Prohibited strategies in evaluation programmes fall into distinct groups, and the reasoning behind each group differs.
One group is restricted because the firm does not want the exposure. Holding positions overnight or across the weekend is commonly barred or capped, because a gap on reopening produces a loss the participant cannot manage and the firm cannot hedge in its own book. Certain instrument classes are excluded on the same logic: exotic pairs, low-liquidity indices, or single-name products with scheduled announcement risk. Position-size caps and limits on concurrent correlated exposure sit here too, restraining how much of the drawdown allowance one decision can consume. These rules concern risk shape, not honesty, and they usually appear as hard platform limits or automatic closures.
The other group exists because the account is simulated, and the pricing behind it is a feed rather than an executed order in a live book. A participant who enters immediately around a scheduled release, or in the thin session between market closes, may receive a fill at a price no counterparty would have honoured in size. Latency techniques — acting on a faster feed than the one the platform quotes from — and arbitrage between the platform's price and another venue's fall in the same category, as does deliberately holding through an event to harvest a fill the simulation permits but a real venue would have slipped or rejected. What is penalised is not the direction of the trade but the fact that the result depends on the gap between simulation and market.
Automated systems are treated on their own terms. Permission generally turns on two questions: whether the system belongs to the participant, and whether the same logic runs across multiple accounts. Copy trading, signal subscription and identical order flow across many participants are frequently barred, because the firm is then pricing correlated exposure it did not agree to underwrite.
The binding text is the terms and conditions attached to the account, not the summary on a marketing page; definitions of news trading, tick scalping and copy trading vary widely between firms and are sometimes revised between programme versions. Enforcement is normally retrospective — the trading record is reviewed when a withdrawal or a stage completion is requested, and the consequence is disqualification of the result rather than a warning during the attempt.