Restricted Trading Strategies

To maintain a fair, stable, and professional trading environment, Alpha Trader Firm enforces restrictions on certain trading behaviors and strategies.

These restrictions are designed to prevent manipulative, abusive, or exploitative practices that undermine the integrity of our evaluation model, distort risk, or rely on technical inefficiencies rather than genuine trading skill.

If trading activity is determined to be inconsistent with responsible risk management or professional trading standards, Alpha Trader Firm reserves the right to invalidate trades, fail the account, deny progression, or withhold payouts, even if no explicit numerical limit was breached.

A strategy that places multiple buy and sell orders at predefined price intervals, forming a “grid” structure.

While grid trading may profit from price oscillations, it creates artificial trade volume, introduces disproportionate risk, and often resembles automated or exploitative behavior. As such, it is not permitted.

A method that exploits delays between different price feeds or execution systems by entering trades before prices update to reflect true market conditions.

This strategy relies on technical delays rather than market analysis and is strictly prohibited.

A form of arbitrage where unfavorable trades are intentionally directed to one account while favorable trades are routed to another through asymmetric execution.

This behavior manipulates fills and violates both fairness and risk integrity.

Repeated execution of extremely short-duration trades, often held for only a few seconds, designed to exploit micro-price movements, execution speed, or server response times.

Tick scalping is prohibited because it prioritizes infrastructure exploitation over market skill.

Operating, controlling, or allowing another individual to trade an account on your behalf, or trading accounts owned by other individuals.

This violates identity verification, fairness, and compliance requirements.

Directly copying trades from another trader, signal service, trade copier, or mirrored system, whether automated or manual.

Duplicated trade behavior removes individual decision-making and invalidates the evaluation process.

Trading styles that rely on ultra-fast execution, automated algorithms, or extremely high trade frequency within short periods.

Retail trading environments are not designed to support true HFT without infrastructure abuse; therefore, such activity is restricted.

Any strategy that systematically increases position size following losses in an attempt to recover prior drawdowns in a single trade.

These strategies introduce unbounded risk and are incompatible with professional risk management.

Opening opposing positions across multiple accounts to guarantee a profitable outcome on at least one account.

This creates an artificial, no-risk environment and defeats the purpose of an individual performance evaluation.

Opening opposing positions on the same instrument within the same account (e.g., simultaneous buy and sell positions).

This artificially locks exposure and disrupts natural risk behavior unless explicitly permitted.

Placing limit orders that execute at prices significantly better than prevailing market conditions due to platform glitches, delayed feeds, or extreme volatility anomalies.

Intentionally exploiting such execution behavior is considered abusive.

Any attempt to exploit errors, delays, or inconsistencies in market data or broker infrastructure, including but not limited to:

Such behavior is considered fraudulent and strictly prohibited.

Executing trades based on charts or data feeds that are not updating in real time.

This provides an unfair informational advantage and invalidates execution fairness.

Trading during major macroeconomic events (e.g., NFP, CPI, FOMC) in a manner that results in fills far outside reasonable market ranges due to extreme volatility or spread expansion.

Trades benefiting from unrealistic execution conditions may be invalidated.

Alpha Trader Firm evaluates traders based on disciplined, sustainable risk management consistent with professional and institutional trading standards.

Accounts that demonstrate abnormally rapid equity growth driven by disproportionate risk exposure, compressed timeframes, or concentrated profit generation may be subject to enhanced review and deemed in violation of our risk policies.

This includes trading behavior that:

Trading activity that produces exceptional returns over unusually short periods, where the underlying risk profile would be considered unsuitable for professional capital deployment, may result in account failure or profit invalidation.

Alpha Trader Firm continuously monitors trading activity using automated systems and manual review processes.

Engaging in any restricted strategy or behavior may result in:

These measures are necessary to preserve a fair, transparent, and sustainable trading environment for all participants.

If you have questions regarding these restrictions, please contact our support team for clarification.