Guide

Custom prop firm rules: check a strategy against your challenge

Last reviewed: 16 September 2026·Tradelyze

A custom rule set is your prop firm's published limits, entered in Tradelyze by hand, so a backtest is graded against the exact challenge you plan to buy. Six fields are checked: max total drawdown, drawdown type, max daily drawdown, profit target, minimum trading days and consistency. Use one when your firm has no preset or its rules have changed.

New to prop firm challenges? Start with how prop firm challenges work, then prop firm rules and backtest metrics.

When should you use a custom rule instead of a firm preset?

Use a custom rule when no firm preset matches the evaluation you are buying. A preset is a rule set Tradelyze ships for a named firm. Three situations call for your own rule instead. Your firm has no preset. Your firm has changed its rules since the preset was written. Or your firm sells several products, and the preset models a different one.

Presets are snapshots. Tradelyze stores each firm's limits as they were understood when the preset was written, and does not check them against the firm's site. Here is one gap, as reviewed on 15 September 2026. Tradelyze's Topstep presets check consistency at 50% of net profit. Topstep's help center, retrieved the same day, says a Trading Combine trader's best day must stay at or below 55% of the Profit Target. The preset and the firm now differ in both the percentage and what it is a share of, so a Topstep trader needs a custom rule, or a careful read of the consistency row.

You can create a custom rule in three places:

• the Prop Firm Rules page, with Add Custom Rule;
• the Run Optimization dialog, under Custom Prop Firm Rules, with Create Custom Rule;
• the new strategy wizard's prop firm list, under Custom (Your own rules), with Create new rule.

Each rule is saved to your account for reuse, up to 100 rules. A custom rule matters for your money because a preset that is out of date can pass a strategy the firm would fail. Checking the firm's current terms takes minutes; a failed challenge costs a fee.

How do you translate a firm's rules into each custom rule field?

Translate a firm's rules by reading each limit off the firm's current terms, for the exact account size you plan to buy. Then enter it in the matching custom rule field. Firms often state drawdown limits and profit targets in dollars, while the form takes percentages. One division converts them:

The form's lower fields are Tier, Phase 2 profit target %, Time limit (days), News trading and Weekend holding allowed. The form says those fields are saved with your rule for reference, but the optimizer does not evaluate against them. Tradelyze also adds one check the form has no field for. Every custom rule requires at least 1 trade, on a Rule Results row named min_trades. A field you leave blank still gets a Rule Results row, with no tick or cross and no limit, so a missing check is never mistaken for a passed one.

Which drawdown type matches your firm: static, trailing, end-of-day trailing or end-of-day balance?

Match the drawdown type to two facts in the firm's terms: where the floor starts, and whether it moves. The floor is the balance level that ends the account if the account reaches it. A static floor is set once, from the starting balance. A trailing floor rises with the account's highest point and never falls back.

On the same trades, Tradelyze's four drawdown figures fall in a fixed order. Trailing Realtime is never smaller than any other type, and EOD Balance is never larger. That follows from how Tradelyze calculates them. A walk trade by trade sees every point a walk from close to close sees, and a running high is never below the starting balance. If a firm's wording leaves you between two types, pick the stricter one and ask the firm.

Is the daily limit measured from the starting balance or the day's start, and in which timezone?

A custom rule always measures the daily limit against the starting balance, and the form has no setting to change it. For each day, Tradelyze takes the fall from that day's opening balance to its lowest balance after a closed trade. It divides that fall by the starting capital. On a $100,000 account with a 5% limit, every day's allowance is $5,000, however far the balance has moved.

That matches FTMO. FTMO's Trading Objectives page, retrieved 16 September 2026, sets the 2-Step Challenge's Maximum Daily Loss Amount at 5% of the Initial Simulated Capital. That is FTMO's term for the starting account size. A custom rule does not match a firm that sets the allowance as a percentage of each day's opening balance. Against such a firm, a starting-balance check is looser after losing days and stricter after winning days. Starting balance or today's balance works through both.

Tradelyze splits days at midnight in the Exchange Timezone set on the strategy, and files each trade under the date it closed. The Chart Timezone is a different setting: it is the clock your uploaded market data and trade list are read in, not the calendar that counts days. The same day split decides four checks: the daily limit, Min trading days, consistency, and both end-of-day drawdown types.

Firms reset on their own clock. FTMO's page recalculates its daily limit at 00:00 CE(S)T, midnight Central European time. Trades that close near a firm's reset can land on a different day in Tradelyze. The Message on the daily-limit and trading-days rows names the calendar used, for example “counted in America/New_York”. Check that it names the timezone you expect.

Firms that measure the day on equity also count losses inside open trades, and Tradelyze does not. Do open losses count toward the daily loss limit? shows how a trade held past a reset can break a firm's rule. When the daily loss limit resets covers reset times.

Which rules does Tradelyze not evaluate, and how do you check them yourself?

Tradelyze does not evaluate a firm's time limit, news-trading rules or weekend-holding rules. The custom rule form shows fields for all three, plus Phase 2 profit target % and Tier, but saves them only for reference. A Qualifies badge, which means every checked rule passed, says nothing about them. Check each one yourself against the trade list: your TradingView export, or a trial's file from Download Trades in the Top Trials table.

These gaps matter for your money because one broken news or weekend rule can end a challenge that passed every drawdown check. Read the firm's terms for each rule before paying the fee. What Qualifies and Not Feasible mean lists the same exclusions.

What does a real firm's rule set look like as a custom rule?

