News, EA, weekend and crypto trading rules

Trading-style restrictions are where prop firm rulebooks diverge most from each other, and they matter more to a trader's realistic outcome than profit split ever does — a strategy that depends on holding through NFP or running an algorithm around the clock is simply incompatible with a firm that restricts either, regardless of how attractive the rest of the offer looks.

News trading is the most commonly restricted behaviour in our dataset: only 68% of firms allow it without qualification, while 32% allow it with conditions (usually a no-entry window around high-impact releases) and 0% restrict it outright. Futures firms are systematically more permissive here than forex firms, largely because they manage risk through published per-contract position limits instead of a news blackout.

Expert advisors and automation show the widest range of interpretation across firms: 53% allow them without restriction, but the 44% majority marked "limited" typically means semi-automated or assisted systems are fine while fully unattended, always-on algorithms are not — a distinction that matters enormously if your strategy is built to run without you at the keyboard.

Weekend holding and crypto access largely track each other in our data, because most weekend-restricted firms are futures-first firms whose underlying markets close for the weekend regardless of the firm's rules. 32% of firms allow weekend holding and 53% offer at least some crypto access, with crypto-native firms trading 24/7 by definition.

Consistency rules — the requirement that no single day account for too large a share of total profit at payout time — sit outside the "trading style" category but affect the same population of aggressive or concentrated traders. 44% of firms in our dataset have no consistency rule at all, which is worth checking before you build a strategy around a small number of high-conviction trading days.