Price Gaps, Platform Outages, and What the Rules Actually Say

If price gaps through your stop and the loss exceeds a drawdown limit, the account is breached. Because most firms measure drawdown against equity including open positions, this can happen while no one is at the screen and with no order having been executed at the intended level. If the platform is unavailable and you cannot close a position, the published rule sets we reviewed contain no compensation mechanism and no suspension of drawdown limits. Neither event is treated as an exception; the limit is a threshold, not a judgement about whether the loss was avoidable.

This is the least-documented area in the category. Firms publish detailed drawdown mechanics and detailed prohibited-practice lists, and say almost nothing about what happens when execution does not work. This article assembles what the rules do say, and sets out the operational record — which is unusually well documented, because platform failures have ended more firms than regulators have.

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Why a gap breaches an account that a stop would not have

Two design choices combine.

First, most limits are measured on equity, not balance. Equity includes unrealised profit and loss on open positions. From the published rules:

• FTMO measures both the daily loss and the maximum loss against equity — "balance + open P/L ± swaps − commissions".
• FundedNext's daily limit is calculated from the initial balance and explicitly includes realised and unrealised P&L, swaps and commissions.
• Breakout Prop recalculates the daily loss on equity including open positions at 00:30 UTC.
• Fintokei's maximum drawdown is static but is checked against equity including open trades.
• Topstep's Maximum Loss Limit trails on end-of-day balance, but the firm's help centre states the breach is evaluated in real time including unrealised P&L.

Second, several trailing floors follow unrealised equity upward. Apex's Intraday Trail option follows the peak of unrealised equity: the firm's own published example is a $100k account with a $3,000 buffer where an open position at +$2,000 unrealised reduces the buffer to $1,000. E8 One uses a real-time trailing 4% following unrealised equity.

Put together: a weekend gap, a news gap, or a fast move against an open position registers against the limit at the moment the price prints, not at the moment you would have closed. A stop order that would have exited at −1.5% does not protect the account if the market reopens at −4% and the limit is 3%.

This is not a hidden rule. It is the direct arithmetic consequence of two rules that are published — but they are published in different sections, and the consequence is not spelled out on any page we read.

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What the rules say about gaps directly

Very little, and mostly in the prohibited-practices direction rather than the protective one.

FTMO prohibits gap trading — specifically, gap trading before news releases or within two hours of a market close of two hours or more (forbidden trading practices). The prohibition addresses deliberately positioning for a gap; it says nothing about a gap that happens to you.

Funding Pips classified weekend holding as "Temporarily Not Allowed" on all Master accounts from 29 January 2026, with positions closed automatically on Friday. On the Flex product this is not a hard breach; on Zero it results in immediate account closure. Evaluation phases are unrestricted. Whatever the intent, the effect is to remove weekend gap exposure from funded accounts.

Apex and Topstep prohibit overnight holding on futures accounts entirely, with auto-flatten at 16:59 ET and 15:10 CT respectively — which removes overnight gap risk structurally.

The5ers permits overnight and weekend holding on every CFD programme, and combines it with a static, absolute maximum drawdown from the initial balance that never trails. That combination is materially different from a trailing equity-based rule for anyone holding through a weekend.

FTMO Swing accounts carry no news restrictions and permit holding through the weekend; the Standard funded account restricts execution around news.

The general pattern: firms address gap risk by restricting when positions may be open, not by making allowances after the fact.

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Slippage

Slippage sits in the same category. It is a normal execution outcome, and it counts toward limits like any other price.

The specific issue documented in our source research is the interaction between slippage and risk guidelines. FTMO publishes a 1% risk-per-trade figure as a guideline on its risk material rather than as a rule on the objectives page. A third-party analysis published by PropScorer in January 2026 reports a case where a payout was declined after slippage put a position approximately $70 outside that guideline, and a second where risk was recorded at 1.12% (propscorer.com). We have not verified either case against primary documents and present them as reported claims, not established facts.

The general point stands independently of those cases: if a compliance threshold is expressed as a percentage of account size, slippage can move a position across it without any decision by the trader. Anyone trading close to a stated threshold should treat the threshold as being a slippage width narrower than it reads.

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Platform failure: the documented record

This is where the evidence is strongest, and it is worth stating the conclusion first: platform providers have ended more prop firms than regulators, traders, and market losses combined. In each case the firm had broken none of its own rules.

