TradeDay rules explained

The drawdown mechanic — read this twice

TradeDay uses an end-of-day trailing drawdown. The limit trails your closing balance, not intraday spikes, so an unrealised runner that gives back profit does not permanently raise your stop-out level. It is meaningfully more forgiving than intraday trailing, but it still ratchets: every profitable close moves the floor up and never back down.

Whatever the model, size your risk against the buffer rather than the account size. The practical rule we use: never let a single campaign risk more than a third of the distance between current equity and the breach level.

Consistency and payout-eligibility rules

Consistency rules are where traders lose money they have already made. On TradeDay the stated position is: None on funded accounts. That leaves the payout gate mostly to the drawdown and minimum-days requirements.

The mechanic to watch is the single-best-day percentage. Where a firm caps one day at a share of total profit, a single outsized win can push a payout out by weeks because you must grind additional smaller days to bring the ratio back inside the cap. If you scalp news or trade one high-conviction setup a week, that mechanic will hurt you far more than a slightly lower profit split.

Full rule matrix

Each flag below is read off TradeDay's public rulebook and paired with the actual mechanic, because "allowed" means very different things from firm to firm.

• News trading: allowed — No news blackout on evaluation or funded accounts.
• Expert advisors / algos: conditionally allowed — Assisted automation allowed; fully unattended high-frequency systems are not.
• Weekend holding: not permitted — Flat before the weekend close on all plans.
• Overnight holding: conditionally allowed — Permitted on the end-of-day drawdown option; the intraday-drawdown option is same-day only in practice.
• Copy trading: conditionally allowed — Own-account copying allowed.
• No time limit: allowed — No calendar deadline on the evaluation.
• Crypto pairs: conditionally allowed — CME crypto futures only.
• No consistency rule: allowed — No consistency rule on funded accounts.

Rules that end accounts in practice

Beyond the headline limits, these are the clauses TradeDay actually enforces.

• Drawdown choice at signup: You select intraday or end-of-day trailing drawdown before you buy. The EOD option only recalculates the floor at the daily close, which is materially more forgiving than an equity-high trail that moves tick by tick.
• No daily loss limit: Unlike Topstep or Apex, TradeDay does not enforce a separate per-day loss ceiling — your only hard boundary is the overall trailing or static maximum loss for the account you chose.
• No consistency rule on funded accounts: A single strong session will not be capped or deferred at payout time, which removes a common source of withdrawal disputes at other futures firms.

Rule stability

TradeDay does not currently appear in our rule-change register, meaning we have not logged a material rulebook revision for it in the tracked period. Re-check before each payout anyway — firms are not obliged to announce changes prominently.

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