A real firm's rule set becomes a custom rule of five entries, plus a note of what the form cannot hold. This example uses the FTMO Challenge phase of FTMO's 2-Step Challenge, on a $100,000 account. The firm's figures come from FTMO's Trading Objectives page, retrieved 16 September 2026. The backtest results further down are a constructed illustration, not measured data.

Static fits better than EOD Balance here. FTMO's Maximum Loss is a fixed level that equity must not cross at any moment. Static checks the balance after every closed trade, so it sees more of each day than EOD Balance, which looks only at the close. Tradelyze's own FTMO preset uses EOD Balance, so this custom rule is the stricter of the two on the same trades. For the Verification phase, create a second rule with Profit target % set to 5. Name each rule after its source, for example “FTMO 2-Step 100K, terms of 16 Sep 2026”. Then set initial_capital=100000 in the script's strategy() declaration.

The rows follow a fixed order, and the blank consistency field shows as a row with no verdict rather than disappearing. Every rule that was checked passed, so this card reads Qualifies. The rows describe the settings Tradelyze recommends for this rule set, not every trial it tried. Suppose instead the worst day had lost 5.60%. The first row would show a red cross. Its Message would read “Daily DD 5.60% (initial_capital, as a share of your starting balance) > 5.00% limit”, followed by the timezone note. The card would read Not Feasible. How to read the Rule Results table explains each column.

Why is loosening a limit to reach Qualifies self-deception?

Loosening a limit until the card reads Qualifies is self-deception because the firm keeps its own limit. The card changes; the account's risk does not. A custom rule is useful only as a faithful copy of the firm's terms. Edited to fit the strategy, it grades the strategy against itself.

A constructed illustration, not measured data: a strategy's Total DD row reads 11.20% against FTMO's 10% static limit. Raising Max total drawdown % to 12 turns the row green. On that same path, a $100,000 account's balance would still have fallen to $88,800. That is below FTMO's $90,000 Maximum Loss Limit, which ends the challenge.

Three quieter edits do the same damage. One is switching a trailing firm to Static or EOD Balance. Another is clearing the daily limit. The third is setting initial_capital above the account you will buy, which shrinks every percentage when trade sizes stay the same. Some edits are legitimate: the firm changed its terms, you are buying a different product, or you typed a number wrong. When you make one, record the source and date in the rule's name.

When a drawdown row fails, test a smaller position size before changing the strategy. What to do when a prop firm card reads Not Feasible walks through that. Position sizing for prop firm challenges turns a dollar allowance into a trade size. Re-running with small changes until a check passes weakens that check too. Why re-optimizing until it passes is a trap explains the arithmetic.

Do custom rules cost credits?

Custom rules cost no credits. When a run is charged for prop firms, the charge counts only preset firms; your own rules add nothing. The Run Optimization dialog shows this before you confirm, and its cost line notes how many of the selected rules are custom and free. Custom rules still count toward the limit of 3 prop firms per optimization.

Submitting a strategy, Re-Evaluate and Resubmit have costs of their own that do not depend on custom rules. Credit prices and allowances can change during the beta, so the current rules live in one place: how credits are used. Account questions are collected in the Learn FAQ.

Frequently asked questions about custom prop firm rules

Sources

• FTMO, Trading Objectives, ftmo.com/en/trading-objectives, retrieved 16 September 2026 — for the 2-Step Challenge: a Profit Target of 10% of the Initial Simulated Capital for the FTMO Challenge and 5% for the Verification; a Maximum Daily Loss Limit recalculated daily at 00:00 CE(S)T as the balance recorded then minus a Maximum Daily Loss Amount of 5% of the Initial Simulated Capital; a Maximum Loss Limit of the Initial Simulated Capital minus 10% of it; equity defined to include the profit or loss on open positions; at least 4 Trading Days, a Trading Day being any day from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 CE(S)T on which at least one position is opened. The page lists a Best Day Rule for the 1-Step Challenge and the FTMO Account (1-Step) only. The firm's terms are paraphrased here, not quoted.
• Topstep help center, consistency article, help.topstep.com article 8284208, retrieved 16 September 2026, when the page was marked “Updated today” — Trading Combine: “Your single best day of profit must stay at or below 55% of your Profit Target.” Express Funded Account: a consistency percentage of 40% or below for payout eligibility.
• Tradelyze implementation, reviewed 15 September 2026 — the custom rule form's fields and labels, and its note that the lower fields are saved for reference but not evaluated; the six evaluated fields; the drawdown types Static, EOD Balance, Trailing Realtime and Trailing EOD, each built from closed trades as a share of the starting capital, with Trailing Realtime following closed trades, not live equity, and no lock at the starting balance; the starting-capital basis for every custom rule's daily limit; the starting capital read from initial_capital in the script's strategy() declaration, with a non-literal value refused and a missing one written in for the run; days counted by close date in the strategy's exchange timezone, with the Chart Timezone as the clock the uploaded files are read in; a min_trades check with a limit of 1 on every custom rule; a row with no verdict and no limit for each field left blank; consistency reported as not evaluated when the backtest made no net profit; the Rule Results columns, row order and message formats; the Qualifies badge computed on the recommended settings for each rule set; the Topstep presets' 50% consistency check and the FTMO preset's EOD Balance drawdown type; custom rules excluded from the per-firm credit charge; and limits of 100 saved custom rules and 3 prop firms per optimization.
• Constructed illustrations — the Rule Results rows, the 5.60% daily figure, the 11.20% drawdown example and the $1,000,000 starting-capital example on this page are constructed illustrations, not measured data.