Multi-account rules govern how many simulated evaluations one person may hold at once, how much combined simulated size those accounts may carry, and whether identical trades may be mirrored across them. The rules exist because correlated positions change the shape of the firm's exposure. A single directional bet placed across several accounts produces several separate claims if it succeeds, while the evaluation fee was priced against one account behaving independently. The firm's arithmetic assumes a spread of uncorrelated outcomes; duplicated trading removes that spread without removing the payout obligation.
Four positions appear most often, sometimes combined. First, a numeric cap on accounts held by one individual. Second, a cap on total simulated capital across all accounts, which binds independently of the account count and is usually measured on the aggregate of allocated sizes rather than on current balances. Third, permission to copy trades between accounts a person holds in their own name, while prohibiting copying between accounts registered to different people. Fourth, prohibition of group trading, signal-following and managed arrangements, where several unrelated participants act on one source of instruction. The third and fourth positions are the same principle applied at different scales: the firm accepts concentration inside one identity and refuses it across identities.
Detection is retrospective, not preventive. Nothing blocks the order at entry. Instead, records are reviewed afterwards for clusters of entries and exits within narrow time windows, position sizes that scale proportionally across accounts, identical instrument selection, and shared device fingerprints, IP addresses or payment instruments. Reviews are commonly triggered by a payout request rather than by the trading itself, so the interval between the conduct and the consequence can be long. When a breach is found, the consequence normally applies to every account in the cluster simultaneously, including accounts that were individually compliant.
Accounts opened under different names, family members' identities or separate corporate entities to defeat a cap are treated as the most serious category. Firms class this as misrepresentation rather than a rule breach, which typically removes any discretionary remedy and can extend to permanent exclusion. The distinction that matters is not how the trades were placed but whose identity the accounts were opened under.