Only 39 of 71 prop firms say what their news rule is once you are funded

A prop firm evaluation is a test with published rules. The funded account is a second set of rules, and nothing obliges a firm to make them the same. News trading is where that gap does the most damage: a trader spends weeks passing a challenge in which trading through CPI is fine, gets funded, trades through CPI, and finds out the funded account never allowed it.

Nobody had counted how often that happens. So we opened the published rules of all 71 firms FirmFax tracks and recorded two things per firm: the news rule during the evaluation, and the news rule on the funded account.

18 firms tighten it. 21 publish a rule that covers both stages and does not change. Not one firm in 71 loosens the rule once funded — the asymmetry runs one way, which is what you would expect from who is carrying the risk.

And 27 firms, 38% of the set, do not state the rule at both stages at all. That is the largest group, and it is the study's real result. A firm that never publishes its funded-stage news rule is telling a trader to find out by being breached.

The rule tightens at 18 firms

Every firm in this group says so on its own pages; none of it is inference. Funded Futures Network publishes the split as a table, and it is the plainest statement of the problem anyone in the sector has printed: T1 news trading in an evaluation is permitted and "does not blow the account", while the same trade on an Exhibition, Sim-Funded or Live-Funded account means "immediate account liquidation", no appeal, all profits forfeited.

FTMO is the largest firm in the group and is equally direct: "These restrictions apply only once you start trading on an FTMO Account. They do not apply during the Evaluation Process."

What the funded rule turns into

Where the funded stage is a blackout rather than a ban, the windows cluster the way every other rule in this sector clusters — a handful of round numbers copied between firms.

3 of the 18 do not publish a window on the funded side because there is nothing to time: E8 Markets, Funded Futures Network, MyFundedFutures move from a permitted evaluation to a funded account where the trade is barred outright. MyFundedFutures is the sharpest case, because both halves are published in one policy — a 2-minute buffer applies everywhere, and Tier 1 releases are permitted on evaluations and Builder plans while being prohibited on Rapid and Pro Sim Funded.

21 firms run the same rule at both stages

This group is a real finding too, and it splits in half by how confidently a reader can rely on it. 31 firms across the whole census name both stages in as many words — Goat Funded Trader's "this rule applies equally to both the challenge phase and the funded phase", Blue Guardian Futures' "News trading is allowed on both Challenge and Funded Accounts", Topstep's "in SIM or Funded Accounts". 8 firms publish a single unqualified sentence and leave the reader to assume it spans both. We have marked which is which rather than treating them as the same claim.

Nobody loosens it

The empty bucket is worth naming. Across 71 firms there is not one that restricts news trading during the evaluation and then permits it once funded. Every published change runs in the direction of the firm's own risk, which is not a scandal — it is simply the shape of the product, and it is the reason a permission granted during a challenge should never be read as a permission that survives it.

27 firms do not say

The largest bucket. These are firms whose own published rules do not answer the question at both stages. Most say nothing about news anywhere we could find it: Bulenox publishes a FAQ heading reading "Can I trade the news?" with no answer beneath it, and FXIFY publishes a question titled "What is the news rule?" whose answer does not render. The question is published. The rule is not.

A smaller group publishes exactly one stage. Take Profit Trader states that PRO accounts must be flat one minute either side of a prohibited news event, and on the same page scopes a different rule to "all account types: Test, PRO, and PRO+" — the firm knows how to name every stage and did not do it for news. OneUp Trader puts its news rule in the Funded Trader Rules and nowhere in the evaluation guidance. T4TCapital is the mirror image: "News trading is fully permitted" sits under evaluations, and the funded section is silent.

Silence is not permission. Where a firm has not published its funded-stage rule, FirmFax resolves the unknown to the strictest thing that firm is documented to publish anywhere, and prints "Not stated" rather than "Allowed". The cost of the other error is a trader's payout.

6 firms contradict themselves

This study exists because of one of them. Tradeify's rules overview was read in an earlier pass as asserting a news restriction; its dedicated news article says "We do not have any rules against or guidelines around trading news events." A verifier of ours read the summary, believed it, and wrote a false correction into our data on the strength of it. When we re-read the overview for this census it no longer carries a news line at all — the two pages agree now, but only because the summary changed.

The pattern generalises. FundingPips manages it inside a single page: "During the Evaluation Stage: There are no restrictions on holding trades during news events" sits three lines above "Purposely trading news in both evaluation and master phase is prohibited and will lead to account closure." A trader cannot act on both sentences.

Where two of a firm's pages disagree we have recorded both and taken the dedicated policy page as the authority, because a summary is a description of a rule and a policy page is the rule.

Two of those rows are corrections to us rather than findings about a firm. The Trading Pit publishes a rule stage by stage for each of its three products and we had it recorded as unrestricted, which is true of one product out of three. TradeDay auto-liquidates every open position 2 minutes before its tier 1 releases, and we had that recorded as unrestricted too.

The census turned up eight firms whose stored record told a reader news trading was unrestricted while the firm's own page restricts it, in six cases only once the account is funded. FTMO, Funded Futures Network, Hola Prime and TradeDay were the worst of them, because the permission was stored at firm level and on every plan row, which is what our news-allowed guides read. All eight were corrected on the day this study was published, and the four named above no longer appear on those guides. The correction is recorded here rather than on our rule tape, which stays a record of what firms did, not of what we got wrong.

Limitations

• 5 firms we could not read at all. Breakout, E8 Futures, Funded Crypto Family, FundingTicks, TickTickTrader refused every request to their own rules pages, mostly with an HTTP 403 from a help-centre bot check, or served pages that rendered no content. These are counted separately from "does not say", because we cannot tell the difference between a firm that publishes nothing and a firm whose page we were blocked from reading.
• Some rules vary by product, not by stage. Dominion Funding answers the question with "It depends on the challenge model you opted in for". Lucid Trading bars red-folder news on LucidDaily and permits it on Flex, Pro and Direct, at both stages. MENT Funding runs no news lockout on futures and a 3-minute rule on forex, throughout. A per-stage frame cannot describe those firms and we have not forced it to.
• Some firms have no evaluation stage to compare. Instant and direct-funding products put a trader on a funded account immediately, so there is no earlier rule for the funded rule to differ from. Where a firm sells both kinds, the census records the challenge products.
• The sample is the firms we track, not the sector. 71 firms is a large slice of the market a retail trader actually shops, and it is not a random sample of every prop firm trading. Percentages here describe this set.
• A page is a snapshot. Every row carries the date it was read. Tradeify's overview changed between two of our own passes; there is no reason to think it is the only one that will.
• Absence of a rule on the pages we read is not proof of absence. A firm filed under "does not say" may state the rule in a terms document, a dashboard calendar, or an email we have not seen. What the 27 rows claim is narrower and still worth publishing: a trader reading that firm's own rules pages cannot find out.

Method

For each of the 71 firms FirmFax tracks, we opened the firm's own published rules - a dedicated news-trading policy page where one exists, otherwise the account-rules, help-centre or terms page most likely to carry the rule - and recorded what the rule is during the evaluation and what it is on the funded account. Third-party listings, review sites and coupon aggregators were not accepted as evidence at any point. Every row names the URL read and the date it was read. Where a firm's summary page and its dedicated policy page disagreed, both were recorded and the dedicated page was treated as authoritative. A firm counts as stating both stages only when its own wording covers both; a single unqualified sentence is recorded as covering both but marked as inferred, and those two are never added together without saying so.

The dataset below carries one row per firm — outcome, both stages, the window in minutes where one is published, the note, the URL read and the date. It is the same file this page renders from, so the page and the download cannot disagree.