Prop Firm Rules: What Can Close an Account

Eleven distinct categories of rule can end a prop-firm evaluation or a funded account. Eight are published as numbers you can check before buying; three — prohibited strategies, account-integrity conditions and discretionary clauses — are not. They are spread across trading-objectives pages, help-centre articles, FAQs, terms and conditions and fee PDFs, and no firm we reviewed lists all of them in one place.

The maximum loss and the profit target take a minute to find, because the product pages are built around those two numbers. The rules that end accounts without a loss — inactivity, consistency, news windows, per-trade caps — sit somewhere else, and the somewhere differs by firm. Every category we found across thirteen firms is below, with parameters as published on 31 July 2026 and the document each was read from.

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Why the rule set is not in one place

Rules accumulate. A firm launches with a target, a daily limit and a maximum loss on one page; clauses are added later, most often in the help centre. Over a few years that produces a rule set spread across documents of different ages and tones.

FTMO’s trading objectives — profit target, maximum daily loss, maximum loss, minimum trading days — are all on one page, carrying a dateModified of 13 May 2026. The Best Day rule applying to its 1-Step product, capping the best trading day at 50% of the profit from positive days, is not on that page; it is in the help centre. News restrictions are in a separate FAQ entry. The prohibited-practice list, whose sanctions include cancellation of any potential rewards, is on a third page. Four documents, four categories of account-ending rule, one firm.

The same holds elsewhere. Topstep’s Maximum Loss Limit — the parameter its product is built on — is documented in a help-centre article rather than on a rules page. Blueberry Funded’s fee PDF states a 30% consistency requirement for one plan while its help centre describes the main plans as having none; the two documents differ, and we report both.

Which of these rules are actually checkable

Eight of the eleven categories reduce to a number, a time window or a count of days. You can read them, write them down, and know in advance whether your method breaches them: maximum loss, daily loss, profit target and minimum trading days, consistency percentages, per-trade caps, news windows, holding permissions and inactivity thresholds.

Three do not. Prohibited-strategy lists are partly quantified and partly elastic — Alpha Capital states a testable threshold (“Your average trade duration must be above 2 minutes, and at least 50% of your profit must come from trades held longer than 2 minutes”), while FTMO’s list bars exploitation of “errors in our Services” and gaining an “unfair advantage” without defining either. Account-integrity conditions turn on a verification process whose outcome cannot be predicted. Discretionary clauses are judgement calls by construction: every major firm’s terms contain at least one clause allowing accrued profit to be cancelled on a judgement call, and none publishes how often it is used.

At most CFD firms there is no time limit at all, which makes the two headline numbers asymmetric: a missed target ends nothing by itself, while a breached limit ends everything immediately. An analysis of roughly 500,000 traders by hoc-trade, cited in a July 2026 vendor report, attributes about 70% of evaluation failures to loss-limit breaches rather than to missed profit targets — one figure from one dataset, and the only one of its kind we located.

The eleven categories at a glance

Ranges come from the published rules of thirteen firms — FTMO, FundedNext, The5ers, Funding Pips, Topstep, Apex, MyFundedFutures, E8 Markets, Alpha Capital, Blueberry Funded, Breakout, Fintokei and ThinkCapital — as read on 31 July 2026.

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Loss limits: the rules that end most accounts

1. Maximum loss

The floor below which the account closes. Four choices define it: whether the floor moves, whether it follows balance or equity, whether a breach is evaluated continuously or once a day, and where it stops moving.

Parameters differ within a single firm. FTMO’s 2-Step carries a 10% static maximum loss from initial capital; its 1-Step carries a 10% end-of-day trailing loss recalculated from the highest 00:00 balance ever recorded, which resets to 90% of initial capital each time a reward is withdrawn. Topstep’s fixed-dollar limit of $2,000, $3,000 or $4,500 trails on end-of-day balance and locks on reaching the starting balance, while the breach is evaluated in real time including unrealised profit and loss. So an open position can breach a limit with no order executed — including under rules labelled static, since Fintokei’s static maximum drawdown is checked against equity including open trades.

