Prop firm prohibited strategies: one contract bans 200 trades a day, another bans whatever it decides is bad faith
The prohibited-acts clauses of six prop firm contracts, side by side. Some rules you can check yourself before placing an order. Others turn on what the firm considers, which is a rule you cannot comply with in advance.
Breaking a prop firm rule costs the account and the fee, and at several firms it costs any payout already owed. So the prohibited-acts clause is the part of the contract with teeth, and it is the part nobody reads before paying.
We read six of them. They split into two kinds, and the difference between the kinds matters more than any individual rule.
Rules you can check, and rules you cannot
A prohibited act is either something you can verify about your own behaviour before you act, or something decided afterwards by the counterparty. Both appear in these contracts, often on the same page.
| Kind | Example, quoted | From |
|---|---|---|
| Checkable | high-frequency scalping above 200 trades a day | TradeDay |
| Checkable | “hedging or coordinating across accounts” | Clarity Traders |
| Checkable | accessing accounts “from the same location, terminal, or IP address” | Super Funded |
| Decided later | “behavior that is or appears to be gambling-focused” | Super Funded |
| Decided later | “any other strategy, software or technique that the Company considers to be trading in bad faith” | Super Funded |
| Decided later | firm “retains sole discretion to determine violations” | Clarity Traders |
You can count your trades. You cannot count what appears to be gambling-focused.
That is not an argument that the subjective clauses are improper. A firm carrying the risk of a payout needs some catch-all, because a list of named exploits will always be one exploit behind. It is an argument about what a buyer is agreeing to, which is that compliance at some of these firms is not something you can establish for yourself in advance.
The concrete list
TradeDay publishes the most specific set we found, and specificity cuts both ways:
- automated trading systems
- high-frequency scalping above 200 trades a day
- order splitting
- exploiting slippage
- VPN use
- hedging
Every one of those is checkable before you place an order, which makes them easier to comply with than a clause about intent. They are also easier to break by accident. Anyone running a VPN as a matter of routine privacy will breach that rule without doing anything a trader would recognise as cheating, and the same person may be running one on a work laptop without thinking about it.
The 200-trade line is the only numeric limit any of the six publishes. Everywhere else the equivalent rule is expressed as a description rather than a threshold, so the trader has no way to know when they crossed it.
What breaking one costs
The penalty is consistent across the six and it is not only the account.
The fee is kept. Every one of the six contracts makes the evaluation fee non-refundable, and termination for a prohibited act does not change that. Super Funded’s clause 16 spells it out: contraventions mean immediate termination without notice, forfeiture of “any existing or future right or entitlement you have to Payouts”, and “your Access Fee will not be refunded.”
Payouts already owed are forfeited. Clarity Traders carries forfeiture of profits; FundedNext may “withhold, suspend, or offset any pending or future Performance Rewards”; TradeDay forfeits profits found to come from exploiting the simulated environment.
At two firms, payouts already received can be recovered. Super Funded’s clause 24.3 lets it “take steps to recover sum(s) paid to you while you are (or were) in breach”, and Funded Futures Family states that “all Benefits you previously received are conditional and subject to clawback and forfeiture”.
So a rule broken in month three can reach money paid in month one. That is the part of these clauses least reflected in how the product is sold.
The rules that are about identity, not trading
A separate group has nothing to do with strategy, and it catches people who never intended to break anything.
Super Funded prohibits accessing multiple accounts “from the same location, terminal, or IP address, unless all the Accounts are owned by you and have been established by you in your own name”, and prohibits allowing a third party to place trades on your behalf. Its FAQ adds that multiple accounts detected on the same or related IP address is a Fair Use Policy violation that “may result in account suspension or termination”.
Read plainly, that means two traders in one household on one connection are a problem, and so is a shared office. Clarity Traders bans “coordinating across accounts” in the same spirit.
The practical reading is that these firms treat one account as one person in one place, and anything that blurs that is a breach regardless of whether trading was involved.
The one rule that is not in any of them
None of the six contracts we read caps how long the firm may take to review a payout request.
Super Funded reserves a review “on receipt of a Payout request”, where it “may assess and review your Trading activities to satisfy itself of your compliance”, and adds KYC as a separate gate it may deny a payout on at its sole discretion. Clarity Traders makes payments subject to “ongoing compliance, KYC verification, and discretionary review”. Neither attaches a deadline, and neither do the other four.
That absence is worth a moment, because a review with no time limit is a rule that cannot be breached and cannot be completed. It is also the one term you can ask about before paying, and the answer, in writing, is worth more than a percentage point of profit split.
Before you buy an evaluation
Find the prohibited-acts clause and read it in full. It is usually one section and takes ten minutes. It is the section that decides whether the fee comes back to you as a payout or stays with the firm.
Check the rules that are not about trading. VPN, IP address, who else uses your connection, and whether anyone else has ever had access to your account. These break more accounts than strategy rules do and none of them feel like cheating.
Count what you can count. If a firm publishes a numeric limit, like the 200 trades a day, you can design around it. If it does not, ask support in writing what the threshold is, and keep the answer.
Assume the catch-all applies. Where a contract lets the firm decide what counts as bad faith, no amount of care makes you certain of compliance, and pricing that uncertainty into the decision is more honest than assuming it away.
Our comparison of the six contracts sets out the rest of what they say about entities, fees, payouts and where a dispute would be heard.
What we checked, and what we didn’t
We read the terms and conditions of TradeDay, Super Funded, Clarity Traders, FundedNext, Top One Futures and Funded Futures Family between 25 August and 1 September 2026, and every quotation above is from those documents. Where we describe a firm’s rules we are describing that firm’s contract, and the six are not interchangeable.
We have not bought an evaluation, traded one, breached a rule, or had an account closed. This page reports what the contracts permit the firms to do, which is not the same question as how often they do it, and no document answers the second one.
Sources
- TradeDay: terms and conditions
- Super Funded: General Terms and Conditions, V.2 dated 22.01.26
- Clarity Traders: terms and conditions
- FundedNext: futures challenge terms