Complete trading rules and terms

Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to read the complete and unabridged trading rules of Approved Funded. The fact that you have arrived on this page — rather than skimming the friendly summary that lives a click away — already tells us something meaningful about you. It tells us you are a serious trader. It tells us you understand that the difference between a profitable career in markets and a string of frustrating losses often lives in the fine print, in the conditions, in the structural details that less-careful participants gloss over. We respect that, and we want this introduction to feel less like a legal preamble and more like a conversation between a firm and a trader who are about to enter into a working partnership. The pages that follow contain a number of rules, restrictions, thresholds, and procedural commitments. They exist for reasons we will explain at length. None of them are arbitrary, and none of them are designed to be hostile to the trader.

Approved Funded — sometimes shortened to AF in our internal materials, our customer dashboards, and our community channels — is a proprietary trading firm operating in the funded-trader vertical of the financial education and capital-allocation industry. Our purpose is straightforward: we identify disciplined, risk-aware traders who can demonstrate consistent edge in a structured environment, and we extend to them the opportunity to trade against firm-allocated capital with a generous profit-sharing arrangement. That is the headline. The substance, however, is the network of policies, controls, technologies, and human judgment calls that make this model work for both sides of the table. The model collapses without trust. Trust collapses without rules. Rules without rationale feel like punishment. Hence this document — long, thorough, occasionally repetitive — exists to make every expectation legible to you before you place a single trade with us.

We want to acknowledge something obvious at the very top of this page. Trading is hard. Profitable trading is harder. Profitable trading inside the constraints of a prop firm — with its drawdown limits, consistency expectations, prohibited strategies, and review windows — is harder still. We do not pretend otherwise. We have built our pricing, our challenge structure, and our overall product around the empirical reality that a small but real fraction of applicants will pass evaluation, that a smaller fraction of those will produce sustained profit, and that the firm and the trader together must respect the asymmetric risk profile of leveraged speculation. If you are new to prop trading, please slow down, read carefully, and consider asking our support team any questions you have before you commit. If you are a veteran of multiple prop firms, please do not assume our rules mirror those of the firm you traded with last year. They do not, and the differences matter.

• We see this document as a partnership contract, not a one-sided terms-of-service.
• We expect you to read it. We expect to be held to it. We hold you to it in equal measure.
• • Every limit disclosed here is also disclosed in our public summary at /rules, in our checkout flow, and in your dashboard once you are funded.
  • Every change to a material rule is announced through email, through this page, and through your dashboard with reasonable notice.
  • Every decision the firm makes affecting your account is logged, auditable, and subject to internal escalation procedures.
• Disagreement with a rule, expressed before you sign up, is welcome — write to us and we will discuss the rationale.
• Disagreement with a rule, expressed after you have signed up and traded, is honored procedurally rather than retroactively — the rule that was in force when you opened the position governs that position.

Many readers will arrive at this page after watching a short-form video, after reading a thread on social media, or after a friend recommended a tier from our catalogue. We understand that motivation, and we know it generates a particular kind of urgency. We respectfully ask that you set that urgency aside for the next twenty or thirty minutes. Read this document. Read it slowly. Highlight the sections that surprise you. Bookmark the ones you might forget. Trading capital is not the kind of thing you want to receive without first understanding the strings attached, even when those strings are quite reasonable. We have written this preamble in the spirit of giving you every advantage we can give you, in the spirit of treating you as an adult professional rather than a transaction. Welcome to Approved Funded. We are glad you are here, and we hope you stay long enough that we are still working together a year from now, two years from now, longer.

If at any point this document raises a question that is not adequately answered by the rules that follow, please reach out to our support team. We staff support seven days a week through the chat widget on every page of our public site, and we maintain an email channel that is monitored on the same cadence. We would rather answer fifteen questions before signup than litigate one ambiguity afterward. The signature on the dotted line — metaphorically speaking, since signup is digital — is meaningful to us, and we want it to be meaningful to you as well.

Before we go any further into the specifics of how Approved Funded operates, we think it is worth pausing to explain — in plain language — what a proprietary trading firm actually is, why our particular slice of the industry has grown so quickly in recent years, and where we fit within that broader landscape. We have observed that a meaningful fraction of new applicants arrive at our site with significant skill in markets but limited exposure to the prop-firm model itself. That is normal. The funded-trader vertical only became broadly accessible to retail participants in the last decade, and the structure differs in important ways from the older institutional prop trading desks at major banks and proprietary trading houses.

A traditional proprietary trading firm — the sort that has existed for as long as there have been markets — is simply a company that trades its own capital rather than client capital. There are no external clients whose money is being managed. There are no investor letters, no quarterly disclosures to outside limited partners, no redemption windows. The firm allocates its own balance sheet to traders it employs, those traders deploy that capital under risk-management oversight, and the resulting profits or losses accrue to the firm. Successful traders are compensated through some blend of base salary and profit share, with the profit-share component typically being the larger of the two for senior personnel. This model has been the bread and butter of Wall Street and equivalent venues for many decades.

What Approved Funded and similar firms have done, and what the funded-trader subsegment of the industry represents, is an opening up of that model to a broader population of skilled traders — traders who do not live in a major financial center, traders who do not have personal contacts inside an established trading desk, traders who are perfectly capable but have not had the door opened to them through traditional pathways. The mechanism that makes this opening possible is the evaluation challenge. Rather than hiring traders through interviews and on-floor proving periods, the funded-trader firm runs a structured remote evaluation in which any qualified applicant can demonstrate skill against a clearly defined set of metrics. Those who pass receive a funded account. Those who do not pass do not, but they have only risked a small evaluation fee rather than years of opportunity cost.

Approved Funded operates within this funded-trader segment, and we think it is helpful to be explicit about how we differentiate ourselves from other firms you may have encountered or compared us against:

• We offer a true Instant Approved tier — funding without an evaluation period — for traders who prefer to begin trading immediately and accept a different fee structure in exchange.
• We offer multi-stage challenge tiers (Lite, 1-Step, 2-Step) calibrated against industry-standard difficulty curves, with public threshold disclosure on every tier.
• We disclose our profit split publicly and in writing, and that split does not change based on opaque performance scores or hidden metrics.
• We disclose our limits publicly — the precise drawdown thresholds, the precise daily-loss thresholds where they apply, and the precise consistency requirements — rather than burying them.
• We use a single risk engine that applies the same logic across all tiers, so a trader graduating from one challenge level to another does not face surprise rule shifts.

There are sometimes misconceptions about prop firms that we would like to address head-on. The first is the suggestion that prop firms are some kind of zero-sum game in which the firm benefits when the trader fails. This is not how the economics actually work for serious firms. We make money when traders pass evaluations and trade profitably, because the profit share — even though the trader keeps the larger portion — accrues meaningful revenue when scaled across many funded accounts. Failed evaluations generate evaluation-fee revenue, certainly, but that is a one-time event. A trader who passes and trades consistently profitably for two years is dramatically more valuable to the firm than a trader who fails three challenges and disappears.

The second misconception is the idea that prop firm trading is somehow not real trading. The mechanics differ from a self-funded retail account in obvious ways — the capital is firm capital, the risk parameters are firm-imposed, the leverage may be calibrated differently — but the price feeds, the execution, the market exposure, the technical and fundamental skill required, and the psychological discipline are all genuinely the trading discipline. Traders who succeed at our firm are traders. Period. The presence of a structured framework around their activity does not diminish that. If anything, the framework forces a level of risk discipline that many self-funded retail traders never develop, and we have heard from numerous funded participants that the constraints made them better traders than they were before.

The third misconception is that all prop firms are essentially identical and that one's choice between them is mostly about marketing aesthetics. We could not disagree more strongly. The differences between firms — in rule structure, in payout reliability, in dispute resolution, in support quality, in platform stability, in jurisdictional posture — are substantial and material to the trader's eventual experience. We encourage you to compare us not just on price but on every dimension that matters when something goes wrong, because something always eventually goes wrong, and the firm you want to be working with on that day is the firm whose policies are written down clearly and applied consistently.

There is a phrase we use internally that we should probably share with you here, because it captures something important about how we have built this firm and how we intend to operate it: structured freedom. We believe that the right way to extend trading capital to a remote, decentralized population of traders is to give those traders maximum operational latitude inside a clearly bounded risk envelope. The latitude is real, the boundaries are real, and neither is negotiable. A firm that gives unlimited latitude with no boundaries is not a firm at all — it is a giveaway, and giveaways do not last. A firm that gives only boundaries with no latitude becomes paternalistic, micromanages every position, and frustrates exactly the talented traders it claims to want. Structured freedom is the calibration we have settled on after carefully studying both extremes.

What does structured freedom mean in concrete terms? It means we do not tell you what to trade. Within the universe of instruments we offer — and that universe spans crypto majors, forex pairs, metals, indices, and select commodities — you are free to deploy your capital however your edge tells you to deploy it. We do not tell you how to enter or how to exit. Your trade-construction methodology is yours. We do not require you to follow any particular technical framework, any particular fundamental discipline, any particular school of thought on market behavior. We have funded discretionary traders, mechanical-system traders, swing traders, momentum traders, mean-reversion traders, and traders whose approach defies easy categorization. The common thread among the successful ones is not methodology. It is risk discipline.

What we do require — and what the structured part of structured freedom is referring to — is that your trading remain inside the risk parameters disclosed in this document. You may not blow through a daily loss limit (where one applies to your tier) and continue trading the next day. You may not pyramid into a position so aggressively that a single market move wipes the account. You may not concentrate your profits onto a single windfall day in a way that makes your performance unrepresentative. You may not engage in synchronized trading with confederates designed to defeat the firm's risk modeling. You may not manipulate the platform, exploit data feeds, or use insider information. These are not arbitrary impositions. They are the load-bearing structures that make the entire model work, and removing any of them collapses the system.

We want to be honest about one philosophical point that distinguishes us from a small but vocal subset of the industry. We do not believe that bigger leverage, looser limits, or laxer rules represent a better deal for the trader. They almost always represent a worse deal, because looser rules attract less-disciplined traders, less-disciplined traders blow up funded accounts at higher rates, and the firm has to price the resulting losses into either evaluation fees, profit splits, or payout reliability. The firms that advertise extreme leverage and minimal restrictions are not making the trader's life better. They are gambling that the trader will not realize the math until it is too late.

• Disciplined risk parameters protect the trader's capital, the firm's capital, and the long-term viability of the entire arrangement.
• Generous profit splits are only meaningful if the firm survives long enough to pay them on years three, four, and five of a trader's tenure with us.
• Public, written rules are easier to enforce consistently than tacit norms — and consistent enforcement is what every trader actually wants from a firm.
• • When a trader passes a challenge, they should know exactly why they passed.
  • When a trader fails a challenge, they should know exactly why they failed.
  • When a trader has a payout request approved, they should understand the verification steps that led there.
  • When a trader has an account flagged, they should be able to read the policy that the conduct violated.

The empowerment we intend to deliver is not a feeling. It is a set of concrete operational outcomes. It is the outcome of a trader being able to wake up in the morning, log into their dashboard, see precisely where they stand on every relevant metric, place trades inside parameters they fully understand, request a payout when they qualify, and receive that payout on a predictable schedule. It is the outcome of the trader knowing that the firm will not move the goalposts mid-evaluation, will not invent new rules retroactively, will not refuse a legitimate payout on technicalities. It is the outcome, ultimately, of a working professional relationship between a firm and a trader in which both sides can plan around each other's behavior because both sides know what to expect.

We will not pretend that we have solved this problem perfectly. We are an early-stage firm. We will make operational mistakes. We will encounter edge cases that our rules do not anticipate. We will have to publish clarifications, occasionally amend procedures, and learn from the small number of disputes that any firm in this space inevitably faces. What we commit to — and this commitment is real, written, and intended to be referenced if it is ever in doubt — is that when those situations arise, we will resolve them by reference to the spirit of structured freedom. We will not retroactively penalize traders for actions that were within the rules at the time. We will not invent new restrictions to deny legitimate payouts. We will not weaponize ambiguity against the trader. If you ever feel that we have, you have an escalation path through support, and that path is taken seriously.

Discipline matters because trading punishes its absence. The market does not care about your conviction, your screen time, or your win rate yesterday. It cares about your position sizing today, your stop placement today, and whether your edge survives contact with a regime shift. The rules that follow are the firm's contribution to your discipline. They are not a substitute for your own, but they are a useful scaffold around it, and many traders have written to us after the fact to say that the structure forced habits they had been failing to develop on their own. That outcome — better trader habits, longer trader careers, more sustainable trader profitability — is the philosophical north star of this firm.

We think it helps to walk through the entire journey of a trader at Approved Funded — from the first visit to our public site through to the long arc of a sustained funded relationship — so that the rules that follow have proper context. This narrative is descriptive rather than promissory; the specific timing, eligibility criteria, and operational details are governed by the rules below and by the firm's published policies on the dashboard, which are the controlling references in any case of conflict with the prose here.

Stage one is discovery. A prospective trader encounters Approved Funded — perhaps through a search engine, perhaps through a community recommendation, perhaps through one of our content channels — and arrives at our public site. That trader spends some time on the homepage, the pricing page, the rules page, and possibly the FAQ. The goal of this stage, from our perspective, is to give the trader enough information to decide whether the firm is plausibly a fit. We try not to oversell. We try to be specific about what we offer, what it costs, and what the constraints are. We would rather lose a prospect at this stage than acquire one who later discovers a structural mismatch with their trading style.

Stage two is tier selection. Our catalogue includes an Instant Approved tier and a set of challenge-based tiers, with the latter graduated by difficulty and account size. A trader at this stage is choosing among real tradeoffs — instant access at one price point, evaluation-based access at others, varying profit splits, varying drawdown structures. We provide written specifications for every tier on our public pages. We do not gate this information behind signup. We want the trader to make the comparison fully informed. If a trader is uncertain which tier suits them, our support team is available to discuss the tradeoffs without any pressure to convert.

Stage three is signup and checkout. The trader creates an account, supplies the required identity information, completes payment, and receives initial dashboard access. We support both crypto and card payment paths through our processor partners. We do not store raw payment instruments on our infrastructure; that processing is delegated to specialist providers. Following successful payment, the trader's dashboard provisions an account record in our system. Depending on tier, the next step is either an immediate transition into trading mode or the start of a structured evaluation challenge.

Stage four is evaluation, where applicable. For challenge tiers, the trader trades in our environment under the published evaluation rules until either passing the threshold criteria or failing them. The criteria are spelled out in writing on the tier page and reaffirmed in the dashboard. We do not surprise traders with hidden metrics. The full set of pass/fail criteria is visible at all times, and the trader can monitor their progress against each criterion in real time on their dashboard.

Stage five is funding. Whether the trader entered through Instant Approved or graduated from a challenge, they reach the funding stage when their account transitions to a state in which firm capital is allocated for them to trade. From this point forward, the structured rules in this document apply continuously to their activity. Their job is to trade. Our job is to monitor risk, process payouts, maintain platform integrity, and answer questions. The relationship at this stage is meant to be operational and undramatic. Most days a funded trader at our firm should not need to think about the firm at all — they trade, they review their performance, they request payouts at the appropriate cadence, and the rest of the apparatus is in the background.

• Payouts are scheduled per the cadence in the payouts section of the rules below.
• Payouts are processed through our default settlement rail, with alternatives available on request subject to applicable fees.
• Payout review involves a routine compliance check, and we publish the criteria of that check on the dashboard so traders are not surprised.
• • Stage one: discovery, where a prospective trader evaluates the firm and the offering
  • Stage two: tier selection, where the trader chooses among published options
  • Stage three: signup and checkout, completed remotely with processor-delegated payment handling
  • Stage four: evaluation (challenge tiers only), monitored transparently via the dashboard
  • Stage five: funded trading, the steady-state working relationship
  • Stage six: payouts, scheduled and predictable
  • Stage seven: scaling and renewal, available as the relationship matures

Stage six is payouts, mentioned briefly above and addressed in detail in the rules below. We treat payout reliability as the single most important operational metric of a prop firm. A firm whose payouts are uncertain, delayed, or arbitrary is not a firm we would want to work with as traders ourselves, and we do not intend to be that kind of firm. Our procedures emphasize predictability, written documentation of any holds or reviews, and resolution within published windows where humanly feasible.

Stage seven, for traders who remain with us long enough, involves account scaling and product evolution. Without making specific feature promises, we will say that we expect our product to evolve substantially over the next several years and that the traders who are with us during that evolution will have early visibility into improvements. The sequence above describes the present state of the journey. The future state will be communicated through the dashboard, through email, and through updates to this document as appropriate.

We close this section by emphasizing that the path described here is not a guarantee of any individual outcome. Many traders pass our evaluations and many do not. Many funded traders earn payouts and some do not. The path is real, the procedures are real, and the framework is consistently applied. The outcomes vary by trader, as they must. Our role is to ensure that the framework itself is fair, legible, and stable. Your role is to bring the discipline and edge that no firm can supply on your behalf.

A reasonable question, particularly from traders comparing us against other firms, is why we have any evaluation or verification machinery at all on a tier called Instant Approved. The label suggests immediate access without preconditions. Why does the application still ask for identity documents, basic compliance attestations, and an acknowledgment of the structured rules? Why is there any review step, however lightweight? We want to address this directly because we think the rationale is honorable and worth understanding rather than glossing over.

First, identity verification is not a discretionary firm preference. It is a baseline operational requirement for any business that processes payments and ultimately disburses funds to individuals. Without confirming who you are and where you reside, the firm cannot reliably process payouts to the correct person, cannot meet sanctions screening expectations, and cannot maintain the integrity of its records in the event of disputes or audits. This is the same reason every regulated payment processor, every bank, every brokerage, and every payments-receiving platform you have ever used has asked you to verify your identity. We are no different in this regard, and we would not want to be.

Second, the lightest of evaluation steps — even a single attestation that you have read and understood the rules below, or a brief multiple-choice acknowledgment of key thresholds — serves a real purpose for both sides. From your side, it ensures that you actually know what you are agreeing to before you start trading firm capital. We have observed that traders who skip these acknowledgments and dive straight into the platform are statistically more likely to violate a rule in their first week, often a rule they did not realize existed. From the firm's side, it documents that the trader was informed at the moment of acceptance, which dramatically reduces ambiguity if a dispute later arises about whether a particular rule was disclosed.

Third, even an Instant Approved account exists inside a risk envelope. The 8% overall drawdown limit governs every account at this firm, regardless of tier. Instant Approved does not have a daily loss limit — that is a deliberate, owner-locked feature of the tier — but every other risk control in the rules below applies fully. Some form of pre-trade education ensures that you understand which rails are present and which are absent on your specific tier. Confusing the structure of one tier with the structure of another is a common source of accidental rule violations, and the modest verification step at the front of every account is calibrated to prevent that confusion.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, every prop firm operates under counterparty risk in both directions. The firm is taking on counterparty risk by funding a trader it does not know. The trader is taking on counterparty risk by entrusting their evaluation fee, their personal information, and their potential profit-share to a firm whose internal operations they cannot directly inspect. Verification steps are part of how each side establishes that the other is genuine, present, and accountable. A firm that demands no verification at all is not actually being generous to the trader; it is signaling a willingness to operate without normal counterparty hygiene, and that signal should worry the trader, not reassure them.

• Identity verification protects the trader from impersonation and the firm from sanctions exposure.
• Pre-trade rule acknowledgment reduces unintentional violations during the first weeks of activity.
• Tier-specific education ensures the trader knows which rails apply to their particular account.
• Counterparty diligence is a two-way street — the firm verifying the trader is the trader's evidence that the firm operates with normal hygiene.
• • Sanctions and compliance screening obligations apply to every regulated payment flow we touch.
  • Tax-form obligations may apply depending on the trader's jurisdiction and the firm's payout structure for that jurisdiction.
  • Operational records of who agreed to what, and when, are essential to consistent dispute resolution.
  • Anti-fraud machinery — chargeback prevention, multi-account detection, payment-method validation — relies on identity-confirmed accounts.

