There is one idea underneath everything here. A funded account is meant to prove you can trade. The profit you make should come from correctly reading price, managing risk, and being disciplined, not from finding a crack in the system.

A simulated or sim-funded environment cannot perfectly match live market conditions. Fills, spreads, and latency behave a little differently than they would with real capital at a live broker. Most prohibited strategies are simply ways of profiting from that gap rather than from the market itself. When you do that, the result does not carry over to real trading, so it is not the skill Upcomers is paying for.

A simple test: if a technique would stop working (or lose money) the moment your orders hit a real live market, it is almost certainly prohibited here.

The practices below are not allowed on any Upcomers Futures account, in either the evaluation or funded stage, across Thunderbolt Classic, Thunderbolt Legacy, and Vanguard. This is the same firm-wide prohibited-strategy list that applies to every Upcomers product.

High-Frequency Trading (HFT), latency trading, and the Quick Strike Method. Automated high-frequency trading, tick-scalping bots, latency trading, and any Quick Strike style system that fires large numbers of orders to profit from the speed or delay of simulated fills rather than from market direction.

Arbitrage trading. Exploiting price differences between the platform and another venue or feed, including latency arbitrage against the simulated price.

Tick scalping. Trades with an average holding time below 30 seconds are likely to be treated as tick scalping and can trigger a rule violation. Real intraday scalping with a genuine market view is fine; systematically opening and closing inside seconds to farm micro-moves off the simulation is not.

Exploiting platform, data, or pricing errors. Trading on off-market prices, stale quotes, frozen feeds, obvious mispricings, data-freezing, or demo-server errors. If you notice the price feed behaving abnormally, the expectation is that you do not trade it and you report it, not that you load up on it.

All-or-nothing trading. Placing an oversized, maximum-risk position, or passing a phase on one or very few trades, betting the account on a single move to either clear the profit target fast or blow up trying. Using max size purely to game the trailing or daily drawdown is prohibited.

Martingale. Doubling size after a loss to force a recovery, especially when it is aimed at outrunning the drawdown. Adding to losers to force a break-even is not risk management, it is the opposite.

Grid trading. Layering a grid of orders around a level as your main way to trade or to average out of losers is not allowed.

Hedging and group hedging. Hedging is prohibited even within a single account (holding opposing positions on the same instrument to freeze risk). Group hedging, taking opposite positions on the same asset across two or more accounts so one side is guaranteed to win while the other absorbs the loss, is strictly prohibited. Using this cross-account "one-sided bet" to extract payouts from a losing account, or to reset or dodge a drawdown, falls under this too.

One-sided bets. Persistent one-directional exposure on a symbol or across your portfolio (for example buy-only, ignoring market conditions) is a breach of the trading rules.

Copy trading across different people. Copy trading is allowed only across accounts that you personally own. Mirroring the same trades across accounts owned by different traders is prohibited. Matching open and close prices, lot size, lot ratio, and symbols are auto-flagged and then manually reviewed.

Group and team trading. Coordinating with other traders to place the same trades at the same time, sharing a single strategy across a group, or trading in a way that only makes sense as part of a larger coordinated book. Each account is meant to stand on its own with a unique strategy.

Signal services. Trading someone else's signals or subscribing to a signal service is not allowed. Your trading must be independent. This carries a permanent ban.

Pass-your-challenge and account-management services. Paying or allowing a third party to pass your challenge or manage your account for you is prohibited and carries a permanent ban from all Upcomers services.

Account sharing. Letting anyone else trade your account, or trading someone else's, and reselling accounts. The account is designated under your name and you are expected to trade under your own identity, preferably from the same IP address. Sharing your password or access can result in account closure.

Emulators. Using emulators to spoof trading activity or the platform environment is strictly prohibited.

Hyperactivity. An account is flagged for hyperactivity when it exceeds 200 trades and generates more than 2,000 order operations in a single day. This catches automated spamming of the platform rather than genuine active trading.

Contract flipping to farm minimum days. Opening and instantly closing trades with no intent to profit, purely to tick off a minimum-trading-day requirement or to manufacture activity. A trading day should reflect real trading.

Rolling positions across the reset. Deliberately holding or opening positions around the daily reset (5:00 PM ET) to shift losses across the boundary and dodge the daily drawdown. Trading normally through the session is fine; engineering entries specifically to defeat the reset is not.

Automation and tools are not banned by default. Expert advisors, bots, and indicators are allowed when they represent a genuine, unique strategy with distinctive parameters that you own and understand. What is prohibited is using automation to abuse the simulation, to copy other people, to run an identical configuration across accounts, or to exploit technical inefficiencies.

You also have full freedom to use any indicator, any strategy, and any instrument or position size available on the platform, as long as your trading follows real market conditions and stays inside your Trading Objectives and account rules.

Several of the prohibited practices above are really just attempts to defeat the risk rules that keep your account alive. It helps to see them side by side:

Trade the way the rules assume you will, with a plan, a stop, and sensible size, and none of this is a concern. The prohibited list only ever bites people who were trying to skip the actual work.

News trading is allowed. Trading around scheduled high-impact news (for example the employment report, CPI, or FOMC decisions) is common in futures, and it does not appear on the prohibited-strategy list. There is no flat-position window before releases and no ban on holding through the number.

Two cautions, and they are cautions, not extra rules. First, holding a large position through a high-impact release can move your equity far enough to trip a drawdown breach in a single tick, and a breach closes the account automatically. Second, prices can gap and slip hard around news, and losses from widened spreads or slippage are not reimbursed. Trade news if it is part of your edge, but size it so a violent print cannot end your account.

Prohibited-strategy checks are applied to your trading history, and most heavily at payout time, which is where any attempt to game the account tends to show up. A suspected violation is reviewed manually by the Risk Management team, not decided automatically.

If a violation is confirmed, the account may be closed or the payout adjusted, and profits made through the prohibited activity can be removed. The most serious categories (paid pass-your-challenge or account-management services, copy trading between different people, and signal services) lead to rejection of the accounts and a permanent ban from all Upcomers services, meaning across every account you hold, not just the one where it was found. Coordinated or cross-account abuse can affect every linked account.

If the firm grants an account reset instead of a suspension, a permanent 50% payout cap is placed on that specific account for the life of the account, so a $4,000 payout on that account would be capped at $2,000. It is per account and cannot be reversed, and a second violation on a reset account results in permanent suspension.

Appeals. If you believe an account was closed in error, you can appeal. Submit your appeal within 48 hours of the closure email, and include your Account ID, a screenshot of the relevant trade history, and a short explanation. Appeals are reviewed within 5 business days and the outcome is final.

If you are ever unsure whether a technique is allowed, ask support at [email protected] or through the help center before you use it, not after.

Want the risk rules these practices try to beat? Read Trailing drawdown (Dynamic Risk Shield) and Daily drawdown and the 5:00 PM ET reset.

Trying to size positions safely and legitimately? See Contract limits explained and Mini vs micro contracts.