Sources: Finance Magnates on the Funding Pips migration; Finance Magnates and FX News Group coverage of the February 2024 terminations.

Two cases illustrate what an outage does to accounts rather than to companies.

Funding Pips, February 2024. The full outage caused by the BlackBull termination was communicated to traders as "urgent maintenance". Migration to Match-Trader took roughly a week.

The Funded Trader, March 2024. A migration to DXtrade failed and account reconciliation broke down. The firm paused operations on 28 March 2024, returning after about five months. It acknowledged more than $2 million in denied payouts; approximately $17 million had been paid in the first two months of 2024 with $2 million blocked (Finance Magnates).

The lesson for a trader is narrow and specific: your account's continuity depends on a commercial relationship between your firm and a third party that you cannot see, cannot verify, and have no contractual standing in. A firm running on a single platform provider has a single point of failure.

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What the rules say about outages

Almost nothing. Across the rule sets reviewed we found no published provision suspending drawdown limits during a platform outage, no compensation mechanism for positions that could not be closed, and no service-level commitment with a stated remedy.

There are two partial exceptions, and both are payout-timing commitments rather than execution commitments:

• FundedNext publishes a 24-hour payout guarantee with $1,000 compensation if the delay is the firm's fault. The same homepage separately displays an average processing time of 40 hours.
• IC Funded publishes $500 compensation for payouts delayed beyond 48 hours.

These are worth noting because they show the structure is possible: a published promise with a stated penalty for failure. Nothing equivalent exists for execution or availability.

For comparison, this is one of the clearer differences from the licensed brokerage side. A regulated retail broker publishes an order execution policy, a complaints procedure, and — in the EU and UK — falls under a compensation scheme for firm failure. None of that applies to an evaluation product; see are prop firms regulated.

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When the firm itself stops

An emerging norm in the category is the "orderly exit", and it is worth recording because it sets a standard against which any future closure will be measured.

• Seacrest Funded (formerly MyFundedFX). Announced 4 February 2026, all accounts and positions closed 6 February — about two days' notice. Refunds and final payouts ran to 28 February 2026. Refunds covered active, unbreached challenges only; breached, gifted and inactive accounts were excluded, with processing up to 30 days on a first-come-first-served basis. TradeInformer reported that traders were offered a 100% deposit bonus if they converted a challenge refund into a deposit with the group's broker.
• ATFunded (ATFX). Suspended 6 June 2026 with full refunds of purchases and all pending payouts promised; MT5 was placed in close-only mode and all trades closed by 13:00 EST that day. The firm's statement was that it had chosen to "pause, stabilise, and evaluate alternative models that better align trader success with company sustainability" (Finance Magnates).
• FundingTicks, the futures arm of the same operator as Funding Pips, announced rule changes on 17 December 2025 and wound down on 18–19 January 2026 — 32 days. On wind-down, active evaluation and Master accounts were refunded; Master accounts that had reached target were paid at an 80% split and those that had not at 20%; live accounts in profit received a refund plus 90% of realised profit plus 20% of the initial balance.

The practical read: an announced closure with a refund window has become the expected behaviour, which means the notice period — two days in the Seacrest case — is the variable to watch, not whether refunds happen at all.

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What is actually checkable before you buy

1. Which platform does the firm run on, and does it run on more than one? Multi-platform is a hedge against a single provider's decision.
2. Does the firm hold its own platform licence, or is it operating under someone else's white label? After February 2024, MetaQuotes' documented position has been direct licensing rather than grey-label access through a partner broker.
3. Is your drawdown limit measured on equity or balance? Equity means a gap counts.
4. Are overnight and weekend positions permitted, and did that change recently? Funding Pips changed this on funded accounts in January 2026.
5. Does the firm publish any commitment with a penalty attached? A payout guarantee with compensation is evidence the firm is willing to write down a remedy.
6. What happened the last time the firm had an outage? The record is public in the trade press.

Related: trailing vs static drawdown for why the equity measurement matters · when a payout can be denied · are prop firms regulated.

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Written by the upme.com research desk. Events above are sourced to mainstream trade press or to the firms' own statements and are dated. Individual trader accounts that we could not verify against primary documents are labelled as reported claims. Corrections to the address on our sourcing page. Nothing here is investment advice.

Sources

Every factual claim above is drawn from one of the documents below. Where a document has been superseded since the date given, tell us and the piece is corrected with a dated line.

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