What gets accounts closed

Funded accounts end in three ways: a drawdown or daily-limit breach, a rule breach discovered on review, or the firm closing the account for reasons that are in the terms but not on the rules page. The first is arithmetic and this course has covered it. The other two are worth a lesson because they are avoidable and because they are where payouts go missing.

Category one: the mechanical breach

The trail line or the daily limit is touched. The platform closes positions and the account is over. Common funded-phase versions:

• The morning after a big day. A new EOD high yesterday, an ordinary loss today, and the line was closer than it looked.
• Size jumped with the balance. The scaling plan allowed 5 contracts; the trader used 5; one normal stop was 25% of the allowance.
• A gap or a fast market. A stop filled well beyond the intended level, and the unrealised loss touched the line before the fill.
• A payout shrank the cushion. Balance $54,100, withdraw $2,000, and the room above the line went from $4,100 to $2,100 without anything on the chart changing.

All four are answered by Module 5, lesson 2: buffer first, size ladder, and recomputing the lines every evening including after a payout.

Category two: the rule breach on review

The account looks fine, a payout is requested, and the firm's review finds something. Typical findings, roughly in order of frequency:

None of these require intent. A stop that triggered four seconds after the news window opened is, at some firms, a breach. The defence is margins: flat ten minutes before the window, flat ten minutes before the close, size two steps under the cap, and the same device and location every day.

Key idea: Reviews happen when money is about to leave the firm. Every rule you were technically inside of during the evaluation will be checked again at payout, by a person, with the incentive pointing one way. Leave margins around every line so there is nothing to find.

Category three: closure under the terms

The terms of nearly every firm include the right to close any account, at the firm's discretion, with or without cause, and to deny payouts for trading the firm considers abusive, inconsistent with a live market, or in breach of the spirit of the rules. Firms have used these clauses in ways that range from reasonable (a customer running a latency bot) to indefensible (closing a large number of profitable accounts shortly before a rule change). You cannot fully protect against the second, but you can reduce the damage:

• Keep the balance small. Withdraw on every eligible date. A closed account with $500 on the ledger is an annoyance; one with $15,000 is a loss you will not recover.
• Keep records. Screenshots of the rules as they stood when you bought, the dated rules sheet, every support reply, and every trade with timestamps. If the closure was wrong, this is what a dispute or a chargeback is built on.
• Trade like a live account. Reasonable hold times, sizes proportional to your history, no clustering of trades around known sim weaknesses. It is the whole defence against the catch-all clause.
• Diversify across time, not accounts. Successive small payouts from one account are safer than one large balance in one account, and safer than the same balance copied across several accounts at the same firm.

The closure post-mortem

If an account is closed, do the same log review as after a failed evaluation, plus:

1. Which category was it? Mechanical, rule on review, or discretionary?
2. If mechanical, which line, and was the line on the rules sheet correct that day?
3. If a rule on review, what margin would have prevented it, and is it now on the sheet?
4. If discretionary, is there a pattern in the community forum (/f/prop-firm-reviews) suggesting the firm does this regularly? If so, that is a firm-selection finding for Module 6, not a trading finding.

Try it: List the five rules that could be breached on review at your firm (news window, session close, size cap, hold time, device/location). Next to each, write the margin you will keep: minutes before the window, minutes before the close, contracts under the cap. Add them to the rules sheet.

Recap

• Mechanical breaches on funded accounts usually come from post-high mornings, size increases, fast markets, or payouts shrinking the cushion.
• Rule breaches are found on review at payout time; news windows, caps, session close and cross-account matching are the common ones.
• Discretionary closure is in every firm's terms; keep the balance small, records complete, and trading indistinguishable from a live account.
• After a closure, classify it, fix the margin or the sheet, and treat discretionary patterns as a firm-selection problem.