**Trading -> Trading rules** in your admin dashboard.

Your challenge rules answer what a trader made: the profit target, the daily
loss, the drawdown. These answer how they made it.

A rule is three decisions. What to measure, where the line sits, and what
happens when somebody crosses it. You compose them out of a fixed catalogue of
seven patterns, each of which is a specific calculation over the trade log. You
cannot add your own pattern, because a new pattern is a new calculation and that
is something we build.

## The seven patterns

| Pattern | What it measures | When it runs |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Minimum hold time | Seconds between opening and closing. Set it low to catch tick scalping | When a position closes |
| Trade burst rate | Positions opened inside a rolling minute | Before the order is placed |
| Oversized risk | The distance to the stop loss, as a share of the starting balance | Before the order is placed |
| Grid and martingale | A chain of trades that grow after each loss, and stopless positions held at once | When a position closes |
| Lot consistency | The trade furthest from the usual size, measured against the median | Hourly sweep |
| One-sided bets | The share of trades in one direction, across too few instruments | Hourly sweep |
| Single-trade target | The best trade as a share of net profit | Hourly sweep, and again at a phase pass or a payout |

Every one of them has knobs, and the editor tells you the range and the normal
value for each.

### Some detail worth knowing

**Minimum hold time only counts closes the trader chose.** A stop loss that hits
two seconds after the open is the market, and a margin call is us. Flagging
somebody for either would be accusing them of something they did not do, so only
a manual close and a take profit count.

**Hold times are measured to the millisecond**, so a floor of half a second is
a real rule rather than a rounding error. The lowest you can set is a tenth of
a second.

Below about a second, remember what the clock is measuring: we stamp the open
when our server writes the position and the close when the request to close it
arrives. A slow connection therefore reads as a longer hold, not a shorter one,
so the error only ever works in the trader's favour. Nobody is flagged for
somebody else's latency.

**Grid and martingale is two checks under one name.** The chain is a run of
trades in the same instrument and direction, each opened after the previous one
closed at a loss, each at least so much bigger than the one before. The grid is
several positions held at once in one direction without a stop loss. Either one
firing is a violation.

**Lot consistency measures against the median, not the average.** The single
huge trade this rule exists to catch drags an average towards itself, which
partly hides it. The median does not move, and the trade furthest from it is the
one the violation names.

**One-sided bets needs both halves.** Trading one direction across twenty
instruments is a bias, and that is a strategy. Trading one direction in one
instrument fifty times is a bet on a single move. Only the second fires.

**Oversized risk is the same calculation as the risk limit on your challenge
phase.** The difference is that this one you can set per rule instead of per
phase, and it can monitor or flag instead of always refusing. If a phase already
caps risk and a rule covers it too, both fire and the trader gets the stricter
of the two; the editor warns you when you build that.

## Where a rule applies

Three widths, and the most specific one wins for each pattern:

- Every account you have.
- Every phase of one challenge.
- One phase of one challenge.

So you set a house rule once and override it where a product needs different
terms. An instant funding account does not have to be held to the same hold time
as a two step evaluation.

Narrowing overrides per pattern rather than wholesale, so a phase rule about
hold time does not switch off your house rule about martingale.

## What happens when one fires

| Action | What the trader experiences |
| --- | --- |
| Monitor | Nothing. The violation is recorded and that is all |
| Flag for review | Nothing immediate. A review flag appears for your team |
| Block | The order is rejected, with the reason, in their own language. On a rule that runs at a phase pass or a payout, that is what gets held instead |
| Void the profit | The profit is taken off the offending trade and the balance corrected |
| Breach the account | The account is failed, its positions closed, and the run is over |

Only the actions that can work at that moment are offered. An order cannot be
refused hours after it closed, so a rule that runs on the hourly sweep will not
let you pick Block for it.

Two things about these worth saying plainly. **Void never touches a loss**,
because voiding a losing trade would be paying somebody for breaking a rule; the
original figure is kept on the trade and in the activity log. And **a trading
rule never suspends a login**. It can end a challenge account, which is a
trading decision; locking somebody out of their account is a fraud decision and
stays on the fraud screen.

## Building up before acting

A rule can act from the first violation or from the third. The ones before that
are still recorded, marked as having done nothing, and that is the point: a
trader who disputes the third finds the first two already written down. Nobody
is ambushed.

The count runs on the behaviour rather than on the rule that caught it, so
retuning a threshold or replacing a rule does not hand somebody a clean slate.
You can also count over a window rather than forever, because "three times this
week" and "three times ever" are different rules and both get meant.

**What counts as a violation is one offence, not one measurement.** The three
patterns on the hourly sweep measure the shape of a whole run rather than a
single trade, and that shape is still there an hour later. Sweeping again does
not find a second offence, so it does not record one: a run whose lot sizes
scatter is one violation until the trader trades again and the numbers move.
Otherwise a rule set to act on the third violation would reach three overnight
without anybody having placed a trade. A refused order is the other way round.
Each attempt is its own offence and each one counts.

## What it caught

**Trading -> Trading rules -> Violations** is every time a rule fired, filtered
by pattern, by outcome, by date, and by the trader or the account it happened
to. Each row opens onto the measurement in full:
the number that was taken, the threshold it broke, the trade and the account it
happened on, and the sentence the trader was shown.

All of that is frozen at the moment it happened. Renaming a rule, retuning it or
deleting it afterwards changes none of it, because that record is what a dispute
is argued over.

The same violations appear in two more places, so you find them whether you went
looking or not: on the trader's profile, beside the fraud flags, and on the
trading account, next to the rules that were in force on it.

## What the trader sees

Their account page lists the rules they are actually held to, in the same words
your editor showed you, along with anything of theirs those rules have recorded.

**Rules set to monitor are not shown to them.** Monitoring is how you try a
threshold out, and a threshold still being tuned is not yet a rule anybody is
bound by. If setting a rule to monitor published it, you could not evaluate a
detector without announcing it, and in practice you would skip that step and
enforce from day one, which is worse for the trader than not knowing.

**Violations building towards a consequence are shown.** A rule that acts on the
third violation shows the trader the first two, which is what stops the third
being a surprise. So is anything that already happened to them: a refused order,
a voided profit, a failed account, even if you have since deleted the rule.

## If you ticked the old boxes

Your challenge phases used to carry a row of prohibited strategy checkboxes.
They never detected anything: the platform stored the tick and traded on as
before. Anything you had ticked is now a rule on this screen, at the threshold
you typed where you typed one and at ours where you did not.

**They arrive switched off.** Those boxes changed nothing for as long as they
existed, so turning them on for you would start flagging traders for behaviour
they were effectively allowed until that moment, at a number you never chose.
Open each one, check the threshold, and switch it on when it says what you meant.

Three of the old boxes have no rule waiting. Gambling was always the risk per
trade on the phase itself, which has been enforced all along. Reverse trading is
picked up by the fraud screen, which looks across accounts, where it actually
happens. Latency arbitrage is gone: we are the broker, so our feed is the price,
and the only thing to arbitrage against is our own lag, which is our bug to fix.

## Starting safely

Set a new rule to monitor and leave it a week. The list shows how often each rule
fired and when it last did, so you can see what it would have caught before it
catches anybody. Turn it up once the number looks like what you expected.

Switching a rule off keeps it and its history and stops it applying. Deleting it
keeps the violations it already caught, so a trader disputing one still has the
record and so do you.