You can do everything in this course correctly, hit the profit target, and still lose the account.
That isn't a scare story — it's the design. The target is the only gate that's checked automatically and instantly. Everything else is checked afterwards, by a person, against your entire trade history, at the precise moment you're expecting to be paid.
Most people prepare exclusively for the gold one.
The four clauses that do the damage
Consistency caps. A limit on how much of your profit can come from one day or one trade — often in the region of 20–50%. Make most of your target on a single magnificent afternoon and some firms will decline the pass. It feels perverse when it happens to you, and the logic is unarguable: a firm cannot tell skill from a jackpot in a single result, and it's about to hand out real money.
News windows. Restrictions on opening, closing, or holding around high-impact releases. Some firms ban holding through them entirely, others police a window of a few minutes either side. This is the easiest rule in the entire structure to breach by pure accident, because it requires you to be checking an economic calendar you had no reason to think about.
Holding rules. Weekend gaps and overnight exposure are outside the firm's control, so many restrict both. The dangerous version is the firm that permits it on some account types and not others — because then you won't check, you'll remember, and you'll remember the wrong account.
Method rules. Copy trading, automation, and third-party signals. This is the one that surprises people hardest, so let's be direct about it.
Where alert services actually sit
We sell an alerts product, so you should read what follows with that firmly in mind. We'd rather tell you the awkward version than have you find out at payout review.
Many prop firms restrict or prohibit copy trading, and some extend that language to following third-party signal services. Breaching those rules can void an account — including one that has already cleared the target.
The distinction that usually matters in the wording is between mirroring and deciding. A copy-trading arrangement, where another account's trades are automatically replicated into yours, is what most of these clauses were written to stop — several traders producing identical fills the firm can't attribute to any individual's judgement. A human reading research, forming a view, and placing their own trade at their own size is ordinarily just research, which is the same category as a chart, a newsletter, or an economic calendar.
But — and this is the part we won't dress up — that distinction is ours, not your firm's. Some rulebooks are written loosely enough to cover any external input. Others say nothing at all, which is its own risk. The only document that governs your account is your firm's, and the only responsible thing we can tell you is to open it and search it for the words copy, signal, automated, and expert advisor before you rely on anything external, ours included.
If your firm's wording is restrictive, don't try to find a clever reading of it. A rule you have to be clever about is a rule you're going to lose an argument over, in a review you don't attend, against a decision that isn't appealable.
Next: what happens after you pass — and why the habits from this course aren't a phase you graduate out of.