There is a related concern that occasionally arises: the worry that excessive verification burdens deter legitimate traders. We take this concern seriously. We try to keep the verification step as lightweight as feasible while still meeting the four objectives outlined above. The trader is not asked for documentation that exceeds what a typical online brokerage or payments service requires. We do not ask for documents that have no operational relevance to a funded-trader account. We do not retain documents longer than the policies require. If you have specific concerns about the document handling, those concerns can be raised with our support team and we will explain in detail what is collected, where it is stored, and how it is protected.

It is also worth noting that the existence of an evaluation or verification step is not a hidden tax on speed. Instant Approved still means instant — once the verification is complete, the account is active, and there is no multi-week incubation period before trading capital becomes available. The verification window is measured in minutes to a small number of hours under typical circumstances, not days. We understand the value of speed in this segment of the market, and we have designed the onboarding flow accordingly. The point of this section is not to apologize for the verification step — it is to explain why the step exists and to invite traders to view it as a feature rather than friction.

Discipline is the recurring theme of every section of this document, and the verification posture is part of that theme. A trader who can complete a sober, complete onboarding flow without trying to game any individual step is the trader who will most likely thrive under the structured rules below. Conversely, a trader who is impatient with onboarding is often the same trader who will be impatient with risk limits, with consistency requirements, and with the cooler heads required during drawdown periods. The onboarding step is, in a small way, our first chance to confirm that the trader and the firm are aligned on temperament. Most are. The few who are not are better off finding a firm whose temperament suits them better, and we are happy to be transparent about ours.

We want to use this section to articulate a value that is genuinely held within the firm: an emphasis on education as a complement to — and in many cases a precondition for — sustainable trading. We are not an academy. We do not run a curriculum. We do not certify traders. We do not grade homework. What we do is build a product that we believe is best deployed by traders who have already invested seriously in their own education, and we want to be open about that bias because it shapes how we think about everything else in this document.

The thesis is simple. The traders who succeed at Approved Funded — by which we mean the traders who pass evaluations, sustain funded status across many months, and earn meaningful payouts — are overwhelmingly the traders who have done their homework before they ever encountered our firm. They have studied at least one of the major schools of technical analysis. They have at minimum a working understanding of macroeconomic forces and how those forces ripple through forex, indices, and commodities. They have spent meaningful screen time on demo or small live accounts before scaling. They have read books on trading psychology and they have actually internalized — not just nodded at — concepts like loss aversion, recency bias, and tilt. They have a written or at least mentally rehearsed plan for how they handle drawdowns. Most importantly, they have a notion of risk-reward that is compatible with consistent profitability over hundreds of trades, not just optimistic about a handful.

We are not in the business of teaching this material. There are excellent resources in the public domain, written by authors more qualified than us to teach these subjects, and we encourage every applicant to engage with that material seriously before considering a funded account at any firm, including ours. We will not name specific authors, courses, or services in this document because that would amount to unsolicited endorsement, and any specific recommendation would inevitably be incomplete. The trader who is ready for funded trading is the trader who has done enough self-directed study to know which resources have helped them and which have not.

The emphasis on education-first has practical implications for how we have structured our product. We deliberately do not offer hand-holding tools that pretend to manufacture trading skill the trader does not have. We do not offer signals services. We do not offer copy-trading from in-house gurus. We do not offer systems that promise to make the rules of risk irrelevant. These tools, where they exist in adjacent industries, are mostly mechanisms for transferring fees from inexperienced traders to vendors. We have chosen not to participate in that subindustry. We provide trading capital, a clean platform, transparent rules, and a payout pipeline. Skill is the trader's contribution.

• Trading psychology is the most underweighted area of preparation for most applicants.
• Position sizing discipline matters more than entry technique for nearly every aspirant we have observed.
• A written trading plan, even a simple one, statistically outperforms intuitive decision-making across long sample sizes.
• • Risk per trade as a fixed percentage of account equity, applied consistently
  • Stop placement based on technical structure rather than on tolerance for pain
  • Position-sizing math worked out in advance, not improvised in the moment
  • A clear policy on adding to winners, adding to losers, and partial exits
  • A predefined response to drawdown thresholds — what happens at minus three percent, what happens at minus five, what happens at minus seven
• Journaling — daily, weekly, monthly — is the single highest-leverage habit we have observed in successful funded traders.

We sometimes get asked whether we plan to offer educational content directly. We will not commit one way or another in this document, because we want to keep our promises tight, but we will say that any educational material we ever publish will be marked clearly as our own perspective, will not be sold separately, and will not pretend to substitute for the work the trader has to do on their own. We do not believe in educational fees stapled onto a prop firm offering. The trader pays for trading capital access through evaluation fees and profit splits; they should not pay extra for content of unknown quality.

There is one practical observation we want to make about education that connects directly to the rules below. The single most common cause of evaluation failure — across our firm and across the industry as a whole, based on conversations with peers and shared aggregate data — is poor risk discipline rather than poor strategy selection. Strategy selection matters, of course. But a mediocre strategy executed with good risk discipline often passes evaluations while an excellent strategy executed with poor risk discipline often fails. The rules below are calibrated against this reality. They are designed to catch traders before they self-destruct on a single bad day, on a single bad position, or on a single emotional decision. They cannot save a trader from a fundamentally flawed approach over many months, but that is not their job; that is the job of the trader's own education and self-awareness.

If you are reading this section and have not yet done meaningful preparation outside this document, please consider this a friendly nudge. The cost of a few weeks of focused study, before you sign up, is much smaller than the cost of a failed challenge that you would have passed with that preparation. Approved Funded will be here when you are ready. We have no interest in rushing you. The trader-firm relationship works best when the trader arrives prepared, not when the trader arrives optimistic.

Education first, trading second, is therefore not a slogan we are using to sound profound. It is a stated preference about the kind of trader we want to attract, the kind of trader we want to fund, and the kind of trader we want to be working with two years from now. The rules below presuppose that trader. We hope you are that trader, and if you are not yet, we hope this section helps you become one before you commit.

Transparency is one of those words that has been used so widely, and so often without follow-through, that it has lost some of its weight in the funded-trader industry. We want to use this section to give the word back its weight, by being specific about what transparency means at Approved Funded, what it does not mean, and how a trader can verify that we are actually living up to the commitment rather than merely advertising it.

What transparency means at this firm, in operational terms, is that the policies, thresholds, and procedures that govern your account are written down, are publicly accessible, are versioned, and are applied consistently across traders. Every threshold disclosed in the rules below is the threshold actually enforced in our risk engine. There is no hidden parallel rule. There is no secret stricter version of the public rule that gets applied selectively to traders who are about to receive a large payout. There is no internal policy document we are keeping back from you. The version of the rules you are reading is the version we operate against.

What transparency does not mean, to be honest about it, is that the firm reveals every internal operational detail. We do not publish our exact risk-engine weighting parameters, because that information would invite gaming. We do not publish our internal compliance heuristics, because the same logic applies. We do not publish our cost structure, our margins, our staffing levels, or our internal conversion metrics. These are normal business confidentialities that any operating firm maintains, and we think it is more honest to acknowledge that limit than to pretend the firm is a transparent organism in every dimension. The transparency commitment is about the things that affect you as a trader, not about every aspect of how the firm runs.

We are aspirational about extending the transparency posture over time, and we want to articulate that aspiration without making promises we cannot keep. We would like, eventually, to publish more aggregate statistics — pass rates by tier, average time to first payout, distribution of trader tenure — though only at points where the underlying numbers are stable enough to be representative. We would like to maintain a changelog of material rule changes that traders can audit. We would like to develop more comprehensive reporting tools inside the dashboard so that traders can see their own performance metrics in greater depth. None of these are commitments today; they are stated directions, and we think it is more honest to share the direction than to keep silent until everything is built.

• Public rules at /rules — the friendly summary, written for fast comprehension.
• Public rules at /full-rules — the document you are reading now, written for completeness.
• Public pricing on the pricing page — every tier, every fee, every profit split.
• Public risk thresholds on tier pages — every drawdown, every consistency requirement, every restriction.
• Dashboard reflections of the same rules — what you read here, you also see in your account UI.
• • What you read on the public site equals what you see at signup
  • What you see at signup equals what your dashboard shows you while funded
  • What your dashboard shows you equals what the risk engine actually applies
  • What the risk engine actually applies equals what is enforced at payout review

We also want to be transparent about how we handle the case of a rule changing. Material rule changes — anything that materially affects how an account is evaluated, monitored, or paid — will be communicated through reasonable channels with reasonable notice. We will not change a payout-affecting rule retroactively against a trader who is mid-evaluation or mid-cycle. The version of the rules in force when you opened a position, or when you began an evaluation, governs that activity. The new version applies to new activity initiated after the change takes effect. This is a principle we apply consistently, and it is part of why we have written this document at length: the longer the document, the more rigorous our discipline must be in not changing it casually.

Transparency around fees deserves particular attention because it is one of the most commonly distorted areas in this industry. Our fees are listed publicly on the pricing page. There are no hidden setup fees. There are no surprise activation fees. There are no monthly maintenance fees added after signup. The evaluation fee for a challenge tier is the evaluation fee. The Instant Approved fee is the Instant Approved fee. Where applicable, third-party processor fees on payment methods may apply at checkout, and where fees apply to particular payout rails, those fees are disclosed at the time you select that rail. We try to keep this surface area small and predictable, and we treat any fee structure that surprises a trader as a defect to be fixed.

There is a particular kind of transparency that matters most when something has gone wrong. If your account is flagged, you should be able to read the policy that the conduct violated. If your payout is held, you should know the reason and the expected resolution window. If your evaluation has failed, you should be able to identify which threshold you crossed. We commit to providing this kind of explanatory transparency in every account-affecting action, and we treat the absence of it as a service failure that escalation is meant to correct.

Finally, we want to acknowledge that transparency is partly a posture and partly a practice. The posture is what you read in documents like this one. The practice is what happens when a trader and the firm disagree about an outcome. Anyone can write a transparency commitment into a preamble. The firms that earn the description are the ones that act like it on the days when it is inconvenient. We intend to be one of those firms, and we ask that you hold us to the standard. Tell us when we have failed to live up to it. Escalate when escalation is warranted. The only way the practice catches up to the posture is through trader feedback that the firm actually reads and responds to.

Trading is, by reputation, a solitary discipline. A trader sits in front of a screen, watches markets, places trades, and absorbs the wins and losses largely in private. There is something true about this picture. Most of the actual decision-making in trading happens in the trader's own head, and no community can substitute for the discipline of independent analysis. At the same time, we have come to believe — based on our own experience and the experience of many traders we have worked with — that the solitary picture is incomplete. Trading communities, when they are healthy, can play a substantial role in trader development, in trader resilience during drawdowns, and in the long-term maturation of trading careers. We want to talk about this honestly here, while being careful not to promise specific community features that we have not yet built.

What a healthy trading community provides, in our experience, is a set of secondary functions that are hard to manufacture in isolation. It provides a venue where traders can test their thinking against peers without being graded. It provides emotional buffering during inevitable drawdown periods, not in the form of false reassurance, but in the form of perspective from people who have been there. It provides exposure to a wider range of strategies and instruments than any individual trader is likely to encounter on their own. It provides a sense of professional identity — this is what I do, these are my colleagues, this is the standard we hold each other to — that can sustain a trader through years that would be hard to weather alone.

What an unhealthy trading community produces is roughly the opposite of all of these. It rewards loud confidence over careful analysis. It encourages position-mirroring rather than independent thinking. It traffics in tip-sharing and signals that are usually wrong and sometimes outright fraudulent. It generates social pressure to take positions a trader would not take on their own analysis. It can become a venue for performative profit-claiming that has no relationship to actual returns. We have seen both kinds of communities in this industry, and we have a strong preference for the first kind over the second, both as a firm and as individuals.

We are not, in this document, promising a specific community feature on a specific timeline. We have not built one yet. What we will say is that any community infrastructure we develop or endorse in the future will be guided by the healthy-community principles outlined above. We will not host signal-sharing groups. We will not promote individual traders as gurus to other traders. We will not facilitate copy-trading communities that obscure the fact that the followers are taking on the leader's risk without the leader's accountability. The bar is high, deliberately, and any community-shaped product we ever ship will be shipped only when we are confident it can clear that bar.

There are, however, some lower-key forms of community that already exist or are easy to develop, and we want to acknowledge those. Our support team interacts with traders daily, and many of those interactions are not strictly support tickets — they are conversations, observations about market conditions, questions about how a particular rule applies in an edge case. Those conversations contribute to the firm's understanding of what traders need, and they contribute to traders' understanding of how the firm thinks. We want to keep that channel open, and we want to keep it informal in the right places.

• We value peer-to-peer trader interaction when it is anchored in independent analysis rather than tip-sharing.
• We are wary of community structures that elevate individual traders into authority figures over other traders.
• We believe that a trader's most important community is, in many cases, a small group of people who hold them accountable to their own written plan rather than a large group that produces social validation.
• • Peer review of trade plans is more valuable than peer celebration of trade outcomes
  • Honest reporting of losses contributes more to community health than dramatic reporting of wins
  • A community that asks 'why did you take that trade' is more useful than one that asks 'what should I trade today'
  • Long-term trader friendships, formed across years of shared market exposure, are among the most underrated assets in a trading career

We also want to acknowledge that for many of our traders, the most meaningful community is not affiliated with our firm at all. It is a personal network of trading friends, a local meetup group, a small private chat with a few peers, or simply a longtime mentor relationship with someone who has been trading for decades. We do not view those external communities as competition. They are the trader's professional infrastructure, and we are honored to be part of the trader's working life rather than the totality of it. If our firm is one of several relationships in a trader's professional ecosystem — alongside their broker, their personal community, their educational sources, and their own ongoing self-study — that is a healthy place for us to occupy.

Recognition of top performers is something we think about, and we want to be careful here as well. There are firms in this industry that publish leaderboards, profile their highest-paid traders, and lean heavily on the marketing optics of trader success stories. We have mixed feelings about this practice. Done well, it can be inspiring and instructive for newer traders. Done poorly, it incentivizes performative trading designed to climb a public ranking rather than disciplined trading designed to compound capital. If we ever publish recognition of any kind, we will design it to reward the latter rather than the former. Public success, when we celebrate it, will be paired with public acknowledgment of the discipline that produced it, not just the size of the payout.

The summary of our community posture is this: we believe trading is improved by the right kind of community and degraded by the wrong kind, we are biased toward developing the right kind slowly rather than the wrong kind quickly, and we believe the trader is best served by treating any community — including ours, if and when one exists — as a complement to their own analysis rather than a substitute for it. The rules below apply to the trader as an individual. The community is not a party to the rules. Your account, your discipline, your responsibility.

Markets evolve. Trading platforms evolve. Trader expectations evolve. The funded-trader industry has changed substantially in the last several years and will continue to change in the years ahead. We want to use this section to share our general posture on platform evolution at Approved Funded — what kinds of changes we are inclined to make, what kinds we are inclined to resist, and how we balance the trader's preference for stability against the firm's need to keep up with the broader environment.

On the side of stability, we strongly believe that traders deserve a platform whose behavior they can predict from one day to the next. A trader's edge is partly built on muscle memory: the location of the order ticket, the keyboard shortcuts, the rendering of the chart, the layout of the positions panel. Disrupting these elements without good reason imposes a real cost on the trader, even if the disruption is dressed up as an improvement. We are conservative about cosmetic redesigns that do not measurably improve trader outcomes. We are conservative about behavior changes that affect risk-control surfaces, because predictability there is even more important. When we do change visual or behavioral elements, we try to do so in ways that respect the existing muscle memory and that are announced clearly enough that traders can adapt before the change is forced on them.

On the side of evolution, the platform has to keep up. Market data feeds change. Symbol coverage changes. Mobile devices and screen sizes change. Browsers change. Security requirements change. The list of compliance obligations changes. The list of payment rails available to a global trader population changes. The technical infrastructure underlying the platform — frameworks, libraries, deployment patterns — changes in ways that the trader does not see but that the firm has to manage continuously. A firm that did not invest in any of this evolution would gradually become inoperable, and that would be a bad outcome for traders even if the surface visible to them remained unchanged.

We try to communicate our priorities at a coarse level so that traders are not surprised by the direction of our investment. Without making specific feature commitments, here are the kinds of areas we are paying attention to: execution performance and reliability, risk-engine accuracy, mobile usability, charting depth, dashboard reporting, payout rail diversity, identity verification flow, and localization for non-English-speaking trader populations. Within each of these areas, the work is iterative and continuous. We do not announce a quarterly roadmap to traders, because roadmaps in early-stage firms slip frequently and traders are better served by changes that arrive than by changes that were merely announced.

We want to be specific about what we will not commit to in this document. We will not commit that any specific feature will ship by any specific date. We will not commit that any specific platform improvement will arrive in a specific quarter. We will not commit that we will support any specific third-party tool or expert advisor framework. We will not commit that we will offer trading on any specific instrument that we do not currently offer. We will not commit to a specific mobile app on a specific platform with specific capabilities. The reasons for this restraint are practical: the funded-trader industry is dynamic, technology choices that look right today may look wrong in six months, and a firm that overcommits in writing tends to either disappoint traders by missing commitments or constrain itself into bad decisions trying to keep them.

• We commit to the rules in force, as written, governing the activity to which they apply.
• We commit to communicating material changes with reasonable notice through reasonable channels.
• We commit to operational continuity — the platform will be there tomorrow, the support channel will respond to messages, the risk engine will apply published thresholds rather than invented ones.
• We do not commit to particular features, particular timelines, particular UI changes, or particular product extensions in this document.
• • Continuity of existing features ranks higher than rapid expansion into new ones, in our internal prioritization
  • Bug fixes that affect risk-control surfaces or payout flows are treated as the highest urgency we can apply
  • Cosmetic redesigns are evaluated against the cost they impose on existing trader muscle memory
  • Backend infrastructure investments — security, performance, reliability — are made continuously and largely invisibly to traders, and we consider that the right balance

Innovation also includes the firm's posture toward mistakes. Any platform of meaningful complexity will occasionally have bugs, occasionally have outages, occasionally have a feature that does not work as documented. We commit to handling these situations with two principles: first, we will not allow a platform defect to be the basis on which a trader is denied a legitimate outcome; second, we will document the defect, communicate about it, and resolve it. We have already encountered minor operational issues during the firm's early life and will encounter more in the future. The character of a firm shows in how it responds to these events, not in whether they happen at all.

There is a broader cultural point about innovation that we want to articulate here. The trading-tools industry is full of products that prioritize novelty over reliability — the chart with one more indicator nobody asked for, the order ticket with one more flashy animation, the workflow change that disrupts five years of trader habit for the sake of a slightly cleaner aesthetic. We try to resist this. We would rather ship one solid improvement that traders genuinely use than ten cosmetic changes that traders ignore. Our innovation posture is therefore biased toward the unflashy: faster execution paths, more reliable data feeds, clearer error messages, more readable dashboard tables, easier payout requests. These do not generate marketing screenshots. They make the platform better to live in for the trader who logs in five times a day, every day, for years.

We close this section with an invitation. If there is something about the platform that you, as a trader, find missing, broken, or in need of improvement, please tell us. We genuinely read trader feedback. We do not promise to act on every suggestion, because some suggestions conflict with each other and some conflict with our risk posture, but we treat feedback as one of the most valuable inputs to the firm's evolution. The platform will be better five years from now than it is today, partly because of trader feedback received over those five years, and the traders who give that feedback shape the firm's direction in real ways.

The funded-trader industry sits at a particular intersection of financial services, technology, and remote operations, and the standards that govern it are partly drawn from each of these adjacent fields. We want to use this final introductory section to articulate the standards we hold ourselves to as a partner firm — the obligations we treat as binding on the firm regardless of whether any specific regulator or jurisdiction would compel them. Some of these standards are baseline industry expectations. Some are stricter than baseline. We want to be clear about both.

