Prop Firm News Trading Rules: Why Most Restrict It, We Don't

Ask ten prop firms whether you can trade the Non-Farm Payrolls release and you will get ten answers, most of them with footnotes. Some say yes. Some say yes during the evaluation and no once you are funded. Some say yes, but any profit from a trade opened within three minutes of the release is removed. One large firm restricts order execution for two minutes either side of a list of named events, on the affected instruments only, and only on one account type. This post explains where those rules come from, what they are protecting against, what the actual risk of a news trade looks like on a $50K account, and why Bold Funded's answer on every plan is a short one: allowed.

Prices and rules below are Bold Funded's launch defaults on the forex and futures plan cards as of 22 October 2026. Forex products are not offered to residents of the USA or Canada; futures are.

What a prop firm news trading rule actually says

News trading rules come in four shapes. Knowing which one a firm uses matters more than whether it "allows news trading" in the marketing copy, because the detail is where accounts are lost.

The first is the full ban: no positions open through a listed high-impact release, on any instrument. This is now rare on forex plans but still appears on some instant-funding products. The second is the blackout window, the most common shape: no orders may be opened or closed for a fixed number of minutes before and after a scheduled release, usually on instruments tied to the currency being released. The third is the profit-removal rule: you may trade, but profit earned from positions opened or closed inside the window does not count towards your target or your payout, while losses do. The fourth is the one Bold Funded uses: trade when you like, with a conduct rule about fills rather than a clock rule about minutes.

One concrete, verified example. FTMO's FAQ "Can I trade news?", checked on 22 October 2026 at ftmo.com/en/faq/can-i-trade-news/, states that order execution is restricted for two minutes before and two minutes after selected news releases on Standard-type funded accounts, that the restriction covers any order execution including stop losses and pending orders, that only instruments linked to the affected currency or asset are covered (during US payrolls you may trade EURGBP but not USDJPY), that Swing accounts and the evaluation phases are exempt, and that violating the rule may result in termination of the funded account. That is a carefully drawn rule. It is also a rule that can close a funded account because a stop loss triggered ninety seconds after a CPI print, which is the part traders tend to find out about afterwards.

Why firms restrict news trading in the first place

There are three honest reasons, and one less honest one.

The first honest reason is fills. A prop firm evaluation is a simulated account on real market data. In a real account, a market order at 8:30:01 on payrolls day is filled wherever liquidity exists, which may be 15 or 20 pips away from the last quote you saw. A simulation has to decide what fill to give you, and a naive simulation gives you the screen price. If it does, traders can earn simulated profits that no real trader could have earned, and the firm pays real money for them. Restricting the window is one way to avoid building a better fill engine.

The second is the asymmetric bet. An evaluation fee is small relative to the account. A trader who buys a $50K Two-Step Classic for $239 with the BF20 code and places one large position seconds before a rate decision has a lottery ticket: lose, and $239 is gone; win, and a funded account with a payout path is the prize. Multiply that trader by a few thousand and the firm's economics break, which is why firms either cap it with rules on consistency and conduct, or ban the trade.

The third is tail risk inside the firm's own risk model. A gap through a stop can carry a position beyond the daily limit before the engine closes it, and a firm whose engine is slow prefers not to find out how slow during FOMC.

The less honest reason is that a blackout window is a convenient way to remove profit from traders who did nothing wrong. A rule that says "profit from any trade closed within three minutes of a release is removed" catches the trader who was short EUR/USD since Tuesday and whose take profit happened to fill on Friday at 8:31. Read the rule for what it does to existing positions, not just new ones.

Why Bold Funded allows it

Bold Funded's position is written on every plan card: "Trading through high-impact news releases is permitted. We ask only that fills reflect the real market; latency arbitrage is prohibited." That is the whole rule, and it rests on a decision about where to put the control.

The fill problem is solved at the engine, not in the rulebook. The risk engine runs at tick level on the real feed, and the prohibited list on the rules guide is about abusing the simulation: latency arbitrage, tick scalping that exploits feed delays, copy trading between different customers' accounts, account sharing and hedging across accounts to engineer a pass. None of those is "trading the news". A trader who is long gold into a CPI print with a stop in place and a size that respects the daily limit is doing exactly what a funded trader is meant to do, and no clock should decide whether that trade counts.

