Prop Firm Rules

Prohibited Practices

Hedging:

At DayTraders.com, we enforce strict risk management guidelines to promote transparent and fair trading practices. As part of these guidelines, hedging across accounts or within the same account is strictly prohibited.

What Does This Mean?

• No Opposite Positions Across Accounts: Traders are not allowed to hold opposite positions (i.e., long and short) in the same or related instruments across different accounts. For example, if you go long on NQ (Nasdaq futures) in one account, you cannot go short on NQ in another account at the same time.
• No Hedging in Related Instruments: Additionally, traders cannot hedge by taking opposing positions in related instruments, such as going long on NQ (NASDAQ) in one account and short on ES (S&P futures) in another account. Hedging between correlated markets or instruments is also not permitted.
• No Simultaneous Long and Short Positions: Traders cannot simultaneously hold long and short positions on the same asset within any account, regardless of the trading strategy.

High-Frequency Trading (HFT):

At DayTraders.com, we maintain strict guidelines to ensure a level playing field for all traders. As part of these guidelines, we do not allow the use of High Frequency Trading (HFT) strategies on our platform.

What Does This Mean?

• Manual Trading Required: High Frequency Trading (HFT) strategies that rely on the rapid execution of multiple trades within very short time intervals are not allowed. This includes trading systems or algorithms designed to execute hundreds or thousands of trades per second or minute.
• Prohibition of HFT Algorithms: Any trading activity that involves the use of HFT software, algorithms, or systems aimed at exploiting price discrepancies in milliseconds or microseconds is strictly prohibited.
• No Trade Overload: Excessive trade volume over short periods that is characteristic of HFT will be flagged and considered a violation of this rule.

Martingale:

At DayTraders.com, we maintain strict guidelines to ensure a level playing field for all traders. As part of these guidelines, we do not allow the use of Martingale strategies on our platform.

What Does This Mean?

• No Martingale Position Sizing: Any trading strategy that involves systematically doubling or significantly increasing position size after a losing trade in an attempt to recover losses is strictly prohibited. This applies regardless of the instrument traded or the account type held.
• Prohibition of Loss Recovery Strategies: Trading approaches that are designed to offset previous losses by exponentially scaling up trade size rather than making independent, merit-based trading decisions are not permitted on our platform.
• Risk Management Compliance: All position sizing must remain consistent with sound risk management practices and must comply with the drawdown and position size limits outlined in your account rules. Using progressively larger positions to chase losses will be flagged as a violation of this rule.
• (DCA allowed)

Minimum Activity Policy:

Your activity requirement depends on whether you are on a Monthly or Lifetime account plan.

MONTHLY ACCOUNTS (Monthly Recurring Fee)

• Accounts are rebilled every 30 days from the original purchase date
• To keep your account active you must complete at least 1 trading day within each 30-day billing cycle
• That trading day must meet the minimum daily profit for your account size
• Consistency is not required
• Best for traders who trade less frequently.

LIFETIME ACCOUNTS (One-Time Fee)

• One-time payment with no monthly rebilling
• To keep your account active and in good standing you must complete 4 trading days within a rolling 30-day period
• Each trading day must meet the minimum daily profit for your account size
• Consistency is not required
• Best for more active traders.

Minimum daily profit requirements per account size: https://daytraders.com/help/articles/14368378-evaluation-account-rules#h_a826b5d75a

• Inactivity Rule: You must place at least one trade every 14 days to keep the account active. Accounts with no trading activity for a 14-day period will be terminated due to inactivity.

• News Trading: The5ers Futures allows trading during news events. There are no restrictions on trading around economic releases, as long as you follow all risk and account rules.

• Copy Trading: You are allowed to copy trade between your futures accounts.

• Overnight Holding: Overnight positions are permitted only on Swing programs

  • Please ensure that at least 10 minutes before market close (4:50 PM ET), all positions exceeding 1 mini contract or 1 micro contract are fully closed.
  • Failure to comply with this rule may result in account termination.

• HFT, Hedging and Algo Trading: not allowed

• Trading Hours: Futures markets operate nearly 24 hours per day, Sunday through Friday, from 6:00 PM to 5:00 PM EST the following day, with a daily maintenance break from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM EST.

• We do not allow any strategy that exploits the demo environment, guarantees profits with little risk, or that cannot be consistently replicated in real markets.

The most common prohibited practices are:

• Latency arbitrage, reverse arbitrage, gap exploitation, or any abuse of platform or server errors/glitches;
• Extremely fast trades taking advantage of atypical market liquidity that would be characterized as liquidity fraud, and/or microscalping (trades held for 30 seconds or less) in most trades;
• All types of arbitrages (latency, statistical, hedge arbitrage, etc.);
• Hedging between multiple accounts (own or third-party), including opposing positions on the same instrument or correlated instruments;
• Group hedging, reverse trading, or any form of collusion between accounts;
• Flipping, operating without the real intention of growing your account, but rather doing the bare minimum so that a new withdrawal can be requested;
• Copy trading of external signals, copiers between different accounts, or use of ""passing challenges"" services;
• Account sharing or allowing someone else to trade on your behalf;
• Martingale, aggressive grid systems, or ""all-in""/gambling-style progressions;
• Use of identical third-party trading EAs that generate duplicate trading patterns among many traders;
• Exploiting news with bracketing (pending orders on both sides);
• Any strategy that only works because it is being executed on a demo/simulated account.

Inactivity Rule

• Minimum 1 traded day in 7 days for Challenge and 1 traded day in 30 days for Funded.