On know-your-customer obligations, we apply identity verification appropriate to the nature of the business. We confirm the identity of every account holder before processing meaningful payouts. We review documentation against the standards expected of any platform that disburses funds to individuals. We do not knowingly onboard accounts in jurisdictions where the firm's product is incompatible with local restrictions. We do not knowingly onboard individuals on relevant sanctions lists. These steps are baseline and unremarkable, but we want to mention them because the absence of them in any prop firm should be treated as a serious red flag rather than a feature.

On anti-money-laundering posture, we apply screening appropriate to the size and pattern of activity in each account. We monitor for activity patterns that are characteristic of fund-laundering attempts — rapid deposit-and-withdrawal cycles unrelated to actual trading, deposits from one source paired with payout requests to a different source under unusual circumstances, account behavior inconsistent with stated trader purpose. Where we observe such patterns, we follow our internal procedures, which include holds, reviews, and where appropriate the involvement of payment-processor partners. We do not advertise our specific monitoring thresholds, for obvious reasons, but we apply them consistently and we apply them based on conduct rather than identity.

On data protection, we treat the personal information of traders as something we hold in trust rather than something we own. We minimize the data we collect to what the operational and compliance functions actually require. We maintain reasonable technical and procedural safeguards against unauthorized access. We retain data only as long as is operationally and legally necessary. Where applicable jurisdictional frameworks impose specific data-subject rights, we honor those rights. We acknowledge that no security posture is perfect, and we acknowledge that the firm has an obligation to communicate appropriately in the unlikely event of a meaningful security incident.

On jurisdictional compliance, we operate the firm out of a defined home jurisdiction with defined governing law, and we apply the rules of that jurisdiction consistently. We do not pretend to be subject to the laws of every jurisdiction in which a trader might reside, because that would be operationally impossible and substantively meaningless. What we do is apply our home jurisdiction's standards to the firm's own conduct, while being mindful that traders bring their own jurisdictional realities — tax obligations, currency controls, regulatory expectations — that are properly the trader's responsibility. We try to be helpful where we can, particularly around year-end documentation that traders use for tax reporting, but the trader's own tax and regulatory situation is the trader's responsibility to manage.

• Identity verification commensurate with the risk of the activity
• Anti-money-laundering monitoring based on conduct rather than identity
• Data minimization, retention discipline, and reasonable security posture
• Defined home jurisdiction and defined governing law for the firm's operations
• Trader-side jurisdictional responsibilities (taxes, local restrictions) acknowledged as the trader's own
• • We screen against sanctions lists in the operationally accessible way
  • We document material policy changes through versioned communications
  • We retain audit logs of account-affecting decisions for periods consistent with operational needs
  • We apply consistent rule enforcement across traders, regardless of account size or perceived value
  • We escalate ambiguous cases internally rather than resolving them ad hoc at the support layer

On trader protection, the standard we hold ourselves to goes beyond the floor of what would be legally compelled. We treat the trader's earned profit share as the trader's, not as a discretionary distribution from firm profits to be granted or withheld at firm convenience. We treat the trader's evaluation result as the result the rules produced, not as a marketing opportunity to extract another evaluation fee through a manufactured technicality. We treat the trader's account activity as confidential to the trader, not as content for marketing. We have heard stories from traders about firms that have failed to live up to these standards, and those stories inform what we are trying not to be.

On dispute resolution, we want to be candid about the structure. The rules below specify a binding arbitration framework with a defined seat and a defined governing law. This is the default mechanism for the resolution of any dispute that cannot be resolved through ordinary support escalation. Before any dispute reaches arbitration, however, we commit to a good-faith escalation process internally. Ordinary support handles routine matters. Senior support handles matters that cannot be routinely resolved. Internal escalation reaches the operations leadership for matters that cannot be senior-support resolved. Only after these informal channels have been exhausted should formal mechanisms be invoked. We expect this to be a rare path, and we think the best way to keep it rare is to apply the rules consistently in the first place.

On reputational obligations, we are mindful that the firm's behavior is the firm's brand. We do not believe that a firm can advertise transparency, fairness, and trader-first values while behaving differently behind the scenes. The two converge eventually. Either the advertising catches up to the behavior in the form of trader complaints, public criticism, and reputational decay, or the behavior catches up to the advertising in the form of consistent practice over time. We have chosen the latter path deliberately. The rules below, the procedures behind them, and the daily decisions of the firm's staff are calibrated to live up to the posture we have set in this document. When we fail at this — and we will, occasionally, fail at this — we ask traders to tell us, and we commit to fixing what failed rather than concealing it.

This concludes the soft introductory portion of this document. The rules that follow are numbered, specific, and operational. They are not optional. They are not aspirational. They are the structure inside which the partnership between you and Approved Funded actually functions. Please read each of them with the same care you have given this introduction. They are shorter, denser, and more consequential. Where you have questions about any specific rule, our support team is available. Where you have concerns about how a rule applies to your particular trading style, please raise those concerns before signup rather than after. The signature at signup is meaningful. The trades placed under the rules are meaningful. The payouts disbursed when the rules are met are meaningful. We thank you for the seriousness with which you have approached this document, and we wish you a long and successful career — whether with us, or with whatever firm best fits your particular trading life.

The Daily Loss Limit (the "DLL") is one of the foundational risk-management constructs of any reputable proprietary trading firm and constitutes a load-bearing element of the firm's overall capital-protection architecture. The DLL exists, in substance, to prevent a single twenty-four-hour trading window from inflicting damage to the firm's allocated risk capital that could not be reasonably recovered through the ordinary cadence of trading activity, and to align the trader's incentive structure with the firm's prudential expectation that risk-of-ruin be measured, predictable, and capped on a per-day basis. In the broader prop-trading industry the DLL has emerged, over the past decade, as the single most common gating mechanism employed by allocator-style firms, and it serves a function loosely analogous to the daily margin-call thresholds applied by clearing houses and prime brokers in regulated markets, although the firm makes no representation that any such regulatory parallel is exact, controlling, or in any way binding upon the firm.

From the firm's perspective, the DLL also provides an objective, machine-verifiable signal that a trader's risk parameters have, on any given day, deviated from the envelope contemplated at the time the account was issued. Because the firm relies on automated detection, machine-readable equity timestamps, and deterministic ledger calculations to enforce the DLL, the rule is enforced without sentiment, without exception based on intent, and without reference to extraneous narrative considerations such as market volatility, news events, latency anomalies, or the trader's subjective state of mind. For the avoidance of doubt, the firm's risk engine evaluates the DLL as a strict numeric inequality applied to the equity time series, and the trader shall have no entitlement to override, suspend, defer, reset, or otherwise modify the DLL by reason of personal circumstance, market dislocation, or any other cause whatsoever.

The Daily Loss Limit is calibrated by tier and operates as set forth below. The tier-specific application is binding and shall not be altered, supplemented, or reinterpreted by oral representation, chat-support response, or any informal channel; only this document, and the canonical compact rules at /rules and /full-rules within the firm's website, shall be deemed authoritative in respect of the DLL.

• Instant Approved tier: For the Instant Approved tier, and for that tier exclusively, no Daily Loss Limit shall apply. The trader on an Instant Approved account is governed solely by the Maximum Drawdown rule set forth in Section 2 (the eight-per-cent (8%) peak-to-trough overall drawdown), and is not subject to any twenty-four-hour intraday loss ceiling. This carve-out is intentional, owner-locked, and reflects the firm's determination that the Instant Approved product line shall be administered with a single, simple, end-state risk metric. The firm shall not, by reason of operational convenience, system migration, or interface redesign, introduce any de facto daily loss limit on Instant Approved accounts; any apparent depletion of a "daily allowance" displayed on the trader-facing dashboard for an Instant Approved account is, by definition, a display artifact and shall not constitute a rule.
• Lite, 1-Step, and 2-Step (collectively the "Challenge Tiers"): For each of the Challenge Tiers, the Daily Loss Limit shall be five per cent (5%) of the account's starting balance, measured over any rolling twenty-four-hour day calculated against Coordinated Universal Time ("UTC"). The day window opens at 00:00:00 UTC and closes at 23:59:59 UTC; trades that span the close-of-day boundary are, for purposes of the DLL calculation, treated as contributing their unrealized mark-to-market profit-or-loss to whichever calendar day contains the relevant equity timestamp. For the avoidance of doubt, the firm does not operate a "trader local time" DLL window; the use of UTC is universal and non-waivable.
• • Worked Example A — Lite tier, $25,000 starting balance: Five per cent (5%) of $25,000 equals $1,250. If the trader's equity at any point during the UTC day falls below $23,750, the DLL is deemed breached and the account shall be flagged for suspension and review, irrespective of whether the equity subsequently recovers within the same UTC day.
  • Worked Example B — 2-Step tier, $100,000 starting balance, intraday rebound: Five per cent (5%) of $100,000 equals $5,000. If, at 14:32 UTC, the trader's equity touches $94,999.99 and the trader thereafter recovers to $100,500.00 by 23:00 UTC, the DLL has nevertheless been breached, since the inequality test is high-watermark within the day relative to the starting balance and the touched value satisfied the breach condition. Recovery does not cure breach.
  • Worked Example C — Instant Approved, $50,000 starting balance: There is no DLL. A trader who loses $4,500 in a single UTC day on an Instant Approved account is fully compliant with Section 1 and shall continue trading subject only to the Maximum Drawdown of Section 2.
  • Worked Example D — 1-Step tier, slippage on the close: A market-on-close fill at 23:59:58 UTC that produces a $50 incremental loss may, depending on the timestamp recorded by the firm's execution gateway, be allocated to the closing UTC day or the opening UTC day. The firm shall apply the timestamp recorded by its risk engine; the trader shall have no right of reallocation.
• Enforcement mechanics: The firm's risk engine evaluates the DLL on a continuous basis using equity snapshots taken at intervals not exceeding five (5) seconds. Upon a breach, the affected account shall be programmatically flagged, all open positions in the account may, at the firm's option, be force-closed by the risk engine, and the account shall be transitioned into a suspended state pending compliance review. The suspended state may, in the firm's sole discretion, be converted into a terminated state, and termination is the typical and expected outcome of a verified DLL breach on a Challenge Tier account. The firm shall not be obliged to deliver pre-breach warnings, throttle trading approaching the DLL, or otherwise provide any form of soft-rail guidance prior to the hard breach event.
• Common trader misconception — partial closes: Some traders assume that closing a portion of a losing position before the DLL threshold is touched will cure or mitigate a breach. This is incorrect. The DLL is evaluated against the equity time series, which incorporates both realized and unrealized profit-or-loss. Closing a portion of a position locks in losses that were already reflected in the equity number; it does not retroactively alter the high-watermark intra-day equity drop.
• Common trader misconception — margin call: Where a trader's account experiences a margin call or forced liquidation that drives equity below the DLL threshold, the trader is sometimes of the view that the breach should be excused on the basis that the loss was "involuntary." This view is rejected. A margin call is itself a downstream consequence of position-sizing and risk choices made by the trader; the firm's enforcement of the DLL shall not be conditioned on the proximate cause of the loss.
• Common trader misconception — trades spanning midnight UTC: The DLL test applies to the equity time series, not to individual trades. A trade opened at 22:30 UTC on Day N and closed at 02:30 UTC on Day N+1 contributes its mark-to-market path to the equity series for both days, and a breach event in either day shall stand independently.
• Notification policy: The firm follows a silent-flag administrative model. Upon DLL breach, the account is internally flagged in the firm's admin tooling and the firm's compliance staff shall determine, in their discretion and on a case-by-case basis, the appropriate cadence and content of trader-facing notification. Traders are not entitled to real-time breach notifications, automated email at the moment of breach, or any specified notice format. The firm typically communicates termination outcomes by email within a reasonable period following review, but no specific service-level commitment is offered.
• Appeals and discretion: A trader who believes that a DLL flag was raised in error may submit a written appeal to the firm's compliance team via the firm's support channel. The firm shall consider such appeals in good faith, but reserves to itself the absolute and final discretion to confirm, modify, or reverse the flag. No appeal shall create any expectation, presumption, or right of reinstatement, and the firm's decision on appeal shall be final and binding for all purposes.
• Cross-references: The Daily Loss Limit operates concurrently with, and in addition to, the Maximum Drawdown rule of Section 2; a trader may be in compliance with one rule and yet in breach of the other. See also Section 12 in respect of the consequences of suspension or termination on payout eligibility.

In all events, the foregoing provisions of this Section 1 shall be interpreted in a manner that gives effect to the firm's overarching prudential objectives and to the asymmetric risk profile inherent in proprietary capital allocation, and any ambiguity in the application of this Section 1 shall be resolved in the firm's favor. Nothing in this Section 1 shall be construed to create any contractual obligation upon the firm to permit continued trading on any account, on any tier, following an event of breach.

The Maximum Drawdown rule (the "MDD") is the firm's principal end-state risk control and applies, without exception, to every account issued by the firm, regardless of tier, regardless of capitalization, and regardless of the trader's history with the firm. The MDD operates as a hard ceiling on cumulative loss measured against a rolling high-water mark of account equity, and its breach results in immediate and non-negotiable termination of the affected account. The construction of the MDD reflects mainstream practice across the proprietary trading industry, in which a single, well-defined trailing drawdown metric is treated as the canonical signal that an account has materially deviated from the risk envelope contemplated at issuance.

The firm has selected an eight-per-cent (8%) peak-to-trough threshold, calculated on equity rather than on balance, with a high-water-mark mechanic. This calibration is the product of internal risk modeling and shall not be altered for individual traders, individual accounts, or individual market conditions. The 8% figure is not approximate, not a soft target, and not subject to negotiation. For the avoidance of doubt, the rule references account equity, which is defined as the sum of the cash balance plus the mark-to-market value of all open positions plus or minus any accrued financing or swap charges, evaluated continuously by the firm's risk engine.

The high-water-mark mechanic operates as follows: at the inception of the account, the high-water mark is set equal to the starting balance. Whenever the equity time series achieves a new all-time peak strictly exceeding the prior high-water mark, the high-water mark shall be ratcheted upward to that new peak. The high-water mark shall never decrease. The Maximum Drawdown threshold is then computed at any time as eight per cent (8%) of the prevailing high-water mark, expressed in the account's quote currency. A breach is recorded whenever equity falls to a value equal to or less than the high-water mark minus the threshold.

• Threshold definition: 8% of the starting balance is the initial threshold; once the high-water mark advances, the threshold becomes 8% of the new high-water mark, locked at the new value. The drawdown therefore trails upward but never downward, and the trader's effective "distance to ruin" shrinks as profits accumulate, reflecting the firm's expectation that a profitable account should not relinquish more than 8% of its peak.
• Equity vs. balance: The MDD references equity, not balance. Unrealized losses on open positions therefore count fully toward the drawdown, and a trader cannot avoid breach by holding an underwater position open in the hope of recovery. Conversely, unrealized gains on open positions advance the equity figure and may, if sustained at a daily-close snapshot, advance the high-water mark in accordance with the firm's snapshot policy.
• High-water-mark snapshot timing: The firm's risk engine evaluates the equity time series on a continuous basis. The high-water mark is recomputed at every snapshot interval, and the threshold is enforced against the prevailing high-water mark at the time of evaluation. There is no "end-of-day reset" mechanism, no "weekly reset" mechanism, and no manual adjustment available to the trader.
• • Worked Example A — $50,000 starting balance, no profit yet: 8% of $50,000 is $4,000. Account equity touching $46,000.00 or below at any time triggers MDD breach.
  • Worked Example B — $50,000 starting balance ratcheted to $55,000 high-water mark: 8% of $55,000 is $4,400. Threshold is now $50,600. The trader has, in effect, $5,400 of room from the peak (not $4,000 from the original starting balance, and not $4,000 from the $55,000 figure). The trader can lose down to $50,600 before breach, even though that level is above the original starting balance.
  • Worked Example C — Equity drop on unrealized loss: Account at $52,000 cash balance with an open position currently showing an unrealized loss of $6,500. Equity is therefore $45,500. If the high-water mark stands at $50,000 and 8% of that is $4,000, then the threshold is $46,000, and the equity figure of $45,500 constitutes a breach, even though the cash balance of $52,000 standing alone would not.
  • Worked Example D — Recovery does not cure breach: Account touches threshold at 09:14 UTC, then recovers above the threshold by 09:16 UTC. The breach event recorded at 09:14 UTC is final and not subject to retroactive cure by reason of subsequent equity recovery.
• Enforcement mechanics: Upon detection of an MDD breach by the firm's risk engine, the account shall be transitioned to a terminated state with immediate effect. Open positions may be force-closed by the risk engine at the prevailing market price, and any resulting realized loss shall be borne by the firm as the ultimate risk-bearer of simulated capital. The trader shall have no further trading rights on the terminated account and any pending payout requests on the terminated account shall be cancelled subject to the firm's compliance review.
• No exceptions: The Maximum Drawdown rule is administered without exception. The firm shall not, in any circumstances, reverse, defer, suspend, modify, or waive an MDD breach by reason of (a) market dislocation, gap moves, flash crashes, or other extraordinary price action; (b) connectivity failures, latency, slippage, or other technical events on the part of the trader, the trader's broker, the trader's internet service provider, or any third party; (c) personal circumstances of the trader, including without limitation illness, bereavement, hardship, or duress; (d) representations purportedly made by support staff, marketing materials, or any other firm communication outside this rules document; or (e) any other cause whatsoever. The phrase "no exceptions" in this Section 2 is to be construed broadly and in favor of the firm.
• Common trader misconception — "I can win it back": A trader experiencing an unrealized loss approaching the threshold sometimes seeks to add to the losing position in an attempt to lower the average price and recover. This conduct neither cures nor delays an MDD breach; it typically accelerates breach by increasing the equity sensitivity of the account to adverse price moves.
• Common trader misconception — "slippage caused the breach": Adverse slippage at execution is a foreseeable feature of any electronically traded market and is treated as a normal cost of trading. Breaches caused by slippage stand. Traders who wish to limit slippage exposure should manage position sizing, use of stop orders, and choice of trading window accordingly.
• Common trader misconception — "the platform glitched": Where a trader contends that an MDD breach is the product of a platform malfunction, the trader may submit a documented appeal pursuant to the procedure set forth below. The firm shall investigate substantiated platform incidents in good faith, but the burden of demonstrating that a documented MDD breach was the product of a firm-side platform malfunction rests on the trader.
• Notification policy: As with the Daily Loss Limit of Section 1, the firm follows a silent-flag administrative model in respect of the MDD. The firm's compliance team determines the timing and form of notification on a case-by-case basis. Termination outcomes are typically communicated by email within a reasonable period.
• Appeals and discretion: A trader who believes that an MDD termination was the product of firm-side error may submit a written appeal to the firm's compliance team. The firm shall consider such appeals in good faith but reserves the absolute and final discretion to confirm or reverse the termination. The phrase "no exceptions" in respect of the MDD shall not be construed to deprive the trader of the right to file an appeal; it is to be construed as denying any presumption of reinstatement.
• Cross-references: The MDD operates in addition to, and not in lieu of, the Daily Loss Limit of Section 1. A trader on a Challenge Tier account may breach Section 1 without breaching Section 2, and may breach Section 2 without breaching Section 1. See also Section 3 (consistency) and Section 12 (payout consequences of termination).

The provisions of this Section 2 are foundational to the firm's risk framework and shall be construed strictly. Any ambiguity in the application of the Maximum Drawdown rule shall be resolved in the firm's favor, and the firm's risk engine logs shall constitute conclusive evidence of equity, high-water mark, and breach status absent clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.

The Consistency Requirement (the "Consistency Rule") is the firm's primary safeguard against patterns of trading that, while not strictly violating the Daily Loss Limit or the Maximum Drawdown, exhibit a profile inconsistent with sustainable proprietary trading. The substantive rule is straightforward: no single trading day's realized profit may exceed thirty per cent (30%) of the trader's total realized profit since account creation, measured cumulatively. The firm has adopted this rule because, across both academic and industry studies of trader populations, the dominant predictor of long-run blow-up risk is concentration of profitability in a small number of high-variance days, irrespective of the underlying directional accuracy of the trader's strategy.

