TradeDay Rules 2026: One Hard Rule, Three Objectives, Three Guidelines

# TradeDay Rules 2026: One Hard Rule, Three Objectives, Three Guidelines

TradeDay runs the simplest rulebook in futures-prop. The Help Center says it directly: "TradeDay has just one rule — Don't break the Maximum Drawdown Limit!" Everything else is either an evaluation objective you have to clear or a behavioral guideline that won't fail you for honest mistakes but will end the account if you abuse it.

I started trading TradeDay in December 2024 across multiple account configurations. Around $14,000 in cumulative payouts, currently no active account. The rules below come from running real accounts through evaluations and funded sim — not from reading marketing pages. The trap most new TradeDay traders walk into isn't in the rulebook itself. It's in misunderstanding which rules apply at which stage and which trailing drawdown method they actually signed up for.

This guide walks every rule that matters: the one hard rule, the three evaluation objectives, the three guidelines, and the rules that change between evaluation and funded. Every rule comes with the verbatim Help Center wording where it exists, plus the practical implication for how you trade.

What Is TradeDay's Single Hard Rule?

The hard rule is the Maximum Drawdown Limit. Break it and the account closes. The Help Center frames the entire rulebook around it because everything else is recoverable — you can fail an objective and reset, you can violate a guideline and get a warning, but you cannot un-breach a max drawdown.

TradeDay sells three drawdown variants and you choose one at signup:

The trailing variants share a critical mechanic that's underappreciated: once the trail reaches your starting balance, it freezes. From that point on, your "trailing" drawdown behaves exactly like a static drawdown. This is genuinely different from prop firms whose trailing drawdowns either follow you forever or trail to a different anchor — TradeDay's lock-in at starting balance is one of the more trader-friendly drawdown structures in the futures space.

The numerical example the Help Center uses: a $100,000 program starts with the Intraday TMD at $97,000 — a $3,000 trail distance. If your highest balance peaks at $103,000, your trailing limit moves up to $100,000 and locks there. From that moment forward, you have a $3,000 profit cushion above your locked drawdown that behaves like a permanent floor.

The full mechanics break down in TradeDay's maximum drawdown rule guide. The side-by-side comparison of when to pick which variant is in TradeDay drawdown types compared.

What Are the Three Evaluation Objectives?

TradeDay's evaluation runs against three objectives. You have to clear all three before the platform will graduate you to a funded account. The objectives don't fail you the way the drawdown rule does — they extend the evaluation until you meet them.

Objective 1: Trade for a Minimum of Five Days

TradeDay requires at least five trading days during the evaluation. As the Help Center puts it: "There is no upper time limit, but we need to see at least 5 days worth of trading data in order to complete this objective."

Two specifics that catch new traders:

• Days don't have to be consecutive. Any day with at least one trade counts. You can trade Monday, skip Tuesday, trade Wednesday, take Thursday off, trade Friday — that's three days, and you'll need two more across however many sessions you want to spread them.
• Subscriptions purchased before September 13, 2025 require 7 days. Everyone signing up after sees the 5-day minimum. If you bought a TradeDay account in mid-2025, check your specific terms — the older 7-day rule still applies to grandfathered subscriptions.

The platform also reserves the right to extend evaluations if material changes in trading behavior suggest you're trying to dilute the consistency rule by adding low-effort filler days. The Help Center calls this out explicitly: "sitting in a funding zone scratching 1 lot micros" once other objectives are met is flagged behavior. Real traders who simply want to wait for setups are fine; traders who place lazy filler trades to pass faster get extended.

Objective 2: Reach the Profit Target

The profit target is the cumulative net profit you have to accumulate during the evaluation. It varies by account type and size:

Static accounts have lower targets because they have lower drawdown allowances ($500–$1,000) and tighter position limits (1–3 contracts). The 6% target on Intraday and EOD accounts is competitive with the rest of the futures-prop space.

The full target-per-account breakdown with profit-day math is in TradeDay's profit target guide, and the per-size pricing is in TradeDay pricing 2026.

Objective 3: Be Consistent (30% Rule, Evaluation Only)

The consistency rule says no single day's profit can exceed 30% of your total profits earned during the evaluation. This is the most misunderstood rule at TradeDay and the one that's saved me from gambling-style behavior more than once.

It does not fail you. As the Help Center notes: "If you have a profitable day in excess of 30% of your profit target you do not fail the evaluation (but your profit target does increase)."

The math: take your best single-day profit and divide by 0.30. That's your new required total profit. If you make $1,200 in one day on a $3,000 target — that's 40% of target — your new required total becomes $1,200 ÷ 0.30 = $4,000. You'd need an additional $2,800 in cumulative profit while keeping every subsequent day at or below $1,200 × 30%-of-new-total proportionality before you can pass.