Where it lives: the percentage is on the product page everywhere. The movement policy and the trigger policy frequently are not.

2. The daily loss limit

A second floor under the maximum loss, reset once per platform day, running from none to 5%. The base it is calculated from varies more than the percentage does: FundedNext calculates from the initial balance, counting realised and unrealised profit and loss, swaps and commissions; FTMO anchors to the balance at 00:00 CE(S)T and evaluates on equity; Funding Pips uses “the higher value between your opening balance or opening equity for that day”. Two products treat the limit as a pause: The5ers suspends trading for the day at 3% on Hyper Growth and Bootcamp rather than closing the account.

Where it lives: beside the maximum loss. The measurement base and reset time are more often in the help centre.

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Rules about how the profit is made

3. Profit target and minimum trading days

A missed target does not close an account at most CFD firms, because most have removed time limits; FTMO states none on either track. It ends the attempt only where an expiry exists — Apex 4.0 evaluations expire after 30 days — or where the product is a monthly subscription, as at Topstep and MyFundedFutures.

Minimum trading days are the more frequent obstacle, because they gate phase completion and payout eligibility both. FTMO requires four per phase on the 2-Step and none on the 1-Step; FundedNext two on the 1-Step and five per phase on the 2-Step; Topstep two days in the Combine, then five winning days of $150 or more once funded.

Where it lives: the product page, reliably — the one category always published where a buyer will see it.

4. Consistency rules

A cap on how much of total profit one day, or one trade idea, may represent. It rarely fails an evaluation; it blocks or delays a payout on an account in profit, which is why a single good day can block a payout on an account that has broken no loss limit.

Published values where the rule exists: FTMO 1-Step, best day capped at 50% of the profit from positive days; E8 Markets 40% on One and 35% on Signature; Apex 50%, evaluated at payout request; Topstep 50% in the Combine and 40% once funded; Funding Pips 35% on the On-Demand cycle and 15% on every Zero payout. FundedNext applies none on any CFD model at any stage, The5ers none on CFD, ThinkCapital none on any programme.

Where it lives: the category least likely to be on the rules page. FTMO’s Best Day rule is in the help centre.

5. Per-trade risk caps

A cap underneath the daily limit, applied to one position or one “trade idea”. Two features make it stricter than it reads: it is often measured on floating rather than realised loss, and a trade idea aggregates repeat entries.

Funding Pips applies 3% per trade idea below $50,000 and 2% above, and operates a Striking System: each time the floating loss on one trade idea reaches 1.2% of account size a warning is recorded, a second strike halves the profit split permanently, a third reduces it to 20%, a fourth closes the account, and warnings never reset. Blueberry Funded applies 1.5% on funded accounts opened from 12 March 2026, defining a trade idea to include split positions and any new position in the same direction within ten minutes of closing a losing one.

Where it lives: help centre and terms, usually as a funded-stage rule — so it is not in force during the phase most buyers use to judge the product. That is the general case: the rule set you pass under is not always the rule set you trade under.

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Rules about when and what may be traded

6. News windows

A prohibition on executing around scheduled high-impact releases; width, scope and penalty all differ. FTMO restricts trading within two minutes either side of a release, on the Standard funded account only — not during the evaluation — while its Swing accounts carry no news restriction. Funding Pips leaves evaluation phases unrestricted and applies a ten-minute window on funded accounts, with news trading a hard breach on the Zero product. FundedNext permits news trading but counts profit made within five minutes of a release at 40% and losses at 100%. Blueberry Funded prohibits it on all plans.

Where it lives: an FAQ entry or a help-centre article. Almost never the rules table.

7. Overnight and weekend holding

Futures products differ structurally: Topstep auto-flattens at 15:10 CT and Apex requires flat by 16:59 ET, while MyFundedFutures permits overnight holding on all plans. On CFD the range is the full width. The5ers permits overnight and weekend holding on every CFD programme, which with a static maximum drawdown suits multi-day positions. Funding Pips moved weekend holding to “Temporarily Not Allowed” on all funded accounts from 29 January 2026, auto-closing positions on Friday — immediate account closure on Zero — while leaving evaluation phases unrestricted.