From the firm's vantage point, a trader whose profit-and-loss distribution is heavily concentrated in one or two outsized days is materially less likely to translate apparent skill into a stable capital-allocation relationship with the firm. The Consistency Rule therefore performs a screening function in addition to its risk-management function: it is intended to identify accounts that should be subject to additional review prior to payout, and to disincentivize trading patterns that rely on lottery-style outsized days.

The Consistency Rule is calibrated as a 30% ceiling because internal modeling indicates that this level captures the bulk of concentration risk while permitting a normal range of profitable variance. The threshold is owner-locked and shall not be adjusted upward or downward in respect of any individual trader, account, or strategy. The Consistency Rule applies to all tiers, including Instant Approved, the Lite tier, the 1-Step tier, and the 2-Step tier.

• Definition of "realized profit": For purposes of the Consistency Rule, "realized profit" is the aggregate of profit-and-loss locked in by the closing of positions, expressed in the account's quote currency, evaluated cumulatively from account inception to the moment of evaluation. Unrealized profit on open positions is not included in this calculation, although the firm reserves the right to apply analogous scrutiny to accounts whose unrealized profit exhibits comparable concentration.
• Definition of "trading day": For purposes of the Consistency Rule, a "trading day" means a UTC calendar day during which one or more positions were opened and/or closed. The day window opens at 00:00:00 UTC and closes at 23:59:59 UTC, mirroring the convention used in Section 1.
• Threshold computation: The firm computes, for each closed UTC day, the realized profit attributable to that day, and divides that figure by the cumulative realized profit since account creation. If the resulting ratio exceeds thirty per cent (30%) for any single day at the time of evaluation, the rule is deemed breached.
• Worked Example A — straightforward case: Trader's cumulative realized profit since account creation is $1,000. The Consistency Rule allows no single day to contribute more than $300 of realized profit. A day contributing $310 of realized profit constitutes a breach, even if the cumulative profit is otherwise spread across many other profitable days.
• Worked Example B — early-life accounts: A trader opens an account on Day 1 and earns $400 of realized profit on Day 1, with no other trading activity. The cumulative profit is $400 and the single-day contribution is $400, or 100% of cumulative profit. This is a structural breach. The firm's standard practice on early-life accounts is to defer the consistency evaluation to the moment of payout request, at which point the cumulative profit base must be sufficient for the single-day contribution to fall under the 30% ceiling.
• Worked Example C — payout-time evaluation: Trader requests a payout when cumulative realized profit is $5,000. The firm reviews the per-day distribution and finds that one day contributed $1,800. $1,800 / $5,000 = 36%, which exceeds the 30% threshold. The payout request is paused for compliance review and the account is suspended at the firm's discretion. The trader is not entitled to payment of the requested amount until and unless the consistency profile is brought into compliance through additional trading days that dilute the concentration.
• Worked Example D — repeated breach: A trader who repeatedly produces single-day concentrations exceeding 30% across multiple payout cycles may, at the firm's discretion, be subjected to escalating remedies up to and including termination of the account. Repetition is treated as a material aggravating factor.
• • Single-day concentration is measured against cumulative profit since account inception, not against the rolling 30-day window or the calendar month.
  • A losing day does not affect the consistency evaluation directly, but losing days reduce cumulative profit and therefore tighten the per-day allowance for subsequent profitable days.
  • Where the cumulative profit since inception is zero or negative, the consistency evaluation cannot be applied in a numerically meaningful way; the firm's practice in such cases is to defer the evaluation until the cumulative profit becomes positive.
  • The Consistency Rule is applied independently to each account and is not netted across multiple accounts held by the same trader.
• Enforcement mechanics: The firm applies the Consistency Rule at two principal points: (1) at the time of any payout request, as a precondition to disbursement; and (2) during routine compliance review, which the firm may conduct at any time and without prior notice. A trader who is in apparent compliance with the rule on a given trading day is not thereby insulated from later breach evaluation; the rule is cumulative and is reapplied at every evaluation point.
• Common trader misconception — "the rule resets monthly": The Consistency Rule does not reset monthly, weekly, or on any other periodic basis. The cumulative-profit denominator runs from account inception to the moment of evaluation.
• Common trader misconception — "only payout days count": The rule is evaluated against all closed UTC days since account inception, not only against days on which the trader is requesting payout. A breach can be recorded for a day that occurred weeks or months prior to the payout request.
• Common trader misconception — "I'll trade more days to dilute the breach": A trader may attempt to remediate an apparent breach by producing additional moderate profitable days, thereby raising cumulative profit and lowering the percentage attributable to the offending day. The firm permits, but does not guarantee the success of, this approach. The firm reserves the right to terminate an account exhibiting a persistent concentration profile even if a particular payout cycle eventually satisfies the numerical test.
• Notification policy: As with Sections 1 and 2, the firm follows a silent-flag administrative model. A trader whose payout request is paused on consistency grounds will typically be informed by the firm's compliance team via email when the review is complete, but the firm does not commit to any specific notification cadence.
• Appeals and discretion: The Consistency Rule incorporates explicit firm discretion. Even where the numerical test is satisfied, the firm reserves the right to suspend or terminate an account exhibiting concentration patterns inconsistent with sustainable trading. Conversely, the firm may, in its sole discretion, decline to suspend an account for a marginal breach. Appeals from suspension or termination on consistency grounds shall be considered in good faith, with final-decision authority reserved to the firm.
• Cross-references: The Consistency Rule should be read in conjunction with Section 12 (payout schedule and conditions) and Section 13 (account suspension at firm discretion). A consistency-related suspension typically operates through the mechanisms set forth in Section 13.

In sum, the Consistency Rule is one of the firm's most heavily exercised compliance tools, and traders should familiarize themselves with its application before the moment of payout request. The firm strongly encourages traders to monitor their per-day realized-profit contribution over time and to manage trading patterns proactively, in order to avoid the disappointment of a payout pause on consistency grounds.

The Minimum Trading Day Requirement (the "MTDR") is a structural safeguard intended to ensure that traders demonstrate a minimum quantity of engagement with the firm's trading environment before being permitted to advance to the next stage of the evaluation, request a payout, or otherwise convert simulated profitability into a tangible benefit. The MTDR is not, in itself, a measure of trading skill or strategy; rather, it operates as a threshold of activity that the firm has determined to be a useful precondition to onboarding and payout in light of industry experience with single-shot, lottery-style trading patterns.

The proprietary trading industry has long recognized that traders who produce profitable evaluations or payout-eligible balances within a small number of days are, on a population basis, materially less likely to sustain that performance into a long-run capital-allocation relationship with the firm. The MTDR addresses this concern not by judging strategy quality but by enforcing a minimum sample size of trading activity. The 5-day minimum has been calibrated against industry norms and the firm's own historical data, and is owner-locked.

The MTDR applies to all tiers without exception. The Instant Approved tier, the Lite tier, the 1-Step tier, and the 2-Step tier each require a minimum of five (5) qualifying trading days before any payout request shall be entertained. For the Challenge Tiers (Lite, 1-Step, 2-Step), the same five-day minimum is also a precondition to passing an evaluation phase. The uniform application of the MTDR across tiers reflects the firm's view that activity-based screening is appropriate at every product level and is not waived by purchase of an Instant Approved account.

• Definition of "trading day": A trading day shall mean any UTC calendar day during which the trader has both opened and closed at least one position on the relevant account. A day in which the trader merely opens a position without closing it, or closes a position previously opened in a prior day without opening any new position, does not, of itself, count as a trading day for purposes of the MTDR. The opened-and-closed requirement is intended to ensure that the trader engages with at least one round-trip on each qualifying day.
• UTC convention: The trading-day window opens at 00:00:00 UTC and closes at 23:59:59 UTC. The firm does not operate trader-local-time MTDR windows. Traders trading from time zones in which the local trading session straddles a UTC midnight should plan accordingly; in particular, a single contiguous trading session that opens at 22:00 UTC and closes at 02:00 UTC will, depending on whether the open-and-close test is satisfied within each UTC window, constitute one trading day or two trading days.
• Instant Approved tier: For the Instant Approved tier, a minimum of five (5) qualifying trading days, as defined above, is required as a precondition to submitting a payout request. The Instant Approved tier has no separate evaluation phase, so the MTDR functions purely as a payout precondition. The five-day count is cumulative from account inception.
• Challenge Tiers (Lite, 1-Step, 2-Step): For each of the Challenge Tiers, a minimum of five (5) trading days, as defined above, is required as a precondition to (a) passing an evaluation phase; and (b) submitting a payout request on a funded account derived from the relevant evaluation. The five-day count is cumulative from account inception and is not reset by phase advancement.
• • Worked Example A — Lite tier, four profitable days: A trader on the Lite tier accumulates four trading days, each ending in profit. The trader's profit and risk metrics are otherwise consistent with passing the evaluation. The MTDR is not satisfied and the trader must produce at least one additional trading day before the evaluation can be deemed passed.
  • Worked Example B — 1-Step tier, day-spanning trade: A trader opens a position at 23:30 UTC on Day 1 and closes it at 00:30 UTC on Day 2. The opened-and-closed test is satisfied for Day 1 only if the trader also closed a position on Day 1; otherwise Day 1 is not a trading day. If, on Day 2, the trader does not open and close any new position, Day 2 is also not a trading day under this rule.
  • Worked Example C — 2-Step tier, weekend gap: The trader's UTC calendar may include weekend days during which non-crypto markets are closed; the firm's MTDR does not require activity on any specific calendar day, and the five-day count may be accumulated across business days as the trader sees fit, subject to all other applicable rules including without limitation the weekend-hold restriction of Section 6.
  • Worked Example D — Instant Approved, payout on Day 4: A trader on the Instant Approved tier accumulates four qualifying trading days of net profit and submits a payout request on Day 4. The MTDR is not yet satisfied (5 days required, 4 accumulated) and the request shall be held until at least one additional qualifying trading day is logged. The Consistency Rule of Section 3 will also apply once the MTDR is met.
• Enforcement mechanics: The firm's risk engine maintains a running count of trading days per account. The count is exposed to the trader's dashboard for transparency, but the canonical figure is the one stored in the firm's database. A trader who attempts to advance to evaluation pass or to submit a payout request without satisfying the MTDR will receive a system-level rejection.
• Common trader misconception — "micro-trades count": A trade of any size shall count for purposes of the MTDR, provided that it satisfies the other applicable rules of this document. However, the firm reserves the right to exclude trades that, in its sole determination, were placed solely for the purpose of inflating the trading-day count without any genuine market exposure (for example, a one-microlot round-trip with negligible duration that produces a P&L change indistinguishable from zero). Such trades shall be deemed cosmetic and shall not be credited toward the MTDR.
• Common trader misconception — "holiday days don't count": Public holidays, weekends, and other days on which a particular instrument is not actively traded do not, of themselves, count toward the MTDR; the requirement is that the trader actually open and close at least one position on the day in question.
• Common trader misconception — "the MTDR resets at evaluation pass": The five-day count does not reset at evaluation pass on the 1-Step or 2-Step tier; it carries forward from account inception. A trader who has accumulated five qualifying trading days during evaluation will not be required to accumulate five additional qualifying days before the first payout, although other conditions including the Consistency Rule must still be satisfied.
• Notification policy: A trader whose evaluation pass or payout request is held pending satisfaction of the MTDR will typically receive a system-level message at the time of request. The firm does not commit to any further notification cadence and the silent-flag model of Sections 1 through 3 applies analogously.
• Appeals and discretion: The firm shall not entertain appeals based on a contention that the five-day minimum should be reduced, suspended, or waived. The MTDR is a structural rule and is not subject to discretionary reduction. Appeals related to the firm's classification of a particular day as qualifying or non-qualifying shall be considered in good faith.
• Cross-references: The MTDR operates concurrently with the Consistency Rule of Section 3 and the payout schedule of Section 12. A trader who has just satisfied the MTDR may nevertheless be unable to receive a payout if the Consistency Rule is breached.

Traders are encouraged to view the MTDR not as an obstacle but as an opportunity to build out a longer track record of demonstrated activity on the firm's platform, which serves the trader's interests in a long-run allocation relationship with the firm and the firm's interests in evaluating the sustainability of the trader's approach.

The News Trading Restriction (the "News Rule") is the firm's principal control on a category of trading activity that, while legal in regulated markets and common among certain professional populations, is associated with elevated execution risk, abnormal slippage, and unstable spread conditions in the simulated trading environment in which the firm operates. The News Rule is calibrated to deter trader behavior that exploits the millisecond-to-minute window surrounding scheduled high-impact economic releases, where price action is dominated by liquidity dislocations, order-book thinning, and pricing-engine adjustments that the firm regards as inappropriate features upon which to build a sustainable trading record.

From the firm's perspective, a trader who repeatedly opens or closes positions in close proximity to scheduled high-impact releases is, in effect, betting on the spread-and-slippage profile of the firm's execution environment rather than on directional skill, and such bets are not consistent with the kind of trading activity the firm wishes to capitalize. The News Rule is therefore both a risk-management tool and a strategy-quality screen.

The substantive rule is that no trader shall open or close any position within five (5) minutes either side of a scheduled high-impact economic release on the calendar maintained by the firm. The five-minute window opens five minutes before the scheduled release time (T-5:00) and closes five minutes after the scheduled release time (T+5:00), measured in UTC against the official scheduled release time as reported by the relevant central bank or statistical agency.

• Scope of "high-impact" releases: The firm maintains a list of scheduled high-impact releases. The categories of release covered include, without limitation:
• • United States: Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP), Consumer Price Index (CPI), Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) rate decisions, FOMC meeting minutes
  • European Union: European Central Bank (ECB) rate decisions, ECB meeting minutes
  • United Kingdom: Bank of England (BoE) rate decisions, UK Gross Domestic Product (GDP) prints, UK Consumer Price Index (CPI)
  • Other jurisdictions: Tier-1 central bank rate decisions, including without limitation the Bank of Japan (BoJ), the Swiss National Bank (SNB), the Bank of Canada (BoC), and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA)
• The list is not exhaustive. The firm reserves the right to add or remove categories of release from the high-impact list, and to publish updates to the calendar from time to time. A trader is responsible for consulting the calendar prior to placing trades around scheduled releases.
• Definition of "open or close": For purposes of this Section 5, the firm shall treat any new position-opening order or any position-closing order — including without limitation market orders, limit orders that fill within the five-minute window, and stop-loss or take-profit orders that trigger and fill within the window — as falling within the scope of the rule. The firm does not distinguish between fills caused by the trader's manual action and fills caused by pre-placed pending orders that happen to execute during the window.
• Worked Example A — NFP release: NFP is scheduled for 12:30 UTC on the first Friday of the month. The protected window runs from 12:25 UTC to 12:35 UTC. A trader who clicks BUY at 12:24:59 UTC is outside the window for the open; if the trader then closes the position at 12:33 UTC, the close falls inside the window and the rule is breached.
• Worked Example B — pending stop fill: A trader places a stop-loss at 11:00 UTC ahead of an FOMC release scheduled for 18:00 UTC. The stop-loss fills at 18:02 UTC due to the price excursion following the release. The fill falls within the protected window and the rule is breached, irrespective of the fact that the order itself was placed outside the window.
• Worked Example C — limit order outside the window: A trader places a limit order at 09:00 UTC that ultimately fills at 17:50 UTC, fifteen minutes prior to a CPI release at 18:05 UTC (illustrative). The fill is outside the protected window and the rule is not breached. Note that the protected window is centered on the scheduled release time and runs 5 minutes before to 5 minutes after.
• Worked Example D — closing a winner inside the window: A trader who is sitting on an unrealized gain prior to the protected window and chooses to close the position one minute before a scheduled release has acted within the protected window and is in breach of the rule. The fact that the closing trade was profitable does not cure the breach.
• Enforcement mechanics: The firm's risk engine maintains a deterministic list of release timestamps and evaluates each fill timestamp against the protected window for each release. Where a fill falls within the window, the trade is flagged as a news-trading event. The firm's standard remedy is to nullify the trade, removing both the entry and the corresponding P&L from the trader's account ledger. Repeated violations escalate as set forth below.
• Common trader misconception — "the trade was already open": Some traders reason that, because a trade was opened many hours before a release, holding it through the protected window is acceptable. This is not so. The rule prohibits opening or closing within the window; a trade that closes within the window — whether by manual action or by pending-order fill — falls within the rule's scope.
• Common trader misconception — "only manual trades count": The rule does not distinguish between manual orders and pre-placed pending orders. The trader is responsible for managing pending orders to avoid fills inside the protected window.
• Common trader misconception — "non-USD pairs aren't affected by US data": Even where a release is nominally jurisdiction-specific, cross-asset spillover is well documented. The firm's enforcement of the rule is by trade timestamp, not by instrument relevance. A trader who closes a EUR/JPY position during a US NFP window has nevertheless triggered the rule.
• Escalation: A first violation typically results in nullification of the affected trade and a written warning. Repeated violations may result in account flagging, suspension, and ultimately termination at the firm's sole discretion. The firm does not commit to a fixed number of warnings before escalation.
• Notification policy: As with Sections 1 through 4, the firm follows a silent-flag administrative model in respect of news-trading enforcement. The trader's dashboard P&L will reflect any trade nullification, but the firm does not commit to real-time notification of the underlying enforcement action.
• Appeals and discretion: A trader who believes a fill was misclassified as a news-trading event may submit a written appeal to the firm's compliance team, attaching the relevant timestamps and order-history details. The firm shall consider such appeals in good faith but reserves final-decision authority.
• Cross-references: The News Rule operates in conjunction with Section 13 (account suspension at firm discretion). A repeated pattern of news-trading attempts may, in the firm's discretion, be treated as conduct violating the spirit of fair trading under Section 13.

Traders are strongly encouraged to consult the firm's published economic calendar and to plan their position management around scheduled releases. The five-minute symmetric window is intended to be administered mechanically and predictably, and the firm shall not entertain arguments that a particular release was "obviously already priced in" or otherwise immaterial; the rule applies on a release-by-release basis according to the published schedule.

The Weekend Holding Restriction (the "Weekend Rule") is the firm's principal control on overnight-and-over-weekend exposure in markets whose primary venues close for the weekend. The Weekend Rule reflects the operational reality that, for traditional markets such as forex majors and minors, metals, indices, and commodities, the weekend close-and-reopen cycle introduces substantial gap risk, in which the open price on Sunday-evening or Monday-morning sessions can diverge materially from the prior Friday-close price as a function of weekend news flow, geopolitical developments, and other discontinuities. Because the firm cannot administer position-level risk management while the underlying markets are closed, and because gap risk is asymmetric and difficult to size, the firm has determined that non-crypto positions shall not be held over the weekend.

The Weekend Rule is also informed by industry practice. A substantial majority of proprietary trading firms operating in the simulated-evaluation space impose some form of weekend-hold restriction on traditional markets. The specific calibration adopted by the firm — close by 21:00 UTC on Friday — reflects the practical end of liquid trading hours on the major forex venues in the period preceding the weekly close, and provides a buffer against late-Friday liquidity collapse.

Crucially, the Weekend Rule is asymmetric in scope. It applies in full force to non-crypto markets, and does not apply at all to crypto markets, which trade twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, and do not exhibit the close-and-reopen gap risk that motivates the rule. The carve-out for crypto is intentional, owner-locked, and material; under no circumstances shall the firm impose a weekend-close requirement on Bitcoin, Ether, or other genuinely twenty-four-by-seven crypto instruments.

