Consistency rule calculator

A consistency rule exists because prop firms are pricing the risk of a lucky trade, not a repeatable strategy. If a trader hits a single 5-lot news spike and the account is instantly up 40% for the evaluation period, the firm has no evidence that trader can do it again — the rule forces enough additional profitable days to demonstrate a process before real money leaves the firm's books. It is a statistical filter dressed up as a payout condition.

The mechanic is almost always the same shape even though the cap varies: take the profit from your single best day, divide it by total profit for the period, and compare that ratio to the firm's published cap. A trader withdrawing $10,000 with $4,000 of it from one day is at a 40% concentration. Against a 30% cap that withdrawal is not compliant; against FTMO's no-cap policy it is a non-issue.

Futures firms apply consistency rules far more often than forex firms, and there is a structural reason for it. A single futures contract on an index or a fast product like crude oil can move an account's daily P&L by a large percentage in minutes, so cheap, small futures evaluations are disproportionately exposed to one lucky session. Firms like Apex, Funding Ticks and Alpha Futures apply caps in the 30–40% range specifically to filter that risk out before it reaches a real payout. Forex firms trading a diversified pair set with tighter per-trade risk see less of this concentration naturally, which is why FTMO, The5ers and Alpha Capital Group can afford to skip the rule entirely.

The rule usually bites hardest right after a trader's best-ever trading day, which is exactly the moment they are most eager to withdraw. If your best day is a large share of total profit, the practical fix is patience: keep trading normally, bank a run of smaller profitable days, and the ratio falls even though you never touch the big day's number. Trying to reverse-engineer compliance by intentionally taking a loss is almost always against the spirit of the rule and, at several firms, against the letter of it too — read the rulebook's language on intentional loss-taking before you try it.

Some firms apply a softer version worth knowing about: progressive payout caps that limit how much of an account's total profit can be withdrawn until the account has matured over several payout cycles, independent of any single day's share. My Funded Futures and Tradeify use variants of this. It looks similar to a consistency rule in effect — early withdrawals are capped — but the mechanic is time-based rather than day-based, so the fix is different: you cannot dilute your way out of it with more trading days, you have to wait out the maturity window.

Where a firm's rulebook is ambiguous about whether the cap applies during the evaluation, on the funded account, or both, treat it as applying everywhere until you have read the current FAQ. Support teams at fast-growing firms have, in the past, given traders conflicting answers to this exact question, and a rejected payout after weeks of trading is a far more expensive mistake than five minutes of reading a rulebook.

This is a planning estimate based on published rulebooks. Firms can and do interpret consistency rules with discretion — contact support before a large withdrawal if you are close to the cap.