Where it lives: the help centre, altered by notice rather than reissued terms. Rule sets have been changed after accounts were sold more than once here.

8. Inactivity and expiry

The category most often missed, because it closes an account that has broken nothing. Funding Pips treats 30 consecutive calendar days with no fully closed trade as a hard breach, and its help centre describes it as “the one rule that can close the account without a loss”. The5ers closes accounts after 30 days of inactivity, MyFundedFutures Pro after seven, and E8 Markets requires one trade every 60. Apex 4.0 expires an unfinished evaluation after 30 days.

Where it lives: the help centre, in every case we found.

9. Prohibited strategies

Named techniques whose use permits removal of trades, disqualification, or cancellation of accrued profit. The lists are public; their precision varies.

Funding Pips enumerates in its terms: “gap trading, high-frequency trading, toxic trading flow, server spamming, latency arbitrage, hedging, long-short arbitrage, reverse arbitrage, tick scalping, server execution exploits, opposite account trading, and churning and burning”. Copy trading between accounts of different users and third-party account management result in termination.

FTMO’s forbidden-practices page bars exploitation of “errors in our Services”, opposite positions across accounts and across firms, “any software, artificial intelligence, ultra-high-speed tools, or mass data entry”, expert advisors exceeding 2,000 server requests per day, and third-party trading. It does not use the terms “high-frequency trading”, “latency arbitrage”, “tick scalping” or “copy trading”; those categories are described functionally rather than named.

Where it lives: a dedicated page at FTMO, the terms at Funding Pips, plan pages at MyFundedFutures. Rarely the same document as the loss limits.

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Rules about identity and firm judgement

10. Account integrity and identity

Verification, residence and account control. These conditions usually surface at the first payout rather than during the evaluation.

The5ers requires a video and identity interview; its published position is that failure to attend within five business days results in pending payouts being rejected and accounts cancelled, and its terms state that on termination “any accrued balance of profits or rewards shall be canceled and forfeited”. Funding Pips logs and analyses IP activity and runs an automated detector for timing similarity between accounts. FundedNext treats VPN circumvention of its restricted-country list as grounds for a permanent ban. Restricted-jurisdiction lists belong here too, since they can void an account after purchase: FTMO restricts around 60 jurisdictions, The5ers around 31 including Israel, its own headquarters.

Where it lives: the terms and the payout policy.

11. Discretionary clauses

The category that cannot be checked in advance. Every firm reviewed retains at least one provision permitting cancellation of profit on its own assessment rather than against a stated threshold. FTMO’s terms cover exploitation of errors and unfair advantage; FundedNext’s reference “behavioral changes” — lot size or frequency deviating from a trader’s norm.

None of the firms reviewed publishes a numeric threshold for these clauses, an appeal procedure with an external decision-maker, or an undertaking to give a written reason citing the clause and the trade. None publishes how many payout requests it declines, or on what grounds.

Where it lives: the terms, always. Reading them in full is the only way to find this category.

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What the eleven add up to

Counting the documents matters more than counting the rules. Four categories on four pages means the rule set you compared is not the rule set you bought — and the eight checkable categories only stay checkable if you find all of them first. Two of the eight need reading twice: a limit has a movement policy and a trigger policy, published independently, and what it measures against — balance or equity — decides whether an open position alone can end the account. Several of them, per-trade caps and weekend restrictions among them, apply at the funded stage and not during the evaluation you used to judge the product. One, inactivity, closes an account that has broken nothing else.

Then the eleventh, which no amount of reading resolves. Every firm reviewed keeps a clause permitting cancellation of accrued profit on its own assessment, none attaches a number to it, and none publishes how often it is used.

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Written by the upme.com research desk. Every parameter above comes from the firm’s own rules page, terms or help centre, read on 31 July 2026; where two of a firm’s own documents state different things, we give both and say so. Rule sets in this industry change by notice, sometimes monthly. 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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