• Scope of "non-crypto" markets: For purposes of this Section 6, "non-crypto" markets shall include, without limitation, all forex pairs (majors, minors, and exotics), spot precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, palladium), equity indices (US, European, Asian, and other regional indices), energy commodities (crude oil, natural gas, refined products), and agricultural commodities. Any instrument whose primary venue is closed for some portion of the period from Friday evening UTC through Sunday evening UTC shall be deemed a non-crypto market for purposes of this Section 6.
• Scope of "crypto" markets: For purposes of this Section 6, "crypto" markets shall include, without limitation, Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and other genuinely twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week digital-asset instruments offered on the firm's platform. The firm shall maintain a list of crypto-classified instruments and reserves the right to update the list from time to time. Where a trader is uncertain whether a particular instrument is classified as crypto or non-crypto, the trader shall consult the firm's instrument list before holding the position over a weekend.
• Friday close requirement: For non-crypto markets, all open positions shall be closed on or before 21:00 UTC on the relevant Friday. The 21:00 UTC threshold is the binding cutoff for purposes of this rule. The cutoff applies regardless of the underlying market's official trading hours; for example, certain index instruments trade until later than 21:00 UTC on Friday, but for purposes of the firm's rule, all such positions must nevertheless be closed by 21:00 UTC.
• Crypto exemption: Crypto positions are exempt from the Friday close requirement. A trader holding BTC, ETH, or other crypto-classified instruments may hold those positions over the weekend in any size and any duration, subject to all other applicable rules including without limitation the Maximum Drawdown of Section 2 and the lot-size cap of Section 8. The firm shall not, in any circumstances, require closure of crypto positions over the weekend.
• Worked Example A — forex pair held over weekend: A trader holds an EUR/USD position open at 21:00:01 UTC on a Friday. The position constitutes a breach of Section 6, even if the position is closed at 21:00:30 UTC; the firm's enforcement is timestamp-based and the inequality test is strict.
• Worked Example B — gold held into Saturday: A trader holds a long XAU/USD position from Thursday afternoon and chooses not to close before 21:00 UTC on Friday. The position is open into Saturday UTC. This constitutes a breach. The fact that gold trades essentially continuously on certain venues does not exempt the position from the firm's rule, since gold is classified as a non-crypto market for purposes of this Section 6.
• Worked Example C — Bitcoin held over weekend: A trader holds a long BTC/USDT position from Wednesday and continues to hold it through Saturday and Sunday into the following week. Crypto positions are exempt and no breach occurs.
• Worked Example D — index held into Sunday futures: A trader holds an S&P 500 index position into Sunday-evening futures session. Indices are non-crypto and the position should have been closed by 21:00 UTC on Friday. The breach stands.
• • The Friday cutoff is 21:00 UTC, regardless of the trader's local time zone.
  • Pending orders that would open a non-crypto position after the cutoff and over the weekend should be cancelled before the cutoff; the firm's risk engine may, in its discretion, cancel such pending orders automatically, but the responsibility for managing pending orders rests with the trader.
  • Hedged or partial-closed non-crypto positions are not exempt; partial closure does not cure a breach.
  • Crypto-vs-fiat pairs are classified as crypto. Crypto-vs-crypto pairs are classified as crypto. Forex pairs are classified as non-crypto. Where a synthetic instrument is offered on the firm's platform, the firm's classification of the instrument shall be controlling.
• Enforcement mechanics: The firm's risk engine evaluates the open-position book at 21:00:00 UTC each Friday and identifies any non-crypto positions that remain open. Such positions are flagged. The firm's standard remedy is to force-close the offending position at the prevailing market price, with any resulting realized P&L applied to the trader's account ledger, and to issue a warning. Repeated violations escalate as set forth below.
• Common trader misconception — "the spread closed before 21:00": Where the underlying venue's pricing thinned out earlier than 21:00 UTC due to liquidity collapse, the trader is sometimes of the view that the rule should be applied at the earlier de-facto close. This view is incorrect. The cutoff is the published 21:00 UTC threshold and the firm's risk engine will enforce that cutoff regardless of intra-day liquidity profile.
• Common trader misconception — "weekend gaps are too small to matter": Weekend gap risk is asymmetric and event-driven; many weekends pass without material gap, but a single adverse weekend gap can produce P&L far in excess of any rational pre-trade risk budget. The firm's rule is calibrated to the worst-case profile, not the typical-week profile.
• Common trader misconception — "my account is on Instant Approved so I'm exempt": The Weekend Rule applies across all tiers, including Instant Approved. The Instant Approved exemption pertains exclusively to the Daily Loss Limit of Section 1 and does not extend to the Weekend Rule.
• Notification policy: A trader whose position is force-closed at the Friday cutoff will see the resulting P&L on the account ledger and, typically, will be informed by the firm's compliance team via email when escalation is contemplated. The firm follows the silent-flag administrative model in respect of weekend-hold enforcement.
• Appeals and discretion: A trader who believes a position was force-closed in error, or that an instrument was misclassified as non-crypto, may submit a written appeal. The firm shall consider such appeals in good faith but reserves final-decision authority. Appeals shall not, of themselves, delay the firm's enforcement action.
• Cross-references: The Weekend Rule should be read in conjunction with the lot-size cap of Section 8, the algorithmic-restrictions provisions of Section 10, and the suspension provisions of Section 13.

The crypto carve-out is one of the firm's most heavily emphasized affirmative permissions. Traders trading crypto instruments may hold positions over weekends without any time-based restriction under this Section 6. This is a deliberate product decision and shall not be administered in a manner that creates de facto weekend-close pressure on crypto positions.

The Minimum Position Holding Period (the "Scalp Cap") is the firm's principal control on ultra-short-duration trading activity that, while permissible in modest quantity, becomes problematic at scale. The Scalp Cap is calibrated to deter trading patterns that rely on systematic exploitation of quoting latency, microstructural noise, or other features of the firm's simulated execution environment that are not aligned with the kind of directional, decision-making trading the firm wishes to capitalize.

The proprietary trading industry has, over many years, developed a substantial body of practice around the regulation of "scalping" — defined here, in the narrow sense, as the placement of round-trip trades with short holding periods, typically completed within a few minutes. While scalping is a legitimate strategy in regulated markets with appropriate execution venues, in a simulated-evaluation environment it can produce outsized P&L sensitivity to microstructural details that are not consistent with sustainable real-world trading. The firm's response is not to prohibit scalping outright but to cap it at a level consistent with normal trader behavior.

The substantive rule has two components. First, the firm shall classify any position whose total holding period from open fill to close fill is less than ten (10) minutes as a "scalp trade." Second, no account shall execute more than two (2) scalp trades, as so defined, on any UTC calendar day. The 10-minute threshold and the 2-trade daily cap are owner-locked and shall apply uniformly across all tiers and all instruments, including both non-crypto and crypto markets.

• Definition of "holding period": The holding period of a position shall be measured from the timestamp of the open fill to the timestamp of the close fill, both as recorded by the firm's execution gateway. Where a position is built up through multiple partial fills on the open side, the firm shall use the timestamp of the first open fill. Where a position is closed through multiple partial fills on the close side, the firm shall use the timestamp of the final close fill. This convention is intended to capture the full duration of the trader's exposure to the market.
• Definition of "trade" for purposes of the scalp count: For purposes of the daily scalp count, each fully closed round-trip with a holding period under ten (10) minutes shall count as one scalp trade. Where the trader holds multiple positions concurrently on the same instrument, each position's round-trip is counted separately.
• Scalp threshold: The 10-minute threshold is administered strictly. A round-trip with a holding period of nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds counts as a scalp; a round-trip with a holding period of ten minutes and one second does not. The trader is not entitled to a tolerance band around the threshold.
• Daily cap: The cap of two (2) scalp trades per UTC day is cumulative across all instruments and order types on the relevant account. The cap is not applied per-instrument or per-strategy. The trader may, in principle, allocate the daily scalp budget across instruments as the trader sees fit, subject to all other applicable rules.
• Worked Example A — within the cap: A trader executes one scalp trade during the London session and one during the New York session, for a total of two scalp trades. The trader is exactly at the daily cap and no breach occurs.
• Worked Example B — third scalp triggers escalation: A trader executes two scalp trades during the morning and a third scalp trade in the afternoon. The third scalp trade exceeds the daily cap. The firm's standard remedy escalates as described below; the trader does not receive credit for the first two and a fresh "warning state" on the third; the third is itself a breach.
• Worked Example C — long trade does not consume scalp budget: A trader holds a position for twelve (12) minutes before closing. The position is not a scalp trade and does not contribute to the daily scalp count. The trader's scalp budget for the day remains unaffected.
• Worked Example D — partial close near the threshold: A trader opens a position at 09:00:00 UTC, partially closes 50% at 09:05:00 UTC, and fully closes the remaining 50% at 09:12:00 UTC. The firm's convention treats the round-trip as a single trade with holding period measured from 09:00:00 UTC to 09:12:00 UTC (twelve minutes), which exceeds ten minutes; the round-trip therefore is not classified as a scalp.
• • The 10-minute window is measured from open fill to close fill, not from order submission to order fill.
  • Pending orders that result in fills less than 10 minutes apart are subject to the rule on the same basis as manually executed market orders.
  • Take-profit and stop-loss fills occurring within 10 minutes of the open fill produce a scalp-classified round-trip on the same basis as a manual close.
  • The Scalp Cap applies to crypto and non-crypto instruments equally; the crypto carve-out of Section 6 does not extend to Section 7.
  • Where the trader holds multiple separate positions on the same instrument with overlapping but not identical lifetimes, each position's round-trip is evaluated separately.
• Enforcement mechanics: The firm's risk engine maintains a running count of scalp trades per account per UTC day. The count resets at 00:00:00 UTC each day. Upon the third scalp trade in a UTC day, the firm's standard escalation path is engaged: (1) a written warning issued to the trader; (2) on a subsequent breach, an account flag and increased compliance scrutiny; and (3) on continued or willful breach, suspension of the account at the firm's discretion. Each step is administered case-by-case; the firm does not commit to a fixed schedule of warnings prior to escalation.
• Common trader misconception — "my strategy needs more than 2 scalps": A strategy that systematically depends on more than two scalp trades per day to be profitable is, by the firm's standards, not the kind of strategy the firm wishes to capitalize. The Scalp Cap is intentionally constraining and is not subject to per-strategy waiver.
• Common trader misconception — "the trade was nine minutes fifty-five seconds, that's basically ten minutes": The threshold is administered strictly, and the trader is not entitled to a tolerance band. Traders concerned about the threshold should manage their close timing with an appropriate buffer.
• Common trader misconception — "stop-loss fills shouldn't count": A stop-loss fill that closes a position less than 10 minutes after open is a scalp trade for purposes of this rule, regardless of whether the fill was triggered by a market move or by manual action.
• Common trader misconception — "the cap is per-instrument": The cap is per-account, per-day, summed across all instruments. The trader may not, for example, execute two EUR/USD scalps and two BTC scalps in a single UTC day on the theory that the instruments are different; the cumulative cap of two applies.
• Notification policy: As with Sections 1 through 6, the firm follows a silent-flag administrative model in respect of scalp-cap enforcement. A trader who breaches the daily cap will typically receive an email warning from the firm's compliance team; the firm does not commit to a specific notification cadence and the trader's dashboard scalp counter is the canonical real-time signal of remaining budget.
• Appeals and discretion: A trader who believes that a particular round-trip was misclassified as a scalp may submit a written appeal to the firm's compliance team, attaching the relevant timestamps. The firm shall consider such appeals in good faith but reserves final-decision authority. The Scalp Cap, like the MTDR, is a structural rule and is not subject to discretionary cap increase on a per-trader basis.
• Cross-references: The Scalp Cap operates in conjunction with the algorithmic-restrictions provisions of Section 10, which prohibit certain classes of high-frequency execution algorithms entirely, and with the suspension provisions of Section 13. A pattern of scalp-cap breaches combined with prohibited algorithmic activity may be treated as conduct violating the spirit of fair trading.

Traders are encouraged to view the Scalp Cap as a structural feature of the firm's product, not as a temporary friction to be worked around. The cap is calibrated to permit normal use of short-duration trades as a tactical instrument while deterring strategies that systematically depend on ultra-short-duration trading as a primary source of edge.

Preamble. The lot size cap, also referred to throughout this section as the per-trade maximum exposure rule, the position-sizing ceiling, or the trade-level risk-per-trade limit, exists for reasons that are both prudential and structural. Approved Funded ("AF," "the firm," "we," or "us") operates a proprietary trading evaluation and funded-account program in which simulated capital is allocated to traders pursuant to a contractual relationship that is performance-tested. The firm's continued ability to allocate such capital — and, where contractually applicable, to remit the trader's share of net realized profits — is contingent upon the firm's overall risk posture remaining within tolerances established by the firm's internal risk committee. A single uncapped position, even one nominally aligned with the trader's directional thesis, can in adverse market conditions produce realized or unrealized losses sufficiently large to threaten the integrity of the firm's risk pool, the firm's ability to honor payout obligations to other traders, and, in extreme cases, the firm's solvency.

Industry context. Position-sizing rules expressed as a percentage of equity-at-risk are standard practice across the proprietary trading industry, the institutional asset-management industry, and the registered-investment-adviser industry. The substantive parallel is well-established: the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission ("CFTC"), through its registered futures-commission-merchant rules, requires risk-based capital adequacy; the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), through Rule 15c3-1 and related provisions, enforces net-capital requirements that effectively cap exposure per counterparty; and global prudential regimes such as Basel III impose risk-weighted asset constraints that have a similar mathematical effect at the institution level. The 0.5% per-trade equity-at-risk cap imposed by AF is calibrated to reflect this same prudential logic at the trader level.

For the avoidance of doubt, this section governs only the per-trade maximum loss as calculated by stop-loss distance and lot size; it does not displace, supersede, or modify the daily loss limit set forth in Section 1, the maximum drawdown set forth in Section 2, or any other rule in this document.

• Detailed definition. "Lot size" shall mean the notional volume of a single open position, expressed in standardized units appropriate to the instrument traded, including without limitation: standard lots, mini lots, and micro lots for foreign exchange ("FX") instruments; troy ounces for precious metals; index points and contract multipliers for cash-settled equity index contracts; barrels or therms for physical commodity contracts; and contract-multiplier-adjusted units for digital-asset ("crypto") perpetual or spot instruments where applicable.
• "Account equity" shall mean the total marked-to-market value of the trader's funded or evaluation account at the moment immediately prior to the order being placed, calculated as the sum of (i) the cash balance, (ii) the unrealized profit or loss on all then-open positions, and (iii) any pending credits or debits already accrued but not yet settled.
• "Equity-at-risk" or "risk-per-trade" shall mean the maximum nominal loss that would be realized if the trade in question were closed at its declared stop-loss price, calculated as: (entry price minus stop-loss price, in absolute value) multiplied by lot size multiplied by contract multiplier multiplied by the prevailing currency-conversion factor where applicable. Where no stop-loss is declared, the firm's risk engine shall impute a synthetic stop-loss in accordance with the methodology described below under "Enforcement mechanics."
• The maximum permitted equity-at-risk per single trade shall not exceed zero point five percent (0.5%) of account equity as measured at the moment of order placement. For the avoidance of doubt, 0.5% means one-half of one percent — i.e., 0.005 expressed as a decimal — and is not a typographical error for 5%.
• Worked example A. A trader holds an Instant Approved account with $50,000 in account equity. The trader proposes to open a long position in EUR/USD at 1.0850 with a stop-loss at 1.0820 (a 30-pip stop). The maximum permitted lot size is calculated as: (0.5% × $50,000) ÷ (30 pips × $10/pip per standard lot) = $250 ÷ $300 ≈ 0.833 standard lots. The risk engine will permit any lot size up to and including 0.83 lots; an order for 1.00 lots will be rejected, downsized, or auto-closed at the firm's discretion.
• Worked example B. A trader holds a 2-Step funded account with $100,000 in account equity. The trader proposes to open a short position in XAU/USD (gold) at 2,400.00 with a stop-loss at 2,415.00 (a $15 stop). The maximum permitted equity-at-risk is 0.5% × $100,000 = $500. With a $15 stop and gold's contract specification of $1 per pip per 0.01 lot, the maximum permitted lot size is approximately 0.33 lots.
• Worked example C (no declared stop-loss). Every order submitted to the firm's simulator must be accompanied by an explicit stop-loss declaration. Where a trader nonetheless submits an order without a declared stop-loss, the risk engine shall impute a synthetic stop-loss equal to the greater of (i) the daily 95th-percentile adverse-move historical volatility for the instrument over the trailing 90 days, or (ii) 1% of the instrument's notional price; and a stop-loss-omission event shall be recorded against the trader's compliance ledger. A trader whose ledger accumulates more than two (2) such omission events on the same funded account becomes eligible, at the firm's sole discretion, for account suspension, payout hold, or termination. Consistent with the firm's silent-flag compliance model, no platform notification is presented at the time of omission; the trader learns of any consequential action via email from an authorized AF administrator at the address of record.
• Worked example D (multi-leg). For multi-leg or basket-style trades opened within a single tactical decision (e.g., a EUR/USD long opened simultaneously with a EUR/GBP short), each leg is evaluated independently against its own stop. The firm reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to aggregate correlated legs and apply the cap to the aggregate equity-at-risk where the firm reasonably determines that the legs constitute a single de facto position.
• Enforcement mechanics. The firm operates an automated risk engine that evaluates each order at the moment of placement and continuously thereafter. Trades exceeding the cap may, at the firm's election, be (a) rejected at order entry, (b) accepted but auto-closed in whole or in part by the risk engine within seconds of detection, (c) accepted but flagged for compliance review with a hold placed on subsequent payouts pending review, or (d) accepted with a downsize event recorded on the account's compliance ledger. The selection among (a) through (d) shall be made by the firm in its sole and absolute discretion based on factors including without limitation the magnitude of the breach, the trader's compliance history, prevailing market conditions, and the broader risk posture of the firm at that moment.
• Detection methodology. The risk engine performs the equity-at-risk calculation in real time using the trader's declared stop-loss where available and an imputed synthetic stop-loss where not. Where the platform receives execution confirmation prior to the risk engine's evaluation completing — for example, due to network latency between the platform and the matching engine — the firm reserves the right to retroactively adjust the trade record to reflect the maximum compliant lot size and to credit or debit the trader accordingly.
• Common trader misconceptions. (i) The cap is calculated on equity-at-risk, not on notional position value; a 1.0-lot EUR/USD position with a 5-pip stop carries far less equity-at-risk than a 0.5-lot position with a 100-pip stop, notwithstanding the larger lot. (ii) The cap applies per trade, not per day; a trader may open multiple compliant trades sequentially provided each, in isolation, satisfies the cap and provided the daily loss limit in Section 1 is not breached. (iii) Crypto instruments are subject to the same 0.5% cap; the crypto exemption in Section 6 (Weekend Holding) does not extend to position sizing. (iv) The cap applies in real time as equity changes; a position that was compliant at entry may, after subsequent realized losses on other trades, become non-compliant relative to a now-lower equity figure, but the firm shall not retroactively penalize a trade that was compliant at the moment of entry.
• Notification policy. Consistent with the firm's silent-flag compliance model, the trader will not, in the ordinary course, receive an automated platform notification when a lot-size cap event is recorded. Where the firm in its discretion elects to take consequential action — including without limitation account suspension, payout hold, or termination — an authorized AF administrator shall communicate that action to the trader by email at the address of record. Traders are reminded that the absence of an immediate notification is not, and shall not be construed as, a waiver of any rule or as the firm's tacit endorsement of the trade in question.
• Appeals and discretion. A trader who has received a consequential action notice in respect of a lot-size cap event may submit a written appeal by emailing [email protected] within fourteen (14) calendar days of the notice. Appeals shall be reviewed by the firm's compliance team. The firm makes no representation or warranty as to the outcome of any appeal, the timeline for resolution, or the availability of any specific remedy. The firm's determination shall be final.
• Cross-references. This Section 8 is to be read together with Section 1 (Daily Loss Limit), Section 2 (Maximum Drawdown), Section 7 (Minimum Position Holding Period), and Section 13 (Account Suspension at Firm Discretion). In the event of any apparent conflict among these sections, the firm shall apply each independently; satisfaction of one does not waive or modify the others.

