Rule Violation
Any breach of the firm's trading rules — separate from drawdown breaches — that can trigger an account ban and profit forfeiture.
Definition
A rule violation is any action that breaches the firm's written trading rules outside of the standard drawdown limits. Common violations include: trading during news embargo windows, using prohibited EA strategies, copy-trading or identical trades across accounts, position sizing that breaches lot-size caps, holding positions over the weekend on firms that prohibit it, and failing consistency-rule thresholds. Most violations are detected automatically through pattern analysis; a smaller set (account sharing, identity misrepresentation) are caught through review. Violations that are not drawdown-related are often the gotchas that traders did not anticipate — the rules are in the terms of service but rarely surfaced in the evaluation dashboard.
Example
Why It Matters
Rule violations are the category of risk traders underestimate most. Drawdown breaches at least give warning signs (the limit is visible, the distance to breach is calculable); rule violations tend to be either binary (you did or did not trade inside the news window) or retrospective (consistency-rule violations are only calculable after the full challenge completes). Before buying a challenge, read the full rule document — not just the marketing summary — and flag every rule whose violation would cost the fee.