The rule's purpose is to filter out lucky single-day windfalls from genuinely consistent trading. The pass-friendly target is splitting your profits across more days, not bigger days. A trader making $500 across six days passes a $3,000 target cleanly. A trader making $2,500 on day one needs to grind another $5,800+ to satisfy consistency, even though they're already past target.

Critical clarification: this rule is evaluation-only. Funded accounts have no consistency objective. Once you pass the evaluation, you can have a $5,000 day on a $50K funded account with no consistency consequence. The full calculation walkthrough is in TradeDay's 30% consistency calculator.

What Are the Three Guidelines?

The Help Center distinguishes objectives (which you have to meet to pass) from guidelines (which won't auto-fail accidental breaches but will end the account if you intentionally abuse them). The three guidelines:

Permitted Products

You can only trade approved CME and CBOT futures and options products. The full permitted-products list lives in the Help Center and updates periodically as product offerings change. TradeDay restricts certain illiquid markets, gapped products, and instruments where simulator fills don't reasonably approximate live execution. Trading a non-permitted product accidentally won't fail the evaluation if it was a one-off misclick. Doing it repeatedly or as a strategy will.

Permitted Trading Times

Trading is restricted to liquid market hours. The Help Center has the full window per product, but the practical rule is: trade the regular session, avoid the thinly-traded overnight stretches and the immediate pre-open volatility. Trading outside permitted times when there's no liquidity to legitimately execute is flagged as gaming the simulator.

Maximum Position Limits

Each account size has a position cap. On Intraday and EOD accounts: 5 contracts on $50K, 10 on $100K, 15 on $150K. On Static accounts: 1 contract on $50K, 2 on $100K, 3 on $150K. The position limit is per direction, so you can't sidestep it by going long 5 ES and short 5 NQ simultaneously beyond what the limit permits.

The position-limit and contracts-vs-micros math (especially around micro futures where 10 micros count differently than 1 mini) is detailed in TradeDay's position-limits and micros article.

What Are Funded Account Rules vs Evaluation Rules?

The transition from evaluation to funded changes which rules apply. Some rules disappear, some stay, and a few new ones appear. Here's the full delta:

The biggest change is that funded accounts drop the consistency rule. Once you're funded, a single $5,000 day on a $50K account is allowed — there's no 30%-of-total cap. The maximum drawdown rule remains in effect but, on graduation to Funded Live, resets to zero (so a Funded Live $50K starts back at the original $48K trailing limit if you had Intraday TMD).

The buffer-clearing requirement only appears on funded accounts. The buffer is starting balance + max drawdown — for a $50K Intraday account with a $2,000 drawdown, you need to reach $52,000 before any withdrawal goes through. Withdrawals from inside the buffer zone are subject to a 50% split rather than the lifetime tier.

The complete funded-account rule changes are in TradeDay's funded account rules guide, and the buffer-zone math is in TradeDay's payout policy.

What's Forbidden: Prohibited Trade Practices

The Help Center maintains an explicit list of prohibited practices. These are different from guidelines because they don't have an "accidental" defense — they're presumed intentional, and breaching them confiscates profits. The full list verbatim:

• Automated trading systems and bots — third-party trading bots, ATSs, and AI-driven execution tools are forbidden. Manual execution only.
• High-frequency strategies above 200 trades per day — the daily trade-count cap on accounts.
• Market manipulation tactics — spoofing, layering, and disruptive practices per CME Group rules. Order splitting (multiple orders at the same price at the same time) is also flagged.
• Simulator exploitation — trading in gapped or illiquid markets specifically for stray fills, using unrealistic stop-loss execution to bracket data releases without slippage, queue-position gaming through limit-order manipulation in liquid markets.
• Account-related violations — signing up with multiple usernames or email addresses, hedging across your own connected accounts, trading "in concert with any other persons, including between connected accounts."
• Execution-environment violations — trading outside best bid/offer spreads, using external or delayed data feeds, trading within 2% of price limits on funded accounts (which loses access).
• Technical-environment violations — using AI, ultra-high-speed software, or mass data entry. Using VPN/VPS to mask location to bypass country restrictions.

The Help Center summarizes the consequence: "All profits generated from prohibited trade practices will be confiscated." In practice this means an account that gets flagged for prohibited behavior loses both the account and any pending withdrawal that hasn't already cleared.

The expanded breakdown with what each item means in practice is in TradeDay's prohibited practices article, and the news-trading lockout window detail is in TradeDay news-trading auto-liquidation.

What Happens at Tier-1 News Releases?