Preamble. The synchronized-trading restriction, also referred to as the copy-trading rule, the multi-account-coordination prohibition, or the cross-account simultaneity limit, is a core integrity provision. The economic foundation of the proprietary trading evaluation business model rests on the premise that each evaluation or funded account represents an independent expression of an individual trader's discretionary decision-making, executed against the firm's simulated execution venue and assessed for skill against statistical baselines.

Where a trader, or a coordinated group of traders, holds multiple accounts and executes substantially identical orders across those accounts within a tight time window, the resulting trade pattern is no longer an independent expression of skill; it is a statistical replica designed to multiply the expected payout from a single decision while keeping the firm's per-account exposure superficially compliant. This pattern, which the industry collectively refers to as "position multiplication via account splitting," is treated by every reputable proprietary trading firm — and, by analogy, by every regulated multi-account-management framework supervised by the SEC, CFTC, FCA, ASIC, and analogous global regulators — as a form of risk-shifting that the firm cannot underwrite at scale.

The 5-second synchronized-trading window is calibrated to capture coordinated execution while leaving room for the natural latency of independent traders observing the same public market signal. It is not, and shall not be construed as, a safe harbor for slightly-slower-than-5-seconds coordination; the firm reserves the right to extend the analytical window where pattern evidence so warrants.

• Detailed definition. "Synchronized trading" shall mean any pattern in which two or more orders, originating from two or more AF accounts, share each of the following attributes: (i) the same instrument or symbol; (ii) the same direction (long or short); (iii) order entry timestamps falling within five (5) seconds of one another, measured server-side at the firm's matching engine; and (iv) lot sizes that are identical or proportional to the respective account equities such that the resulting equity-at-risk percentage is materially equivalent across the affected accounts.
• "Linked accounts" shall mean any two or more accounts which the firm reasonably determines, on the basis of evidence available to the firm, to be controlled directly or indirectly by the same natural person or by a coordinated group of natural persons, including without limitation determinations based on shared payment instruments, shared IP addresses, shared device fingerprints, shared KYC documentation, shared payout wallet addresses, shared email-domain patterns, behavioral fingerprints in trade entry timing, or any combination of the foregoing.
• "Near-identical" shall mean trades that are not byte-for-byte identical but that, in the firm's reasonable judgment, replicate the substantive economic content of one another, including but not limited to: the same instrument with stop-losses or take-profits within 0.05% of one another; the same instrument with lot sizes scaled proportionally to account equity; or the same instrument with entries differing only by a small predetermined offset in price, time, or size.
• Worked example A. A trader holds three Instant Approved accounts with equities of $50,000, $100,000, and $200,000 respectively. The trader places three buy orders on EUR/USD within a two-second window, with lot sizes of 0.50, 1.00, and 2.00 respectively. The lot sizes are proportional (1:2:4 matches the equity ratio), the instrument and direction are identical, and the timestamps fall within the 5-second window. This pattern constitutes synchronized trading and may result in suspension of all three accounts.
• Worked example B. Two distinct AF customers, John and Jane, who share a residential address, place buy orders on XAU/USD within four seconds of one another with proportional lot sizes. John and Jane each insist that they trade independently. The firm, in its sole discretion, reviews available evidence (shared address, shared device fingerprint, shared payment instrument) and reasonably determines that the accounts are linked. Both accounts may be suspended pending investigation.
• Worked example C (genuine independence). Trader A in Singapore and Trader B in Brazil, who do not know one another, both react to a Federal Reserve press release by placing long EUR/USD orders within three seconds. Although the timestamps fall within the synchronized-trading window, the firm's pattern-detection model also evaluates persistent indicators (KYC, IP, device, payment) and finds no linkage. No enforcement action is taken. This is the intended carve-out for genuine independent reaction to public market signals.
• Worked example D (consistent pattern). Across thirty trading days, two accounts produce ninety-three trade pairs in which entries fall within the 5-second window with proportional sizing across forty-one distinct instruments. Even if no single trade pair is dispositive, the persistent pattern across many trades and instruments is by itself adequate evidence of coordinated trading and may trigger enforcement.
• Enforcement mechanics. The firm operates an automated synchronicity-detection model that evaluates trade pairs across all accounts continuously and produces a synchronicity score for each candidate pair. Pairs scoring above a threshold are routed to compliance review. Where the compliance team confirms a pattern of synchronized trading, the firm shall, in its sole discretion, suspend or terminate any or all of the affected accounts, withhold pending payouts, claw back previously paid payouts to the extent permitted by applicable law and the trader's contract, and decline to enter into future evaluation or funded-account contracts with the affected trader or trader group.
• Detection inputs. The firm's analytics may consider, without limitation: server-side order entry timestamps; client-side timestamps where reported; lot-size ratios; instrument and direction concordance; stop-loss and take-profit concordance; account-creation patterns; KYC overlap; payment-instrument overlap; payout-wallet overlap; IP-address overlap (recognizing that VPN use is common among legitimate traders and is not by itself indicative of coordination); device fingerprints; browser fingerprints; behavioral biometrics including typing cadence and pointer dynamics; and any other signal the firm reasonably considers probative.
• Common trader misconceptions. (i) Multiple-account holders are not prohibited from holding multiple accounts; they are prohibited from executing synchronized trades across them. A trader holding three accounts and trading each independently with materially different instruments, sizes, and timings is fully compliant. (ii) The 5-second window is server-side at the matching engine, not client-side at the trader's desktop; network jitter does not provide a defense. (iii) The rule applies even where the trades are profitable for the firm; profitability does not waive the rule. (iv) The rule applies whether the synchronicity is human-driven, copy-trading-software-driven, signal-service-driven, or coincidental; intent is not an element of the breach.
• Notification policy. Consistent with the firm's silent-flag compliance model, traders will not be notified at the moment of detection. Where consequential action is taken, an authorized AF administrator shall communicate that action by email. Traders are not entitled to advance notice of an investigation.
• Appeals and discretion. Traders may appeal a synchronized-trading determination by emailing [email protected] within fourteen (14) calendar days of the action notice. Appeals shall be reviewed by the firm's compliance team in its sole discretion. The firm makes no representation or warranty as to the outcome.
• Cross-references. This Section 9 is to be read together with Section 11 (Hedging Restriction), Section 13 (Account Suspension at Firm Discretion), and Section 15 (Disputes). In particular, cross-account hedging — addressed in Section 11 — is a distinct but related abuse, and the firm may pursue enforcement under either or both sections. The firm reminds traders that compliance with one rule, including but not limited to compliance with the synchronized-trading prohibition set forth in this Section 9, does not waive, modify, or otherwise affect the trader's obligations under any other section of this document, including without limitation the daily-loss limit (Section 1), the maximum drawdown (Section 2), the consistency requirement (Section 3), or the lot-size cap (Section 8). The firm may, in its sole discretion, pursue enforcement under multiple sections concurrently in respect of a single course of conduct, and successful resolution of one enforcement track shall not preclude the firm from pursuing additional tracks. Traders are encouraged to operate each account independently — with distinct strategies, distinct instruments, distinct timing patterns, and distinct sizing approaches — so as to ensure that any cross-account analysis surfaces no concerning patterns. The firm welcomes legitimate multi-account holders and recognizes that holding multiple accounts is itself a permitted practice; the prohibition is on coordination, not on multiplicity.

Preamble. The algorithmic-trading rule, also referred to as the Expert Advisor ("EA") policy, the automation policy, or the bot-trading policy, exists at the intersection of two competing legitimate interests. On one hand, the firm acknowledges that systematic, rules-based trading — whether implemented as a fully automated EA, as a semi-automated alert system, or as a discretionary process supported by software tooling — is a legitimate and widely-practiced trading methodology used by retail and institutional traders alike, including by traders whose skill the firm is genuinely interested in capitalizing. On the other hand, certain narrow categories of automation exploit microstructure features of simulated execution venues in ways that produce returns disconnected from any genuine market-forecasting skill, and the firm is not in the business of underwriting such returns.

Industry context. The categories of prohibited automation enumerated below are not novel and are prohibited by every reputable proprietary trading firm globally, are subject to enhanced scrutiny by regulated futures commission merchants and registered broker-dealers under SEC Rule 15c3-5 (the "Market Access Rule"), and are addressed in the IOSCO Final Report on Regulatory Issues Raised by the Impact of Technological Changes on Market Integrity and Efficiency. The firm's policy is calibrated to those industry norms.

The firm's general posture is permissive: manual trading is unrestricted, EAs are permitted when run through the trader's own official API key or connector issued in the dashboard, and traders are encouraged to use whatever tooling — charting overlays, signal alerts, automated stop-loss management, scaling strategies, position-management bots — best supports their decision-making. The firm's posture becomes restrictive only with respect to the four narrow categories of abusive automation described below.

• Detailed definitions. "Manual trading" shall mean trading in which each order is placed by a human operator with knowledge of the order's contents prior to placement, including discretionary trading, semi-systematic trading where a human reviews each signal before execution, and copy-trading from a public signal where a human reviews each signal before mirroring it.
• "Expert Advisor" or "EA" shall mean any software system that places, modifies, or cancels orders on the firm's platform without requiring human review of each individual order, including without limitation MetaTrader EAs, NinjaTrader strategies, Python or JavaScript bots interacting with the firm's API, no-code automation builders, signal-replication services, and copy-trading platforms.
• "Latency arbitrage" shall mean any strategy that profits primarily from the time differential between the firm's simulated execution venue and one or more reference markets, including without limitation strategies that observe the price of the underlying instrument on a faster external feed and submit orders to the firm's platform before the firm's quote has updated to reflect that move.
• "Tick scalping" shall mean any strategy that opens and closes positions within a small number of price ticks (typically one to five) and that derives its profitability from the bid-ask spread, the simulated venue's tick-size granularity, or microstructure noise, rather than from any forecast of price direction over a meaningful time horizon.
• "News-spike algorithm" shall mean any strategy that submits orders within a narrow window surrounding a scheduled or unscheduled news event with the principal purpose of capturing the immediate post-release price spike before the firm's quote has had time to absorb the new information.
• "HFT-style execution" shall mean any strategy submitting more than ten (10) orders per minute on a sustained basis, or any strategy whose median holding period across all trades on a rolling 30-day basis is less than five (5) seconds.
• Permitted automation. The following categories of automation are expressly permitted, subject to the broader rules in this document: stop-loss and take-profit management; trailing-stop bots; position-scaling bots that scale into a pre-existing manual entry; alert systems that surface signals to a human for manual placement; basket-management tools that close groups of positions on a single human command; and EAs implementing rules-based trading strategies, run through the trader's own official API key or connector, that do not fall within any of the four prohibited categories.
• Official API keys and connectors. Automation that runs through the trader's own API key or connector issued in the trader's dashboard — including AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT, and strategies the trader writes and the firm's server interprets — is permitted and is subject to exactly the same trading rules as manual trading. Every order placed through the trader's key is the trader's order, and the trader is responsible for it. Bot scalping is permitted on the same basis; every rule in this document, including the Scalp Cap of Section 7 and the Consistency Rule of Section 3, is evaluated at withdrawal review. A key is personal to the account it was issued for: sharing a key, trading another AF customer's account through any key, or copying another AF customer's trades remains prohibited under Sections 9 and 13, as does cross-account or group hedging under Section 11 and the exploitation of platform or pricing errors under Section 13.
• Prohibited automation. The following categories of automation are expressly prohibited: latency arbitrage strategies; tick-scalping bots; news-spike algorithms; and HFT-style execution as defined above. The firm reserves the right to add categories to this list as and when novel abusive patterns emerge, with notice as set forth in the closing paragraph of the canonical rules document.
• Worked example A (permitted). A trader deploys an EA that monitors EUR/USD on the daily timeframe, enters long when a 50-day moving average crosses above a 200-day moving average, sets a 2% trailing stop, and otherwise leaves the position alone. This is a classic systematic strategy, holds positions for days or weeks, and is permitted when run through the trader's own official API key.
• Worked example B (prohibited — latency arbitrage). A trader's bot subscribes to a low-latency external EUR/USD feed and submits orders to AF whenever the external feed price diverges from AF's quoted price by more than 0.3 pips. Substantively all profits derive from the firm's quote being slightly stale. This is latency arbitrage and is prohibited.
• Worked example C (prohibited — tick scalping). A bot submits a long order, waits for the price to tick up by exactly one pip, and immediately closes; repeats this cycle hundreds of times per day. The strategy holds no directional view; it harvests microstructure noise. This is tick scalping and is prohibited.
• Worked example D (prohibited — news spike). A bot fires a buy order at exactly 14:30:00.000 UTC on the first Friday of each month (NFP release time) anticipating the immediate post-release spike, regardless of whether the release surprises positively or negatively. This is a news-spike algorithm and is prohibited (and is also independently prohibited by Section 5).
• Worked example E (prohibited — HFT). A bot submits, on average, twelve orders per minute over a sustained period and has a median holding period of three seconds. This is HFT-style execution and is prohibited.
• Pre-deployment review. Review before deployment is optional. A trader who wants confirmation that an EA falls outside the four prohibited categories may request one by emailing [email protected], providing: (i) a high-level description of the strategy's logic; (ii) the typical holding period; (iii) the typical order frequency; (iv) the instruments traded; and (v) any third-party software, signal source, or data feed relied upon. The firm shall review the request in its sole discretion and shall communicate approval, conditional approval, or denial by reply email. Approval is specific to the EA and strategy described and does not extend to material modifications.
• Enforcement mechanics. The firm operates an automation-detection model that evaluates each account's order-flow signature for indicators of automation, including order-entry-timing distributions, lot-size distributions, parameter-fingerprints, and concordance with known-bot patterns. Where the model surfaces automation that is not running through the trader's own official API key or connector, or where automation appears to have shifted into a prohibited category, the matter is routed to compliance. The firm may, at its sole discretion, suspend the account, void affected trades, withhold payouts, terminate the account, and decline to enter into future contracts with the trader.
• Common trader misconceptions. (i) Approval of an EA does not waive any other section of this document; an approved EA that violates Section 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, or 17 is still in violation of that section. (ii) Deploying an EA without review does not constitute approval-by-silence. (iii) Using publicly-marketed copy-trading services counts as automation; the trader's own laissez-faire posture does not change the technical reality. (iv) Disclosure of an EA's source code is not required; the firm's review is operational and does not require code-level inspection.
• Notification policy. Consistent with the firm's silent-flag compliance model, traders will not, in the ordinary course, receive automated notifications when an automation flag is recorded. Where consequential action is taken, an authorized AF administrator shall communicate that action by email.
• Appeals and discretion. Appeals must be submitted in writing to [email protected] within fourteen (14) calendar days of the action notice. The firm's determination shall be final.
• Cross-references. This Section 10 is to be read together with Section 5 (News Trading Restriction), Section 7 (Minimum Position Holding Period), Section 9 (Copy / Synchronized Trading Restriction), Section 11 (Hedging Restriction), and Section 13 (Account Suspension at Firm Discretion). In particular, an automation that is itself permitted under this Section 10 may nonetheless violate Section 5, 7, 9, or 11, and the trader is responsible for ensuring concurrent compliance with all applicable rules.

Preamble. The hedging restriction, more precisely the cross-account hedging restriction or the multi-account opposing-position prohibition, is one of the most subtle but most important integrity provisions in this document. Unlike the synchronized-trading rule in Section 9, which addresses position multiplication via account splitting, the cross-account hedging rule addresses a structurally distinct abuse: the use of two or more accounts to construct a position pair in which one account is guaranteed (or near-guaranteed) to win while the counterpart account is guaranteed (or near-guaranteed) to lose.

The economic mechanic of the abuse is straightforward. If a trader holds two accounts at AF and opens an equal-and-opposite position on the same instrument across them, then in expectation one account will reach its profit target and yield a payout while the other account will hit its drawdown limit and be terminated. The trader's net P&L (ignoring fees) is approximately zero, but the trader has converted the cost of the two evaluation fees into the value of one funded account. This is a deterministic extraction of firm capital that is fundamentally distinct from genuine trading skill, and the firm cannot underwrite it at any scale.

The same logic applies, with diminishing strength, to partial cross-account hedging — where the lot sizes are not exactly equal, where the instruments are correlated rather than identical, or where the timing is staggered. The firm shall apply the rule to the substance of the pattern rather than to the form, and the firm shall do so in its sole discretion.

By contrast, hedging within a single account — opening an opposing position on the same instrument inside one account — is permitted. Single-account hedging is a legitimate risk-management technique that is functionally equivalent to closing and reopening the position with a small efficiency improvement, and it does not produce the deterministic firm-capital extraction described above.

• Detailed definitions. "Cross-account hedging" shall mean any pattern in which two or more accounts, controlled directly or indirectly by the same trader or by a coordinated group of traders, hold open positions on the same instrument (or on materially correlated instruments) in opposing directions, such that the aggregate net exposure across the linked accounts is materially smaller than the gross exposure within any individual account.
• "Same instrument" shall mean the identical symbol as listed on the firm's platform.
• "Materially correlated instruments" shall mean two or more instruments for which the firm reasonably determines that the price-path correlation over a relevant historical window exceeds 0.85 in absolute value, including without limitation common substitutes such as EUR/USD vs USD/CHF (typically negatively correlated), gold spot vs gold futures, S&P 500 cash index vs E-mini futures, and various crypto perpetual pairs vs spot.
• "Linked accounts" shall have the meaning given to that term in Section 9, and the same indicators (KYC, payment, payout, IP, device, behavioral) shall apply.
• "Single-account hedging" shall mean any opposing-position structure within a single account, including locked positions in MetaTrader-style platforms or net-zero exposures created by simultaneous long and short orders inside the same account. Single-account hedging is permitted under this Section 11.
• Worked example A (prohibited). A trader holds two 1-Step accounts, each with $50,000 in equity. The trader opens a 1.0-lot long EUR/USD position in Account A and a 1.0-lot short EUR/USD position in Account B within the same trading session. Net exposure across the pair is approximately zero; one account is near-certain to reach its profit target while the other is near-certain to hit its drawdown threshold. This is cross-account hedging and is prohibited.
• Worked example B (prohibited via correlated instruments). A trader opens a long EUR/USD position in Account A and a long USD/CHF position in Account B with sizes calibrated to produce approximately equal-and-opposite USD exposures. Although the symbols differ, the firm's correlation analysis identifies the pair as a cross-account hedge in substance, and enforcement may follow.
• Worked example C (permitted — single-account hedging). A trader, having opened a long XAU/USD position in Account A, opens a short XAU/USD position in the same Account A in response to changing market conditions. This is single-account hedging and is permitted.
• Worked example D (permitted — independent strategies). A trader holds two accounts and runs distinct strategies on each — one trading FX trend-following, the other trading metals mean-reversion. Occasionally the strategies happen to produce simultaneous opposing positions on a single common instrument. The firm's correlation and pattern analysis recognizes the strategies as substantively distinct and no enforcement action is taken. This is the intended carve-out for genuine multi-strategy operators.
• Worked example E (multi-trader coordination). Trader A and Trader B, who are spouses and share a residential address, deliberately coordinate to put A long EUR/USD and B short EUR/USD with proportional lot sizes. The firm's linked-accounts analysis identifies the coordination, and both accounts may be terminated.
• Enforcement mechanics. The firm continuously monitors aggregate exposure across all accounts within each linked-accounts cluster. Where the firm reasonably determines that a pattern of cross-account hedging exists, the firm may, in its sole discretion: (a) suspend any or all affected accounts pending review; (b) terminate any or all affected accounts; (c) withhold pending payouts; (d) reverse already-paid payouts to the extent permitted by applicable law and the trader's contract; (e) decline to enter into future evaluation or funded-account contracts with the affected trader, traders, or related parties; and (f) pursue any other remedy available at law or in equity.
• Detection inputs. The firm's analytics may consider, without limitation: simultaneous opposing positions; opposing-position pairs separated by short time intervals; lot-size ratios suggestive of net-zero hedging; instrument correlation analysis; the linked-accounts indicators set forth in Section 9; and any other signal the firm reasonably considers probative. The firm's determination of "materially correlated" shall be made in the firm's sole discretion using methodologies the firm shall not be obligated to disclose.
• Common trader misconceptions. (i) Single-account hedging is permitted; cross-account hedging is not. (ii) The rule applies even when the hedged pair is profitable for the trader in net; profitability does not waive the rule. (iii) The rule applies regardless of which legal entity nominally holds each account; if the firm reasonably determines that the same trader controls multiple accounts, those accounts are linked. (iv) The rule applies to crypto pairs; the crypto exemption in Section 6 does not waive the cross-account hedging prohibition. (v) Spousal, family, or household coordination is treated as linked; "my partner is a separate person" is not a defense.
• Notification policy. Consistent with the firm's silent-flag compliance model, no automated notification is issued at detection time. Where consequential action is taken, an authorized AF administrator shall communicate that action by email.
• Appeals and discretion. Appeals must be submitted in writing to [email protected] within fourteen (14) calendar days of the action notice. The firm's determination shall be final.
• Cross-references. This Section 11 is to be read together with Section 9 (Copy / Synchronized Trading Restriction) and Section 13 (Account Suspension at Firm Discretion). The two abuses — synchronized trading and cross-account hedging — are conceptually adjacent but mechanically distinct: synchronized trading multiplies a single directional bet across accounts to amplify expected payout, whereas cross-account hedging constructs an offsetting pair to convert evaluation fees into a deterministic capture of a funded account. The firm may enforce one, the other, or both in respect of any given course of conduct, and the existence of a defense to one is not a defense to the other.
• Concluding integrity statement. The firm acknowledges that some traders, in good faith and without abusive intent, may run multiple accounts and may from time to time hold positions on a common instrument that happen to be opposing. The firm's enforcement posture under this Section 11 is targeted at patterns rather than at isolated coincidences, and the firm shall apply reasonable business judgment in distinguishing the two. Traders who are genuinely concerned about whether their multi-account activity might appear, on a pattern basis, to constitute cross-account hedging are encouraged to contact [email protected] proactively for an informal review; while no informal advice from the firm shall constitute a binding determination, such consultations have historically resolved a substantial fraction of borderline cases without escalation to formal enforcement.

