1 · News windows and news bans
Two very different policies hide under “news trading restrictions”. The window version: no new positions ± a few minutes around named high-impact releases (payrolls, rate decisions), sometimes with a minimum holding time after the window. The ban version: profits from trades opened inside restricted windows are voided or the account is closed — often enforced only on funded accounts, which is the cruel part: the behaviour that passed your challenge becomes the behaviour that kills your payout.
Why firms care: news spikes are where slippage and stops fail, and where a small account can lottery itself into a pass. A firm pricing its risk assumes your edge survives without the lottery tickets.
2 · Weekend holding
Whether positions may stay open over the weekend is usually a property of the account type, not the firm: intraday-style accounts require flat books by Friday's close; swing-style accounts allow weekend exposure (often with higher drawdown lines to pay for it). The trap is buying the wrong type for your strategy — a swing system on an intraday account will breach the Friday rule structurally, not accidentally. And check whether “flat by Friday” means your broker time or the firm's server time; the difference has eaten more than one position.
3 · The automation disclosure trap
Most rulebooks allow expert advisors and copy trading
if declared, and void accounts when the same strategy
fingerprint appears across many accounts at once. If you trade
someone else's EA — or your own, from two accounts
— the correlation itself can read as a violation. The
phrases to find: copy trading
,
third-party EAs
, identical strategies across
accounts
, and any volume cap
per position or per
day.
How to check before you buy
±N minutes around high-impact news
,restricted instruments list
— the window variant; note whether it applies on the challenge, on funded, or both.news trading is not allowed on funded accounts
,profits from restricted periods are void
— the ban variant; treat as a strategy filter, not a footnote.positions must be closed before the weekend
,Friday 20:00 UTC
-style deadlines — the weekend rule; match it to your system, not your ambition.EA usage must be declared
,copy trading between accounts
— the automation clause; declare early, it's almost never the declaring that kills accounts.
What our tools do about it
Honest limits: PassLab's daily-close abstraction doesn't model news windows — its stress row (vol ×1.5) is the closest proxy for a wilder tape. The Sim Arena makes the weekend shape of a strategy visible: watch what pressing does to your worst day, then imagine that day scheduled for payroll Friday. When Terms Intelligence ships its per-firm dataset, news and weekend policies get their own columns — this article is the schema.
Feel what size does to a wild tape:
Analysis, not advice. Patterns above are industry archetypes, not any specific firm's current terms — firms change rules; confirm before you buy.