The asymmetric-bet problem is handled by rules that already exist for other reasons. On the Bold futures evaluation, no single day may account for more than 40% of total profit, so a one-spike pass is not a pass; the consistency rule post works through the maths. On the forex Instant Funded and futures Instant Funded accounts the same 40% consistency rule applies to payouts, and the forex Instant plan also needs a 2% payout buffer. The Two-Step and One-Step forex evaluations have no consistency rule at all, and that is deliberate: the Two-Step asks for 8% then 5% with a 5% daily limit and a static 10% floor, and the One-Step for 10% with a 4% daily limit and a 6% end-of-day trailing floor. A trader who tries to spike through those targets on a single release has to survive the daily limit to do it; there is no minimum number of trading days on either plan, because the daily limit and the floor already do the filtering.

The tail-risk problem is the engine's job. If it cannot close a position fast enough on a gap, the fix is a faster engine, not a rule asking traders to be flat so the engine never gets tested.

What a news trade really costs on a $50K account

Allowed is not the same as advisable. The reason to understand news trading rules is not to find a firm that lets you do it, but to understand what you are exposing the account to when you do. The table below works one scenario on a $50K Two-Step Classic (daily loss limit 5%, $2,500; static overall floor 10%, $45,000; leverage 1:100), holding a long EUR/USD position with a 20-pip stop through the US payrolls release. Slippage and spread figures are illustrative inputs chosen to show the mechanics, not statistics about any feed.

Standard lot on EUR/USD: $10 per pip. The first three rows are survivable and say something useful: the slippage on a sensibly sized position costs you a few hundred dollars more than planned, which is annoying rather than fatal. The last two rows are how news days end evaluations, and neither of them is caused by the news. They are caused by size, and by the decision to go again. A blackout window would have changed nothing for the trader in row five, who would simply have breached on the next volatile session instead. The daily loss limit post covers why the limit is measured on equity from the 00:00 server-time balance, which is the detail that matters when a position gaps.

The same trade on a futures account

The arithmetic on the futures side is tighter, because the floors are in dollars rather than percentages. A Bold 50K evaluation has a $2,000 end-of-day trailing drawdown, a $3,000 profit target, no daily loss limit and a cap of 5 minis or 50 micros. One ES contract moves $50 a point; four points of slippage on a five-contract stop is $1,000, half the floor, on a single fill. The Bolt 50K has the same $2,000 end-of-day trailing floor and no minimum trading days, and the futures Instant Funded 50K adds a fixed $1,000 daily limit on top of its $2,000 trailing drawdown. On all three, you must be flat by 3:59 PM CT, one minute before the session close, and may not hold through the maintenance break. News is allowed; the floors still apply, and they do not care why you hit them.

A news-day plan for a funded account

You do not need a blackout window imposed on you to run one of your own. The difference is that yours can be sensible.

Decide in advance which releases matter for what you trade. For a EUR/USD trader that is the US and euro-area rate decisions, US payrolls, US CPI and the ECB press conference, not every amber event on the calendar. For an ES or NQ trader it is FOMC at 2:00 PM ET and the press conference half an hour later, payrolls and CPI at 8:30 AM ET, and little else. Write the list down once.

Size for the gap, not the stop. If your normal risk is 1% of the account, assume the stop on a news trade can fill at twice the planned distance and size so that the doubled loss is still inside your daily budget. On a $50K Two-Step that means a position whose doubled stop is well inside the $2,500 line and leaves room for a second, normal trade later in the day.

Treat existing positions as the main risk. Most news-day damage is done to positions opened hours earlier whose stop was never adjusted. Either reduce them before the release or accept, explicitly, that the stop may fill wide.

Do not re-enter to recover. Row five of the table above is the whole lesson. The risk plan for a $50K evaluation sets out a daily stop that is a fraction of the firm's daily limit for exactly this reason.

If you follow those four, a firm's two-minute rule becomes irrelevant to you, which is the right way round: the trader manages the news, not the rulebook.

How to read any firm's news rule before you buy

Read the rule as a checklist, because the headline rarely tells you what you need. Does it apply to the evaluation, the funded account or both? Does the window cover opening only, or closing too, including stop losses and take profits that trigger inside it? Which instruments are in scope: the affected currency only, or everything? What is the consequence: account termination, profit removal, or a warning? And does the window move with the calendar, so that a release rescheduled by ten minutes catches you out?

At Bold Funded the answers are the same on the Two-Step Classic, One-Step Fast and Instant Funded forex plans and on the Bold, Bolt and Instant Funded futures plans: no window, no instrument list, no phase where the rule changes. What applies instead is the daily loss limit on the plans that have one, the drawdown floor on every plan, the consistency rule where it exists, and a conduct rule that fills must reflect the real market. That is fewer rules to remember and, we think, the right ones. You can see all of them side by side on how it works.