Categories
The 12 categories of payout denial, adopted from hftarbitrageplatform.com’s taxonomy. Category definitions and the share estimates below are from hftarbitrageplatform.com (accessed 2026-08-03); we adopt the taxonomy, not the shares, as our measurement. Each category links to its own page with the firms affected and the verified-cases ledger.
Offsetting positions across multiple accounts (often across firms or against a live account) so that one side profits regardless of direction, eliminating real risk and violating the firm’s single-account risk model.
Exploiting price-feed delays between the firm’s demo/simulated feed and a faster reference feed to lock in risk-free profit before the firm’s price updates.
Duplicating another trader’s positions (or having one’s positions duplicated) so that identical trades appear across multiple accounts — ‘trading in concert’.
Trading around high-impact scheduled news releases in breach of the firm’s news-trading restrictions (e.g. bracketing pending orders around news, or trading restricted instruments during blackout windows).
Holding positions overnight or over the weekend in breach of the firm’s holding-period restrictions (typically applies to Standard/Eval account types).
Exceeding per-trade or per-lot size limits, or breaching profit-consistency / best-day rules that cap how much of total profit may come from a single day or trade.
Failing to meet the minimum trading-day requirement, or breaching the maximum time limit (where one applies), before requesting a payout.
Recovery-style position scaling (martingale, grid, cost-averaging) that rapidly increases exposure after losses, breaching risk-management rules.
Material divergence between the simulated (demo) evaluation environment and the live/funded execution that the firm alleges invalidates the evaluation result.
Failure to complete identity verification (KYC), video interview, or document checks within the firm’s deadline, triggering payout denial and account cancellation.
Operating more accounts than the firm permits, or using multiple accounts to circumvent per-account risk/consistency limits.
Firm-reserved discretionary termination/denial rights not captured by a specific rule — broad ‘unsportsmanlike conduct’, ‘abuse of system’, or ‘we may deny at our sole discretion’ clauses.