When we go through complaints about a firm — Trustpilot, Reddit, the ones people send us directly through the correction link on each review — the striking thing is how repetitive they’re. It’s rarely “the firm invented a reason.” It’s the same short list of rules, breached in the same ways, by traders who mostly didn’t know the rule existed until the email arrived.
That’s not a defence of the firms; several of them bury these rules on purpose, and a few write them vaguely enough that they can be applied to almost anything. But it does mean you can check for all of them in ten minutes before you hand over a fee. Here’s the list, in roughly the order we see them cause trouble.
1. The consistency rule
The single biggest one. A consistency rule says no single trading day can account for more than X% of your total profit — 30%, 40% and 50% are the common thresholds. Have one big winning day early, then request a payout, and the firm can decline it until you’ve “smoothed out” your results with more, smaller profitable days. Some firms apply it only to the evaluation, some only to funded accounts, some to both. Some measure it at the moment you request a payout; some measure it continuously and close the account the moment you breach.
The reason it catches so many people is that it punishes exactly the thing traders are proudest of. You catch a clean trend day, make 8% on the account, and you’ve just breached a 40% consistency rule with the best trade of your month. The fix isn’t to trade worse. It’s to know the rule exists and either pick a firm without one or plan your payout requests around it. Our Consistency Calculator exists precisely because this rule is so easy to trip by accident and so easy to plan for once you can see the numbers.
How to check: search the firm’s FAQ for “consistency” and “best day.” If it’s not in the FAQ, ask support in writing and keep the reply. If support gives you a different number from the terms page, that discrepancy is itself a warning sign.
2. The news-trading window
“News trading allowed” on the marketing page and “no positions opened or closed within 2 minutes of a high-impact release” in the terms are both true at the same firm. The second one is the one that closes accounts. Some firms extend it to 5 or 10 minutes either side. Some define “high impact” by their own calendar, not the one you use. Some apply it only to funded accounts and let you do whatever you like during the evaluation, which is how people build a habit that gets them terminated the week they go live.
The particularly nasty version is the rule that treats a stop-loss being hit during the window as a “closed position.” Your trade was open for hours, the news spikes, your stop triggers, and you’ve technically closed a position within the restricted window. Firms differ on whether that counts. Find out before it happens.
How to check: the exact wording of the restriction, which calendar they use, and whether stop-outs count. The Trading Rules Manager lets you save each firm’s window next to the others so you aren’t relying on memory.
3. Weekend and overnight holding
Straightforward, but the number of people who get caught by a Friday close rule on a swing trade is remarkable. FTMO doesn’t allow weekend holding on standard accounts; FundedNext and E8 do. If your strategy holds over the weekend, this rule alone should eliminate half your shortlist, and it’s one of the reasons our swing trading rankings are a separate list. Some firms allow weekend holding on a specific account type only, or for an extra fee, or with a reduced profit target — read the account-type page, not just the general rules. We flag it in the “Trading Rules at a Glance” table on every review.
The overnight version is rarer on forex firms and near-universal on futures firms, where positions generally have to be flat before the session close. If you’re used to forex and moving to futures, this is the rule that will surprise you first.
4. Maximum lot size and “risk per trade” limits
Less common on forex firms, standard on futures firms, and increasingly appearing in the funded-account terms of firms that didn’t have it during the evaluation. A cap on contracts or lots per position is easy to breach when you scale into a trade — three entries of 2 lots each is 6 lots, and if the cap is 5 you’re done. Some firms also enforce a maximum risk per trade as a percentage of the account, calculated from your stop-loss, which means a trade with no stop attached can be treated as a breach on its own.
How to check: whether the limit is per trade or per account, whether it’s on open positions or on total exposure, and whether it changes after you’re funded. The funded number is usually lower.
5. Copy trading and account-linking rules
Running the same strategy across two different firms is normal and allowed almost everywhere. Running it via a copier between your own accounts at the same firm is, at a lot of firms, a termination. So is “group trading,” where several traders run identical trades from a shared signal. The rule is usually aimed at people gaming multiple accounts to hedge the evaluation — pass one, fail one, net out ahead — but it’s written broadly enough to catch you if you and a friend follow the same Telegram channel.
Futures firms tend to be the opposite: they actively expect you to copy across your own accounts and build their whole multi-account model around it. That difference is one of the reasons we recommend settling futures or forex before you settle on a firm.
6. “Gambling,” “toxic flow” and other discretionary rules
This is the category where the vagueness is the point. Some terms include a clause against “gambling behaviour,” “exploiting platform latency,” “toxic order flow,” or “trading in a manner inconsistent with a professional.” None of those has a definition you can check your trades against. In practice they get applied to martingale sizing, to very high-frequency scalping, to hedging within the same account, and occasionally to a trader who simply made a lot of money quickly. If a firm’s terms lean on this kind of language, assume any strategy that looks unusual on a trade log can be called a breach.
7. The soft breach that turns out to be hard
This is the one we wrote about in our payout-denial piece. A firm’s FAQ describes a rule as a “soft breach” — a warning, the offending trade gets closed, you carry on — and then the account gets terminated for it. If a firm’s terms leave the consequence at their “sole discretion,” treat every rule as a hard one. The FAQ isn’t the contract. The terms are.
Why the funded rules are the ones that matter
A pattern worth naming directly: most traders read the evaluation rules carefully because they’re about to pay for the evaluation. Far fewer read the funded-account rules, because by the time they’re funded they’re already committed and it feels done. Firms know this. It’s common for the funded terms to add a consistency rule, lower the lot cap, tighten the news window, or introduce a “minimum payout interval” that didn’t exist during the challenge. Read the funded rules before you buy the evaluation. If they aren’t published — and at some firms they aren’t, you get them on passing — that’s a reason to pick a different firm.
The ten-minute check, in order
- Read the funded-account rules, not the evaluation rules. They’re often different documents, and the funded ones are the ones that cost you money.
- Search the terms and FAQ for: consistency, news, weekend, overnight, lot, contract, copy, group, gambling, discretion.
- For each hit, write down the number and the consequence. If the consequence isn’t stated, assume termination.
- Anything ambiguous: ask support in writing before you buy. A firm that won’t confirm its own rules in writing has told you something.
- Screenshot the terms page with the date visible. Terms change, and “it said something different when I bought” is a much stronger position with a screenshot than without one.
We do this check for every firm we list, and when a rule is unusually strict or unusually vague, we say so in the review rather than letting it get averaged into a star rating. If you find a rule we’ve missed, the correction link is at the bottom of every review and we do read them.