply to accounts already running, because a rule you planned around is only useful while it is the rule.
Two more questions after the contract
The eleven questions above tell you what your firm is allowed to do to your account. They do not tell you whether the way you trade fits inside what is left. That is two separate questions, and both of them are answered somewhere.
Is your stop wider than the noise?
The free risk check takes your account and your stop and puts it next to the measured range of a five minute candle on the instrument you trade. It answers one question properly: whether your stop is inside the distance price normally covers anyway.
Risk & Drawdown Playbook
Six truths about what actually ends an evaluation, each one a tool you type your own account into: both ceilings at once, every drawdown variant, your instrument and your stop, recalculated as you change them.