Preamble. The profit split and payout schedule provisions, also referred to as the trader-firm split, the payout cadence, the disbursement policy, or the funded-account compensation framework, set forth the economic terms on which the firm shares net realized profits with traders operating funded accounts.

Industry context. The 80/20 trader-firm split has emerged over the past several years as the durable equilibrium across the proprietary trading evaluation industry. It reflects a balance among (i) the firm's cost of capital, including the working capital required to honor payout obligations; (ii) the firm's operating costs, including platform development, market data, compliance, customer support, and risk management; (iii) the firm's expected loss reserves, including allowances for evaluation losses and funded-account drawdowns; and (iv) the trader's compensation for skill, time, and risk-taking. Splits more aggressive than 80/20 in favor of the trader are typically observed only in time-limited promotional offers, and are typically not sustainable across full firm lifecycles.

Payout cadence (14 days minimum after the first payout) reflects similar industry norms and is calibrated to (i) provide traders with meaningful cash flow on a predictable cadence; (ii) allow the firm sufficient time to perform compliance review on each payout request; (iii) discourage trade-and-withdraw cycling that would force the firm to manage extreme intra-period volatility in its working capital; and (iv) support the firm's anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing controls, which include payout-pattern review.

All payment-rail-specific terms below are set forth without prejudice to the firm's right, in its sole discretion, to add, remove, or modify available rails from time to time, with notice as set forth in the closing paragraph of the canonical rules document.

• Detailed definition. "Profit split" shall mean the percentage of net realized profit on a funded account, calculated over the relevant payout period, that the firm shall remit to the trader upon a valid payout request, with the remainder retained by the firm.
• "Net realized profit" shall mean (i) the sum of realized gains on closed positions during the payout period, less (ii) the sum of realized losses on closed positions during the payout period, less (iii) any platform fees, swap or financing charges, or other transaction-related charges accrued during the payout period, and less (iv) any prior-period deficits not yet recovered.
• "Payout request" shall mean a written request submitted by the trader through the firm's dashboard or via email, specifying the requested payout amount (which may not exceed the trader's net realized profit available for distribution), the payout rail (default: USDC on Polygon), and the payout destination address or account.
• Profit split. The profit split shall be eighty percent (80%) to the trader and twenty percent (20%) to the firm on (a) Instant Approved accounts and (b) all standard challenge tiers, including Lite, 1-Step, and 2-Step. Promotional or special-case splits, if any, shall be disclosed at the point of sale and shall override this default to the extent so disclosed.
• First payout. For all tiers (Instant Approved, Lite, 1-Step, 2-Step), the first payout may be requested only after the trader has completed at least five (5) qualifying trading days within the funded account, where "trading day" has the meaning given in Section 4. The five-day requirement applies uniformly; the Instant Approved tier is no longer exempt from this precondition.
• Minimum payout amount. Each payout request must be for an amount no less than one percent (1%) of the account's starting balance. By way of illustration, a $5,000 account must request at least $50; a $25,000 account must request at least $250; a $100,000 account must request at least $1,000. Requests below the minimum will be rejected at submission. The minimum applies to gross payout amount (before application of the 80/20 split).
• Subsequent payouts. After the first payout has been issued, subsequent payouts may be requested no more frequently than once per fourteen (14) calendar days. The 14-day clock runs from the date of the most recently disbursed payout, not from the date of the most recent payout request.
• Worked example A (Instant Approved, first payout on day 6). A trader funds an Instant Approved $100,000 account and trades on five distinct UTC days, accumulating $4,200 of net realized profit. On day 6 (after the MTDR is satisfied) the trader submits a payout request for $4,000. The request meets the 1% minimum ($4,000 ≥ $1,000 on a $100,000 account). The firm's compliance team reviews the request, finds no issues, and disburses $4,000 × 80% = $3,200 to the trader's USDC wallet on Polygon. The remaining $200 of trader-share profit remains in the account as a credit.
• Worked example B (challenge tier, first payout after five trading days). A trader passes a 1-Step challenge and is funded. The trader trades on five distinct UTC calendar days, each with at least one position opened and closed. On the morning of the sixth trading day, the trader requests a payout. The firm reviews and disburses 80% of the requested amount. The 14-day clock for the next payout begins on the disbursement date.
• Worked example C (subsequent payout cadence). A trader received their first payout on March 1. The earliest the trader may request a second payout is March 15, regardless of the size of the second-period profit. A request submitted on March 10 will be denied or held until March 15.
• Worked example D (deficit carry-forward). A trader has $1,000 of unrecovered deficit from a prior period. In the current period, the trader has earned $3,000 of gross realized profit. Net realized profit available for payout is $3,000 − $1,000 = $2,000, of which the trader is entitled to 80% = $1,600.
• Payment rails. The default payout rail is USDC on Polygon. The firm shall bear the on-chain transaction costs for default-rail payouts, subject to a per-payout minimum amount established by the firm from time to time. Wire transfer and bank transfer rails are available on written request, subject to (i) the trader providing complete and accurate banking details; (ii) the trader satisfying any additional KYC, AML, or sanctions-screening requirements applicable to the receiving institution; and (iii) the firm passing through to the trader any wire fees, intermediary-bank fees, or currency-conversion costs incurred. Other rails (e.g., USDT, BTC, ETH, alternative L1/L2 networks) may be offered from time to time at the firm's discretion.
• Compliance hold. All payout requests are subject to compliance review. The firm reserves the right to delay payout processing where any of the following circumstances apply: (a) an open investigation under any other section of these rules; (b) a pending KYC, AML, or sanctions-screening matter; (c) a chargeback, payment dispute, or fraud signal on the underlying evaluation purchase; or (d) any other circumstance the firm in its sole discretion deems sufficient. Compliance holds shall be communicated to the trader by email and shall be lifted upon resolution.
• Tax. Payouts are made gross. Each trader is solely responsible for the determination, reporting, and payment of any tax liability arising from payouts received from the firm under the applicable laws of any jurisdiction in which the trader is or may be tax-resident. The firm shall not act as a tax withholding agent except as required by applicable law. The firm shall provide such tax-information forms (e.g., 1099s, where applicable) as it is required to provide. Traders are encouraged to consult independent tax advisors.
• Common trader misconceptions. (i) The 14-day clock runs from the prior disbursement date, not from each subsequent request. (ii) The 5-trading-day pre-first-payout requirement applies to ALL tiers, including Instant Approved. (iii) The trader's payout entitlement is calculated on net realized profit, not on gross realized profit nor on unrealized mark-to-market profit; closing positions before the payout request is the trader's responsibility. (iv) Payouts are gross of tax; tax is the trader's responsibility. (v) Compliance holds are not refusals; they are pauses pending resolution. (vi) The 1% minimum payout amount is based on the account's starting balance, not on current equity nor on the trader's realized profit.
• Notification policy. Payout request status (received, in review, on hold, approved, disbursed) shall be visible to the trader in the dashboard and may also be communicated by email. Where a payout is denied or held for compliance reasons, an authorized AF administrator shall communicate the reason and any next steps by email.
• Appeals and discretion. A trader who contests a payout determination may appeal by emailing [email protected] within fourteen (14) calendar days. The firm's determination shall be final.
• Cross-references. This Section 12 is to be read together with Section 4 (Minimum Trading Day Requirement), Section 13 (Account Suspension at Firm Discretion), and Section 14 (Refunds). In particular, suspended or terminated accounts may have payout requests automatically rejected pending resolution under Section 13.

Preamble. The discretionary suspension provision, also referred to as the integrity-protection clause, the residual-discretion clause, or the catch-all enforcement provision, is the firm's last-line mechanism for protecting the integrity of the evaluation and funded-account ecosystem against conduct that, while perhaps not explicitly enumerated elsewhere in this document, nonetheless threatens the legitimate interests of the firm, of other traders, of the firm's payment partners, of the firm's regulators (where applicable), or of the broader market.

Industry context. Every reputable proprietary trading firm globally operates such a residual-discretion clause. The clause is necessary because the universe of potential abuses evolves continuously — new automation patterns, new arbitrage vectors, new fraud schemes, new data-leakage channels, new coordinated-trading topologies — and an enumerated list of specific prohibited acts will always be a step or two behind the present-day threat landscape. The clause complements, rather than replaces, the specific rules elsewhere in this document; specific conduct that violates a specific enumerated rule shall be addressed under that rule, and the residual clause covers the remainder.

The firm acknowledges the asymmetry inherent in any discretionary clause: the trader is being asked to trust the firm's good-faith exercise of discretion, while having no contractual entitlement to a specific outcome. The firm commits to exercising this discretion in good faith, applying it sparingly, and reserving it for cases where the firm has reasonable cause based on evidence available to it. The firm does not commit, and shall not be construed as committing, to any specific procedural standard, evidentiary threshold, or remedial outcome beyond those expressly enumerated in this section.

• Detailed scope. The firm reserves the right, in its sole and absolute discretion, to suspend, terminate, restrict, or otherwise act upon any account or any group of linked accounts where the firm has reasonable cause to suspect any of the following:
• • Manipulation of the firm's platform, including without limitation manipulation of order routing, market-data feeds, execution engines, dashboard interfaces, or any other technical surface; manipulation includes but is not limited to exploiting bugs, exploiting race conditions, abusing API endpoints in ways inconsistent with their documented purpose, or using reverse-engineered or otherwise unauthorized access methods.
  • Manipulation of market data, including without limitation submitting orders or cancellations primarily for the purpose of moving displayed quotes rather than for the purpose of effecting a genuine trade, layering or spoofing patterns, and any conduct that would, if practiced on a regulated venue, constitute market manipulation under applicable securities or commodities law.
  • Manipulation of the execution engine, including without limitation timing attacks designed to exploit known or suspected latency in the firm's quote-update process, scripted-cancellation arbitrage, and any other pattern designed to extract value from microstructure features rather than from genuine price-direction skill.
  • Use of insider information, including any material non-public information obtained from issuers, exchanges, regulators, or any other source whose disclosure to the trader would constitute a breach of duty by the source.
  • Use of leaked data, including any data of any kind obtained as a result of an unauthorized breach of a third party's systems or otherwise distributed without the rights-holder's authorization.
  • Use of third-party signals or data feeds obtained without authorization, including pirated subscription services, scraped paywalled content used in violation of the publisher's terms, and information obtained from other firms' confidential systems.
  • Coordinated trading across multiple proprietary trading firms designed to game the simulated-versus-real spread, including any pattern in which the trader, alone or in concert with others, exploits price differentials between AF's simulated venue and any other firm's simulated or real venue in ways that produce risk-free or near-risk-free profit.
  • Fraudulent payment activity, including without limitation use of stolen payment instruments, identity theft, synthetic-identity schemes, structured payments designed to evade KYC/AML thresholds, and any payment activity reasonably suspected of constituting money laundering under applicable law.
  • Chargebacks initiated other than for genuine reasons recognized under the trader's payment-method-issuer's chargeback rules; spurious or harassing chargebacks shall be treated as fraudulent payment activity for purposes of this section.
  • Any other conduct, whether or not specifically enumerated in this section or elsewhere in this document, that the firm reasonably determines violates the spirit of fair trading, threatens the firm's ability to operate its program in a manner consistent with the legitimate expectations of its other traders, or exposes the firm to legal, regulatory, reputational, or financial risk that the firm cannot reasonably absorb.
• Standard of review. The firm's standard for exercising discretion under this Section 13 shall be "reasonable cause based on evidence available to the firm," which is a lower standard than "preponderance of the evidence," "beyond a reasonable doubt," or any other standard applicable in formal legal proceedings. The firm is operating a private contractual relationship, not adjudicating a legal claim, and shall not be required to satisfy formal evidentiary standards.
• Worked example A (platform exploit). A trader discovers and exploits a bug in the order-rejection flow that results in their orders being filled at a more favorable price than the firm's quoted bid/ask. The trader exploits the bug across multiple sessions and accumulates substantial profit. Upon detection, the firm suspends the account, voids the affected trades, and may terminate. This is platform manipulation.
• Worked example B (insider information). A trader who is an employee of a corporate issuer trades the issuer's stock CFD on AF's platform shortly before a material non-public corporate development is announced. The pattern is detected and reviewed; the firm suspends the account and may report the conduct to applicable regulators.
• Worked example C (cross-firm gaming). A trader maintains accounts at AF and at three other proprietary trading firms simultaneously and runs a strategy that opens long positions at AF (which has a slightly stale quote) and offsetting short positions at the other firms (which update faster). The strategy harvests the spread on a near-risk-free basis. This is cross-firm gaming and is prohibited under this Section 13.
• Worked example D (payment fraud). A purchase of an evaluation is made using a stolen credit card. The legitimate cardholder discovers the charge and disputes it. The trader's account is suspended pending investigation, and the trader's KYC details are flagged for further review. Pending payouts, if any, are held.
• Worked example E (spirit of fair trading — catch-all). A trader's pattern of behavior, while not falling within any specific enumerated prohibition, exhibits multiple indicia of bad faith — repeated bad-faith chargebacks subsequently withdrawn, repeated abusive interactions with support staff, repeated submissions of demonstrably false KYC documentation that fall short of fraud — and the firm in its sole discretion determines that continued engagement is incompatible with the program's integrity. The firm may terminate.
• Suspension review process. Where the firm suspends an account under this Section 13, the firm shall (i) communicate the suspension to the trader by email, (ii) describe in general terms the basis for the suspension (without necessarily disclosing investigative details that would compromise ongoing review), and (iii) commit to completing the review within seven (7) business days of the suspension date, where "business day" means any day other than a Saturday, Sunday, or U.S. federal holiday. Where the review cannot be completed within seven business days for good reason — including without limitation pending third-party information requests, pending KYC re-verification, or pending regulator response — the firm shall provide a status update by email and continue the review with reasonable diligence.
• Outcomes of review. The review may result in any of the following outcomes, in the firm's sole discretion: (a) reinstatement of the account, with or without conditions; (b) reinstatement of the account with adjustments to the account history (e.g., voiding of specific affected trades); (c) termination of the account and forfeiture of any then-pending payouts in accordance with the trader's contract and applicable law; (d) termination of the account combined with refund of evaluation fees, where the firm in its discretion deems that appropriate; (e) clawback of previously paid payouts, to the extent permitted by applicable law and the trader's contract; or (f) any other outcome the firm reasonably considers appropriate.
• Appeals and discretion. A trader who contests a suspension or termination determination may appeal by emailing [email protected] within fourteen (14) calendar days of the determination. The appeal shall be reviewed by a different member of the compliance team than the member who made the original determination, where staffing permits. The firm's determination on appeal shall be final.
• Common trader misconceptions. (i) Suspension is not termination; suspension is a temporary state pending review. (ii) The seven-business-day review window is a target, not a hard guarantee, and may extend for good reason. (iii) The firm is not obligated to disclose the full evidentiary basis for a suspension; partial disclosures are made to facilitate the trader's response while protecting the integrity of ongoing investigation. (iv) Successful appeal does not entitle the trader to compensation for the suspension period; the firm's good-faith exercise of discretion is contractually protected.
• Notification policy. Suspensions are communicated by email to the address of record. Reinstatements, terminations, and other outcomes are communicated by email. Where a suspension is silent in the dashboard for operational reasons (e.g., to preserve the integrity of an active investigation), the firm shall, upon request, confirm the account's status to the trader.
• Cross-references. This Section 13 is to be read together with all other sections of this document. Conduct violating a specific enumerated rule shall be addressed under that rule; the residual discretion in this Section 13 covers conduct not so addressed. Section 12 (Profit Split and Payout Schedule), Section 14 (Refunds), and Section 15 (Disputes) all interact with this section in relevant respects.

Preamble. The refund policy, also referred to as the cancellation policy, the cooling-off period, or the fee-disposition framework, sets forth the limited circumstances under which evaluation fees and funded-account fees may be refunded to the trader. The policy is calibrated to balance two competing legitimate interests: the trader's reasonable expectation of a brief opportunity to reconsider an impulse purchase, and the firm's reasonable expectation that — once a trader has begun consuming the firm's resources by placing trades on simulated capital — the economic relationship has commenced and the fee has been earned.

Industry context. A 24-hour pre-trade refund window is consistent with industry norms for digital-goods cooling-off periods, with consumer-protection regulations in many jurisdictions (which typically require a 14-day cooling-off period for distance-sold goods, with carve-outs for goods or services that have begun to be performed at the consumer's express request), and with the firm's payment-processor terms. The non-refundability of fees once trading has commenced reflects the operational reality that the firm's costs — platform allocation, market-data costs, execution-venue costs, compliance review costs — are incurred on a per-active-account basis from the moment of first trade, and these costs cannot be recovered if the fee is refunded.

Funded-account fees, where applicable, are non-refundable from the moment of payment because they secure access to a fundamentally different kind of relationship — a live, allocated, income-producing arrangement — and the firm's allocation cost is committed at the moment of activation.

