Prop Firm Trading Rules: What Counts as Trade Manipulation?
At TEFS, our mission is to provide an elite, professional, and transparent simulated trading environment. We are built to identify, support, and reward genuine trading talent. To ensure a sustainable and level playing field for our entire global community, we have established clear guidelines regarding trading practices that cross the line from strategic trading into platform exploitation.
Our core policy is simple: we do not respect or reward any form of trading manipulation.
By manipulation, we mean any trading strategy, behavior, or pattern designed to exploit platform mechanics, system infrastructure, or structural rules to artificially increase your chances of success in non-legitimate ways. We want to see your actual market edge, not software trying to game the system.
To keep everything clear, here is a breakdown of what to avoid to keep your account in good standing, along with a quick look into how our Risk Team keeps things safe and fair for everyone.
1. High-Frequency Trading (HFT) and Prohibited Scalping
We look for consistent, repeatable trading strategies that reflect real-world market conditions. Ultra-short-term trading methods that attempt to profit from infrastructure speed rather than actual market analysis are strictly prohibited.
The 2-Minute Rule
Any trade that is opened and closed in under 2 minutes is classified as HFT or prohibited scalping.
Why Is HFT Prohibited?
These methods often rely on latency arbitrage: attempting to exploit tiny, millisecond-level differences between data feeds, or taking advantage of internet delays and pricing errors. In a simulated environment, this does not reflect live market reality and provides an artificial advantage.
How We Check This Fairly
- Trade monitoring: Our Risk Team actively monitors and reviews all trades that remain open for less than 2 minutes.
- Cancellation policy: TEFS reserves the right to cancel these short-duration trades and void any associated profits.
2. Cross-Account Hedging and Coordination
Trading must reflect your individual skills and independent decision-making. Using multiple accounts to mathematically eliminate risk is not allowed.
Opposite Hedging
You must avoid opening opposite positions across multiple accounts, for example going long on EUR/USD on one account while simultaneously going short on EUR/USD on another. Maintaining mirror-opposite positions across two different accounts is strictly prohibited under our trading rules.
The Reason
This strategy is frequently used to intentionally blow up one account to guarantee that a secondary account passes an evaluation or secures a payout. This removes the required risk management element from the evaluation process.
3. Copy Trading and Account Replication
Every account allocated to a trader must be treated as a completely separate, independent entity.
Avoid Trade Replication
You must avoid executing the exact same trades (identical assets, entry times, and relative sizes) across multiple profiles. This applies whether you are copying a third-party signal provider, mirror trading another user, or replicating your own entries across multiple personal accounts to treat them as a single aggregated pool to bypass allocation limits.
4. Sequential Drawdown Exploitation
System Mechanic Abuse
Avoid trading strategies that are specifically designed to exploit structural platform rules, such as trying to game the precise timing of daily drawdown resets or manipulating sequential drawdown windows to bypass standard risk boundaries rather than trading the market organically.
What This Actually Means, in Simple Words
This rule stops traders from trying to "cheat the software" using two specific tricks:
- The midnight clock game (time-based): A trader has a massive floating loss and is about to hit their daily limit. Right before midnight, they open a temporary trade to freeze or hide the loss just long enough for the server clock to reset to a fresh day, bypassing the daily loss limit.
- The hot potato / account pass (account-based): A trader has a trade that is heavily in the negative on Account A and is about to blow the account. Right before it hits the limit, they close the trade on Account A and immediately open the exact same trade on Account B, treating multiple accounts like a continuous chain to keep a single bad trade alive.
In both cases, the trader isn't managing risk based on the market — they are manipulating the platform's math to bypass the rules.
What Is Allowed? Multi-Account and Shared IP Rules
We want to make it clear that we fully support traders scaling their operations legitimately.
Multiple Accounts
It is perfectly fine to own and trade multiple accounts.
Shared Households and IPs
It is completely acceptable for two partners, roommates, or family members living in the same house to trade from the same IP address.
The Boundary
The requirement is that each account and each user must be treated entirely separately. Every account must run its own independent strategy. Accounts cannot be pooled, coordinated, or hedged against one another to game our systems.
Technical Exploitations to Avoid
Our Risk Department and automated protocols continuously audit trading data for other forms of technical platform abuse outlined in our Provider Service Agreement. Please ensure your trading avoids the following.
Latency Exploitation and Lag Trading
Attempting to execute trades at off-market prices by capitalizing on brief platform connectivity drops or data-feed delays.
Network Interference
Using external software, malicious Expert Advisors (EAs), ultra-high-speed scripts, or mass data entry tools that flood our API endpoints or interfere with the platform's networking and stability.
Illiquid Asset Manipulation
Attempting high-volume trading on low-liquidity, low-volume assets (like certain illiquid stocks) to create artificial price movements within the simulated environment.
Summary of Compliance
These guidelines are built solely to protect the integrity of our fair simulated environment. We want to reward great traders. Please note that accounts found utilizing prohibited trading methods, malicious EAs, or manipulative strategies will be canceled and banned without a refund.
For a complete breakdown of all standard risk parameters, like Max Daily Loss and Minimum Days, please review our Rules for Instant Funding and Challenges.
For the full legal framework, see our Provider Service Agreement.