TradeDay auto-liquidates all open positions two minutes before tier-1 economic data releases and reopens markets two minutes after. The covered events:

• FOMC Minutes — 1:00 PM CT (all products)
• FOMC Interest Rate Decision — 1:00 PM CT (all products)
• US CPI — 7:30 AM CT (all products)
• Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP) — 7:30 AM CT (all products)
• EIA Crude Oil Inventories — 9:30/10:00 AM CT (oil contracts only)
• EIA Natural Gas Inventories — 9:30 AM CT (gas contracts only)
• Crop Production Reports — 11:00 AM CT (agricultural contracts only)

The flat-and-block window is non-negotiable. Trying to keep positions through it by holding through the system flatten will fail because the platform forces the close. Trying to game it by entering 90 seconds before release with a built-in 30-second-before-flat exit gets flagged and can end the account if it looks deliberate.

The Help Center is forgiving on accidental breaches: "TradeDay does not fail you for accidentally trading tier 1 economic data releases." But it's also clear that systematic circumvention is treated as gaming the platform.

How Does the Trailing Drawdown Lock-In Actually Work?

This is the rule that separates traders who understand TradeDay from traders who don't. The trailing drawdown locks at your starting account balance — meaning once your highest balance climbs enough that the trail reaches the starting balance, it freezes there.

Worked example on a $100K Intraday TMD account:

1. Account starts at $100,000 with the trailing limit at $97,000.
2. Best peak hits $102,000. The trail moves up to $99,000 (still $3,000 below peak).
3. Best peak hits $103,000. The trail moves to $100,000 — now equal to your starting balance.
4. From this point forward, the trail freezes at $100,000. Future profits don't move it. You now have a permanent $3,000+ cushion above the trailing line.

The frozen behavior matters because most traders intuit "trailing drawdown" as something that always trails. At TradeDay, it stops trailing once you've earned a starting-balance buffer. After lock-in, a $5,000 drawdown from peak still doesn't break you as long as you stay above the locked floor.

End of Day TMD works the same way but updates only at session close. Static drawdown skips the trail entirely — it's a fixed number from day one. The complete worked examples for each variant are in TradeDay intraday trailing drawdown explained and TradeDay EOD trailing drawdown.

Multiple Accounts: What Changed in 2026?

TradeDay launched multi-account support in early 2026. The current limits as of April 2026:

• Up to six accounts simultaneously, with a maximum of three Funded Sim accounts and one Funded Live account (the other two slots are evaluation-stage).
• Single platform only. All your accounts must run on the same trading platform — you can't split accounts between Tradovate and TradingView, for example.
• No new purchases while Funded Live is active. Once you activate Funded Live, you cannot buy additional accounts until the Funded Live is offboarded.
• Hedging across your own accounts is forbidden. Going long on one account and short on another for the same instrument triggers offboarding and profit forfeiture.
• Copy trading is partially allowed. External-to-TradeDay copies are fine. Copies between two or three of your own Funded Sim accounts are fine. Copies between Funded Sim and Funded Live are forbidden.

The full multi-account policy with discounted partner copy-trader integrations (Tradesyncer, Flowbots Replikanto, Expert Trading Programmers) is in TradeDay multiple accounts policy.

Eligibility and Country Restrictions

TradeDay restricts roughly 80 countries from signing up. The full list is verified in the Help Center, but the regions covered include most of Africa, large parts of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines), the Russia/Ukraine region, Cuba/Venezuela/Iran, and a handful of European countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Malta, Iceland). Canada is conditional — only Ontario is permitted, with the rest of the country excluded.

VPN and VPS use to mask location and bypass country restrictions is on the prohibited practices list. Traders flagged for location masking get offboarded with profits confiscated.

The complete country list and the eligibility-edge-case scenarios are in TradeDay banned countries and TradeDay eligibility requirements.

The bottom line

TradeDay's rulebook reads simpler than it trades. The Help Center's "one rule" framing is technically accurate — the maximum drawdown is the only line that auto-closes the account — but the three objectives and three guidelines are the rules that actually shape how you trade through an evaluation. The 30% consistency rule is the trap most traders walk into, and almost always because they didn't realize it applies only to evaluation, not funded.

If you're picking a drawdown variant: Intraday TMD suits aggressive scalpers comfortable with tight stops, EOD TMD suits intraday traders who want overnight-style breathing room within a single session, Static suits conservative traders who want a fixed dollar floor and don't mind the smaller profit target. The trailing-to-starting-balance lock-in is genuinely trader-friendly compared to prop firms whose drawdowns trail forever or to alternative anchors.

For the full account-by-account pricing including the 30%-off SAVE30 discount, head to TradeDay pricing 2026. For the post-passing payout flow, TradeDay payout policy. For the side-by-side against the rest of the futures-prop space, TradeDay vs Lucid Trading is the comparison most readers ask for.

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