How the Rules Work

Challenges have a handful of rules that keep risk under control. This page explains each one in plain English, with dollar examples on a $100,000 account so you always know where you stand.

The one-sentence summary

Don’t lose too much in a single day, don’t lose too much overall, always use a stop-loss, aim for at least 3× your risk on each trade, and hit your profit target. Do that and you pass.

Max drawdown (your hard floor)

Your max drawdown is a balance floor you must never touch. It trails your progress upward but never moves back down, so your winnings are locked in.

Here is how it works on a $100,000 account with a 10% drawdown:

• The floor is measured from your start-of-day balance — your realized, closed-trade balance — not from your live equity during the day. Because the start-of-day anchor and its high-water mark only move on realized balance, an open winner you hold across the 02:00 reset does not ratchet the floor up to a peak you never actually closed.
• It only recalculates once a day, at 02:00 Europe/Zurich — the moment your daily window resets.
• Between resets it is frozen. Nothing you do intraday moves the floor.
• The floor is always your highest-ever start-of-day balance minus 10% of your initial balance ($10,000 here). It can only ratchet up.

Worked example

Time	Start-of-day balance	Floor (high water − $10,000)
Day 1, 02:00	$100,000	$90,000
Day 1, close (+5% → $105,000)	(not yet counted)	still $90,000
Day 2, 02:00	$105,000 (new high)	$95,000 ⬆️
Day 2, you drop $2,000 → $103,000	—	still $95,000 (frozen)
Day 3, 02:00	$103,000 (lower, no new high)	still $95,000 (never drops)

On Day 1 you gained 5%, so at the next 02:00 reset your floor climbed from $90,000 to $95,000. On Day 2 you gave back $2,000 — but the floor stays at $95,000 because it never moves down and only recalculates at 02:00. Your locked-in cushion is safe.

Caution

Because the floor only ratchets up, a great day permanently raises the bar. After a strong run you have less room to give back before you breach — that is by design, to protect your gains.

Daily loss limit (resets every day)

Separate from the trailing floor, there is a daily loss limit measured from your start-of-day balance at 02:00 Europe/Zurich. Lose more than your type’s daily percentage in one day and the day is a breach.

On $100,000 with a 2.5% daily limit (Your Own Style):

• Start of day: $100,000. Your daily loss line is $2,500.
• Your realized losses for the day must go past $2,500 to breach. Landing exactly on the $2,500 line does not — a limit is breached only when you go strictly beyond it.
• At the next 02:00, the counter resets to your new start-of-day (realized) balance and you get a fresh daily allowance.

Limits are exclusive

Every limit works this way. Hitting a threshold exactly — the daily dollar line, exactly 2%/5%/10% drawdown, or your remaining budget to the cent — is not a breach. Only strictly exceeding it is.

Even a track with no per-trade cap is bounded by your day

On types with no risk-per-trade cap (Your Own Style, High Conviction) a single trade still can’t put your whole drawdown cushion at risk. The moment you open a position, its worst-case loss (the distance to your stop-loss) is measured against your remaining daily budget — so one trade can never be sized to risk more than roughly your daily percentage, far less than the full drawdown allowance.

What counts as a loss

Breaches are judged on your realized (closed) results — what you actually bank — plus a worst-case check the moment you open a position, based on how far away your stop-loss sits. It is not a continuous mark-to-market of your floating P&L. What counts toward the daily limit and the drawdown floor is:

• Realized P&L — profit or loss on trades you’ve already closed. This is what actually moves your balance against the limits.
• Trading fees — the commissions you pay to open and close, once charged.
• Funding fees — periodic funding payments on perpetual positions, once charged.
• Worst-case open risk — when you open a trade, the loss you would take if its stop-loss were hit is measured against your remaining daily and drawdown room.

Unrealized dips don’t breach on their own

There is no continuous mark-to-market of open profit and loss. A position that drifts into the red while you hold it does not, by itself, breach a limit — only your realized results and the worst-case stop distance on your open trades are measured. If an unrealized dip recovers before you close, it never counted against you. And because your daily and weekly budgets and the drawdown high-water mark reset and ratchet on your closed balance, carrying an open position across the 02:00 reset never dilutes, resets, or inflates your allowance.