• Detailed definitions. "Challenge fee" shall mean the fee paid by a trader to access an evaluation account on any of the Lite, 1-Step, 2-Step, or other challenge-style products offered by the firm from time to time.
• "Funded-account fee" shall mean any fee paid by a trader specifically in respect of access to or maintenance of a funded account, separate and apart from any challenge fee paid in respect of an antecedent evaluation. "Funded-account fee" shall include without limitation activation fees, monthly platform fees (if any), and reset fees (if any).
• "Trade" shall mean any order that has resulted in a position being opened on the account, regardless of whether that position has subsequently been closed. For the avoidance of doubt, a placed-but-unfilled limit order does not constitute a trade for purposes of this Section 14, but any order that has resulted in a fill — even an immediately-closed fill — does.
• "24 hours of purchase" shall mean the 24-hour period beginning at the moment of payment confirmation by the firm's payment processor, as recorded in the firm's order ledger.
• Challenge-fee refund window. A challenge fee shall be refundable upon the trader's written request submitted within twenty-four (24) hours of purchase, provided that no trade has been placed on the account during that window. "No trade" means no fill of any kind. A trader who has placed but not been filled retains the right to request a refund; a trader who has been filled — even for a fraction of a second — does not.
• Post-trade non-refundability. Once a trade has been placed on the account, the challenge fee shall be non-refundable, regardless of any subsequent action including without limitation: closing the position; resetting the account; failing the evaluation; voluntarily abandoning the evaluation; or any other event.
• Funded-account fees. All funded-account fees shall be non-refundable from the moment of payment. There is no cooling-off period for funded-account fees.
• Worked example A (refundable). A trader purchases a 1-Step evaluation on Monday at 10:00 UTC. The trader does not place any trades. On Monday at 23:00 UTC the trader emails support requesting a refund. The request is within the 24-hour window and no trade has been placed. The refund is processed to the original payment instrument, less any payment-processor fees that the firm cannot recover.
• Worked example B (non-refundable due to trade). A trader purchases a 1-Step evaluation on Monday at 10:00 UTC and places a single 0.01-lot EUR/USD trade on Monday at 10:05 UTC, closing it within seconds with negligible P&L. On Tuesday at 09:00 UTC the trader emails support requesting a refund, citing the 24-hour window. The trade has been placed; the refund is denied.
• Worked example C (non-refundable due to time). A trader purchases a 2-Step evaluation on Monday at 10:00 UTC, does not place any trades, and emails support on Wednesday at 10:00 UTC requesting a refund. The request is outside the 24-hour window; the refund is denied.
• Worked example D (funded-account fee). A trader pays an activation fee for a funded account on Friday and emails support on Saturday morning, before placing any trades, requesting a refund. Funded-account fees are non-refundable; the request is denied.
• Worked example E (limit-order edge case). A trader purchases an evaluation on Monday at 10:00 UTC and places a limit order at a price level that is not reached during the 24-hour window. The trader emails support at hour 23 requesting a refund. The order has been placed but not filled; no trade has been placed within the meaning of this Section 14; the refund is granted, and the limit order is cancelled at the time of refund processing.
• Refund mechanics. Approved refunds shall be processed to the original payment instrument used for the purchase. Refunds via crypto rails (USDC, USDT, BTC, ETH, etc.) shall be processed to the originating wallet address where reasonably possible; where the originating wallet address is unrecoverable, the firm shall, in its sole discretion, refund to a wallet address provided by the trader subject to enhanced verification. Refunds via card rails shall be processed back to the card of original charge. Refunds shall typically be processed within five (5) business days of approval, subject to payment-processor timelines outside the firm's control. Cryptocurrency refunds may, at the firm's discretion, be issued in the same coin and same network as the original payment to avoid currency-conversion exposure for either party.
• Crypto exemption note. Where the original payment was made in crypto, the refund shall be calculated in the same crypto units in which payment was made, not in U.S. dollar equivalent at the time of refund. Cryptocurrency price volatility between the moment of payment and the moment of refund is the trader's risk, not the firm's; the firm shall not, and is not obligated to, true up to the U.S.-dollar value originally paid.
• Common trader misconceptions. (i) The 24-hour window starts from the moment of payment confirmation, not from the moment of trader's first login. (ii) A single fill, however small and however brief, eliminates the refund right. (iii) Resetting the account does not restore the refund right. (iv) Funded-account fees are non-refundable from the moment of payment; there is no cooling-off period. (v) The firm is not obligated to grant a refund as a goodwill gesture for any reason; refunds outside the express terms of this section are at the firm's sole discretion.
• Notification policy. Refund requests should be submitted by email to [email protected]. The firm shall communicate the disposition of the request — approved, approved-with-deductions, or denied — by reply email within five (5) business days. Approved refunds shall be processed to the originating instrument as described above.
• Appeals and discretion. A trader who contests a refund determination may submit a written appeal by reply email within fourteen (14) calendar days. The firm's determination on appeal shall be final.
• Cross-references. This Section 14 is to be read together with Section 12 (Profit Split and Payout Schedule), Section 13 (Account Suspension at Firm Discretion), and Section 15 (Disputes). In particular, where an account is suspended or terminated under Section 13 in circumstances that the firm in its discretion regards as warranting a fee refund, the firm may issue such a refund notwithstanding the lapse of the 24-hour window; the firm is not, however, obligated to do so.

Preamble. The disputes provision sets forth the binding mechanism by which any dispute arising out of or relating to the trader's relationship with Approved Funded — including without limitation any dispute arising out of or relating to the trader's evaluation, the trader's funded account, the firm's exercise of discretion under any other section of this document, the firm's calculation of profit and payout, the firm's refund determinations, or any alleged tort, breach of contract, or violation of statute or common law — shall be resolved.

Industry context and rationale. The firm has elected mandatory binding arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act ("FAA"), 9 U.S.C. § 1 et seq., as the exclusive mechanism for dispute resolution, and has elected the State of Delaware as the seat of arbitration and the source of governing law. The Delaware choice reflects the State's well-developed commercial-law jurisprudence (administered through the Delaware Court of Chancery and the Delaware Superior Court's Complex Commercial Litigation Division), the predictability of Delaware contract interpretation, and the State's deep institutional capacity for adjudicating sophisticated commercial matters. The Wilmington seat reflects practical access to the State's institutional infrastructure.

Class-action waiver. The class-action waiver reflects the firm's reasoned judgment that bilateral, individualized arbitration produces efficient and just outcomes for both parties in the kinds of disputes typical of evaluation-program relationships, and that aggregate procedures (class actions, mass arbitration, collective actions, representative actions, or any equivalent device) impose disproportionate costs and procedural complexity that ultimately disserve traders by raising the firm's cost base and degrading the firm's economic terms over time. The class-action waiver is enforceable to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law; if and to the extent that any portion of the waiver is held unenforceable in any forum, the remainder shall remain in full force and effect.

By accepting these rules at signup, the trader expressly agrees to the dispute-resolution framework set forth in this Section 15 and waives any right the trader might otherwise have to bring a dispute as a class action, in any judicial forum (subject to limited exceptions for actions to compel arbitration or to enforce an arbitral award), or in any other manner inconsistent with the terms of this section.

• Detailed definitions. "Dispute" shall mean any controversy, claim, demand, cause of action, or grievance of any kind whatsoever, however arising and whatever the legal theory, between the trader and the firm, including without limitation: (i) any controversy arising out of or relating to the firm's exercise of discretion under any rule in this document; (ii) any controversy regarding the calculation, timing, or method of any payout or refund; (iii) any controversy regarding the firm's interpretation or application of any term in this document or in any related agreement; (iv) any controversy regarding alleged manipulation of, errors in, or defects in the firm's platform; (v) any tort claim including without limitation defamation, tortious interference, or unfair competition; (vi) any claim under any statute including without limitation consumer-protection statutes, privacy statutes, or financial-services statutes; and (vii) any claim under any common-law doctrine.
• "Arbitration" shall mean a private, binding adjudicatory proceeding conducted by a neutral arbitrator (or, where the parties so agree, a panel of three arbitrators) under the rules of a recognized arbitral institution, with the resulting award enforceable in any court of competent jurisdiction in accordance with the FAA, the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (where the trader is located outside the United States), or any other applicable international convention.
• Mandatory binding arbitration. Disputes resolved through binding arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware, USA. The arbitration shall be administered by a recognized arbitral institution agreed to by the parties; absent agreement, the arbitration shall be administered by the American Arbitration Association ("AAA") under its Commercial Arbitration Rules, with such modifications as the parties may agree.
• Class actions waived. The trader waives, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, any right to bring or participate in any class action, mass action, collective action, representative action, private attorney general action, or any other procedure of an aggregate nature against the firm. All disputes shall be brought solely in the trader's individual capacity. The arbitrator shall have no authority to consolidate the claims of multiple traders or to preside over any form of class or representative proceeding.
• Governing law: State of Delaware, USA, without regard to conflict of laws principles. The substantive law governing the trader's relationship with the firm, including the construction and enforcement of these rules, shall be the substantive law of the State of Delaware, U.S.A., without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles or rules that would result in the application of the law of any other jurisdiction. The procedural law governing the arbitration shall be the FAA, supplemented where the FAA is silent by Delaware procedural law.
• Seat of arbitration and venue. The seat of arbitration shall be Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A. Proceedings may be conducted in person at a location in or near Wilmington, by videoconference, by telephone, or by written submissions only, as the arbitrator shall determine in consultation with the parties.
• Selection of arbitrator. Unless the parties otherwise agree, the arbitrator shall be selected from the AAA's roster of commercial arbitrators with not less than ten (10) years of experience in commercial dispute resolution. The arbitrator shall be neutral and shall disclose any relationships with either party in accordance with applicable canons of judicial ethics.
• Rules of evidence and procedure. The arbitrator shall apply the AAA Commercial Arbitration Rules (or such modified rules as the parties may agree). The Federal Rules of Evidence and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure shall not strictly govern, but the arbitrator shall be guided by them where instructive. Discovery shall be limited and proportionate to the matter in dispute, in the arbitrator's sole discretion.
• Confidentiality. The existence, conduct, content, and outcome of any arbitration proceeding under this Section 15 shall be confidential as between the parties, except: (i) as required for the enforcement of any award; (ii) as required by applicable law or regulatory authority; (iii) as required for accounting, audit, tax, or insurance purposes; or (iv) as the parties otherwise agree. The arbitrator may issue a confidentiality order on the application of either party.
• Costs and fees. Each party shall bear its own attorneys' fees and costs except as the arbitrator shall determine. Filing fees and arbitrator compensation shall be allocated in accordance with the rules of the administering institution. The arbitrator shall have the authority to shift fees and costs in accordance with applicable law where one party's claims or defenses are determined to have been frivolous or asserted in bad faith.
• Award and enforcement. The arbitrator's award shall be in writing, shall set forth the essential findings of fact and conclusions of law, and shall be final and binding on the parties. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction. The parties expressly waive any right of appeal except on grounds enumerated in the FAA (e.g., evident partiality, fraud, exceeding powers).
• Carve-outs from arbitration. Notwithstanding the foregoing, either party may bring an action in a court of competent jurisdiction in the State of Delaware: (i) to compel arbitration under this Section 15; (ii) to enforce or vacate an arbitral award under the FAA; (iii) to seek temporary, preliminary, or other interim equitable relief in aid of arbitration; or (iv) to assert any claim that is not, as a matter of applicable law, subject to mandatory arbitration. For all such court proceedings, the parties consent to the personal and subject-matter jurisdiction of the state and federal courts seated in Wilmington, Delaware, and waive any objection based on forum non conveniens or any analogous doctrine.
• Time limitation. Any dispute must be commenced — by written demand for arbitration delivered to the firm at its last known address — within one (1) year after the dispute arose, where "arose" means the date on which the claimant knew or, by the exercise of reasonable diligence, should have known of the facts giving rise to the dispute. Any dispute not so commenced shall be permanently barred. This time limitation operates in addition to, and not in lieu of, any otherwise applicable statute of limitations.
• Worked example A (typical dispute). A trader contests the firm's denial of a payout under Section 12 on the ground that the firm allegedly miscalculated net realized profit. The trader's first remedy is an internal appeal under Section 12. If the appeal is denied and the trader wishes to pursue the matter further, the trader's exclusive remedy is binding arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware, under this Section 15.
• Worked example B (class-action attempt). A group of traders attempts to file a class action in U.S. District Court alleging common practices by the firm. The firm moves to compel arbitration under this Section 15 and to dismiss the class allegations under the class-action waiver. The motion is granted; each trader's individual claim, if pursued, must proceed to bilateral arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware.
• Worked example C (interim relief). A trader believes the firm is about to publish defamatory statements concerning the trader. The trader files a temporary restraining order action in Delaware state court under the carve-out for interim equitable relief. The Delaware court hears the application; the underlying dispute, if it proceeds beyond the TRO, returns to arbitration.
• Worked example D (international trader). A trader resident outside the United States contests a payout determination. Notwithstanding the trader's foreign residence, the trader's exclusive dispute-resolution mechanism is binding arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware, under U.S. law. The resulting arbitral award is enforceable in the trader's home jurisdiction under the New York Convention.
• Common trader misconceptions. (i) The arbitration requirement applies regardless of the trader's residence; the trader is not entitled to litigate in their home jurisdiction. (ii) The class-action waiver applies even where class procedures might be available in a particular jurisdiction; the waiver is contractual and binds the trader. (iii) Disputes regarding the validity of the arbitration agreement itself shall be decided by the arbitrator (the so-called "delegation clause") except as required by the FAA; the trader cannot circumvent arbitration by attacking the arbitration clause in a non-arbitral forum. (iv) The Delaware choice of law applies to the substantive merits; the FAA applies to the procedure; the trader cannot import the substantive law of any other jurisdiction.
• Severability. If any provision of this Section 15 is held unenforceable by an arbitrator or by a court of competent jurisdiction, that provision shall be severed, and the remaining provisions shall remain in full force and effect, except that if the class-action waiver is held unenforceable as to any specific claim, the entirety of that specific claim — but not other claims — shall be excluded from arbitration.
• Survival. The provisions of this Section 15 shall survive any termination, suspension, or other cessation of the trader's relationship with the firm, and shall continue to govern any dispute arising out of or relating to that relationship indefinitely.
• Cross-references. This Section 15 is to be read together with all other sections of this document, each of which is subject to the dispute-resolution mechanism set forth herein. In particular, internal-appeal rights set forth in earlier sections (e.g., Sections 8 through 14) operate as preconditions to, and not as substitutes for, arbitration under this Section 15.

The Account Inactivity policy is the firm's mechanism for managing the carrying cost of accounts that have ceased to generate any trading activity. The firm holds market-data licenses, infrastructure capacity, and compliance-monitoring obligations for every active account on the platform; idle accounts that remain on the books indefinitely impose a continuing cost that the firm absorbs at the expense of all other traders. The Inactivity policy is calibrated to release that capacity when an account demonstrates sustained non-engagement.

The substantive rule is that an account on which no order has been opened or closed for fifteen (15) consecutive UTC calendar days shall be deemed inactive. Inactivity does not, of itself, terminate the account; rather, an inactive account becomes eligible, at the firm's sole discretion, for any of the following dispositions: (a) continued retention without further action; (b) suspension pending the trader's reactivation request; (c) termination with cancellation of any pending payouts subject to compliance review; or (d) such other disposition as the firm reasonably determines.

• Definition of "activity". For purposes of this Section 16, activity means the opening or closing of a position on the funded account. Login events, dashboard views, profile edits, and other non-trading interactions do not constitute activity. The fifteen-day window resets on each qualifying activity event.
• Enforcement mechanics. The firm operates an automated inactivity-detection routine that runs daily and flags accounts crossing the fifteen-day threshold. Flags are surfaced to the firm's compliance team for review. The compliance team retains sole discretion as to whether and how to act on a flag; no automated suspension or termination occurs solely as a result of an inactivity flag. Traders should not rely on the firm's discretion in any particular direction; an account flagged for inactivity may be left active, suspended, or terminated.
• Notification policy. Consistent with the firm's silent-flag compliance model, the trader will not receive an automated platform notification when an inactivity flag is recorded. Where the firm in its discretion elects to take consequential action — including without limitation account suspension or termination — an authorized AF administrator shall communicate that action to the trader by email at the address of record.
• Reactivation. A trader whose account has been suspended on inactivity grounds may request reactivation by emailing [email protected]. Reactivation requests shall be considered in good faith and may be granted at the firm's discretion subject to such conditions as the firm reasonably imposes (including without limitation re-verification of KYC and confirmation of the trader's payout-wallet details).
• Cross-references. This Section 16 is to be read together with Section 13 (Account Suspension at Firm Discretion). In particular, an inactivity-driven suspension is administered through the mechanisms set forth in Section 13 and is subject to the appeal and discretion provisions thereof.

The Overnight Financing policy, also referred to throughout this section as the swap policy or the rollover policy, governs the per-night carrying cost that the firm applies to any non-crypto position held open across the daily rollover boundary. The substantive rationale parallels the standard practice in the regulated brokerage industry, where overnight positions accrue a financing charge that reflects the underlying cost of carry on the position. The firm applies a simplified, flat per-lot swap schedule designed to be transparent to the trader while preserving alignment with industry practice.

Swap charges are applied at 21:00 UTC each calendar day (corresponding to the standard 5:00 PM New York close) to any position open at that moment. The charge is debited from the account as a realized loss and is recorded against the position for transparency. Positions opened and closed entirely between two rollover boundaries do not accrue any swap charge.

• Per-instrument schedule. The flat per-lot, per-night swap schedule is: (i) Forex (major and minor pairs): $7.00 per standard lot, per night, in either direction; (ii) Metals (XAU/USD, XAG/USD): $5.00 per lot, per night; (iii) Indices (US30, NAS100, SPX500, and analogous instruments): $3.00 per lot, per night; (iv) Commodities (oil, natural gas, and analogous): $5.00 per lot, per night; (v) Crypto (BTC, ETH, and all other crypto instruments): $0.00 per lot per night — crypto instruments are exempt from overnight financing. The schedule applies symmetrically to long and short positions; the firm does not differentiate by direction.
• Triple-swap Wednesday. On Wednesday at 21:00 UTC, the per-lot swap charge for non-crypto instruments is multiplied by three (3) to reflect the standard industry convention of advancing settlement across the weekend. By way of illustration, a one-lot EUR/USD position open at 21:00 UTC on Wednesday accrues a swap charge of $7.00 × 3 = $21.00. The Wednesday multiplier applies only to non-crypto instruments; crypto positions remain at $0.00.
• Equity and drawdown interaction. Swap charges, once accrued, are realized losses for purposes of all other rules in this document, including without limitation the Daily Loss Limit of Section 1, the Maximum Drawdown of Section 2, the Consistency Rule of Section 3, and the net-realized-profit calculation of Section 12. A trader whose account equity is near the drawdown threshold should account for prospective swap charges when deciding whether to hold positions over the 21:00 UTC rollover.
• Worked example A (single overnight forex hold). A trader opens a 1.0-lot EUR/USD long at 14:00 UTC and holds the position past 21:00 UTC. At 21:00 UTC, a $7.00 swap charge is debited from the account. If the position is held a second night, an additional $7.00 is debited at the following 21:00 UTC. Total swap incurred across two overnights: $14.00.
• Worked example B (Wednesday triple swap on gold). A trader opens a 0.5-lot XAU/USD position on Tuesday and holds it through Wednesday 21:00 UTC. The Wednesday charge is $5.00 × 0.5 lots × 3 (triple multiplier) = $7.50, debited at 21:00 UTC on Wednesday. Holds on non-Wednesday nights would have charged only $5.00 × 0.5 = $2.50.
• Worked example C (crypto exempt). A trader holds a 0.2-lot BTC/USDT position for seven consecutive nights. No swap charge is applied on any night. Crypto instruments do not accrue overnight financing.
• Worked example D (intra-day closure). A trader opens a 1.0-lot USD/JPY long at 02:00 UTC and closes it at 18:00 UTC the same calendar day. The position was not open at the 21:00 UTC rollover and therefore no swap charge applies, irrespective of position duration.
• Notification policy. Swap charges are visible in the trader's dashboard and in the position-level transaction history. Consistent with the firm's silent-flag compliance model, no separate notification is delivered at the moment of each rollover; traders are expected to consult their dashboard for the running swap balance on each open position.
• Cross-references. This Section 17 is to be read together with Section 1 (Daily Loss Limit), Section 2 (Maximum Drawdown), Section 6 (Weekend Holding Restriction), and Section 12 (Profit Split and Payout Schedule). In particular, the Weekend Holding Restriction of Section 6 forecloses certain overnight-financing scenarios entirely by requiring non-crypto positions to be closed before the Friday weekend close; the swap charge in this Section 17 applies only to the limited weeknight rollover scenarios consistent with Section 6.