Stop-loss required

Every position must have a stop-loss attached. This is non-negotiable on all challenge and funded accounts.

• A trade with no stop-loss is a rule breach.
• A stop-loss placed too far away can also breach — if the distance to your stop would risk more than your account’s limits allow, it counts as an over-wide (effectively missing) stop.

Tip

Set your stop before you enter. The Order Form calculates position size from your stop distance, so a sensible stop and a clean risk number go hand in hand.

Risk:reward of 1:3

On the types that require it, each trade must target at least three times what it risks.

• Risk $1 on a trade → your take-profit must aim for at least $3.
• Risk $300 → target at least $900.

On tracks that require R:R, a trade with no take-profit (or a target closer than 3×) fails the check. Types without an R:R requirement let you exit freely.

You can’t strip these rules after you’re in

Once your position is open you can still tighten a stop or move it to break-even, but you cannot widen your stop past the per-trade risk cap, nor delete or loosen your take-profit below the required 1:3, to escape the rule mid-trade. Such an edit is rejected — the change simply doesn’t go through and your existing stop and target stay in place. This is a blocked edit, not an account failure, and it applies to the tracks that carry these limits: Disciplined Trader and funded accounts.

Consecutive losses (Disciplined Trader)

The Disciplined Trader type limits losing streaks to keep you from tilting:

• You may take up to 4 losing trades in a row per day.
• The 5th consecutive loss breaches the rule.
• A winning trade resets the streak to zero. The count also resets at the start of the next day.

Other types do not have a consecutive-loss rule.

Minimum trading days

You can’t pass by getting lucky on one big day. A day only counts as a trading day when you:

• Hold a position for at least 3 minutes, and
• Take at least 0.1% risk on it.

Days where you barely trade (or hold for seconds) don’t count toward your minimum.

Profit target

To pass, reach your type’s profit target. On a $100,000 account with a 10% target, that’s +$10,000 of net profit. Two-step challenges split the target across two phases to prove consistency (see the table below).

Hitting the target early doesn’t end the challenge

Reaching the profit target on its own does not pass a phase. You pass only when both are true at once: you’ve met the profit target and completed the minimum number of trading days. Hit the target on day 2 of a 14-day minimum and you simply keep trading (within the rules) until the days are in.

Liquidation ends the challenge

If a position is liquidated by the exchange, the challenge is over immediately. Liquidation is always terminal and cannot be reversed — always trade with margin to spare.

Caution

Liquidation is the one breach you can’t recover from. Keep enough margin that a normal adverse move never wipes the position.

Your funded account keeps the same rules

When you pass, your funded account inherits the exact rules of the challenge type you passed under. There is no new, stricter rulebook to learn — the daily limit, drawdown floor, risk:reward, and consecutive-loss rules you traded under carry straight across (with your profit target now set to zero, since you’ve already proven it).

And the reward:

• You keep 80% of the profits your funded account generates.
• Consistent performance can raise your split up to 90%.

Quick reference by challenge type

Current rule values for each type (on any account size — percentages scale to your capital):

Rule	Your Own Style	Disciplined Trader	High Conviction
Daily loss limit	2.5%	2%	5%
Max drawdown	10%	10%	15%
Risk:reward	None	1:3	None
Risk-per-trade cap	None	under 0.6% (1-step) / under 1% (2-step)	None
Consecutive-loss rule	None	4/day, out on the 5th	None
Stop-loss	Required	Required	Required
Profit target	10% (or 8% + 5% two-step)	10% (or 8% + 5% two-step)	20% (or 15% + 10% two-step)
Minimum trading days	14	14	7

Note

Percentages are measured against your initial account balance. On a $100,000 account, a 2.5% daily limit is $2,500 and a 10% drawdown is a $10,000 cushion from each new start-of-day high.