How does SFX Funded regulate trading behavior, including restricted strategies, martingale rules, and lot size limits?

💡 Answer

SFX Funded publishes one of the longest prohibited-strategy lists in the industry. In addition to hedging, copy trading and third-party EAs (covered separately), the following are all explicitly banned:

• Gamble to pass — outsized risk or maxed leverage inconsistent with your trading history
• Opposite direction recovery — reopening in the opposite direction within 10 minutes of closing a loss
• Churning of accounts — buying many max-size accounts and trading each at high risk on the assumption failures are replaceable
• Poor money management — repeated margin calls
• Overtrading — frequent entries and exits without a clear rationale
• One-sided bets — unmanaged directional positions left to run to target
• Group hedging and multi-account reverse trading
• Behavioural inconsistency — frequently switching strategies, trading illiquid hours, emotional decisions
• Exploiting system glitches, price-display errors or feed delays
• Latency arbitrage, reverse arbitrage and hedge arbitrage
• HFT and ultra-fast scalping, and tick-scalping
• News bracketing and news straddles
• Martingale and grid systems
• Order layering — generally more than four layered orders on one trade idea
• Use of emulators

Consequences are graduated and discretionary: profit deduction, forced account reset, soft or hard breach, withdrawal rejection, a cut of your profit split to 20–25%, or a leverage reduction to 1:10 — decided by the risk team.

Our honest read: several of these — "overtrading", "behavioural and inconsistent trading patterns", "one-sided bets" — are subjective by construction and are enforced at the risk team's discretion, typically at the point of withdrawal. That is not unique to SFX, but the sheer length of the list widens the surface area for a discretionary call. Combine that with a suppressed Trustpilot rating and the sensible approach is to take small, frequent payouts early rather than building a large balance you then have to defend.

Minimum lot size: 0.01 on FX pairs, indices and commodities; 0.1 on crypto.

Maximum lot size: SFX does not publish a fixed per-instrument lot cap. Instead it caps exposure through an over-leveraging rule: any position that reduces your margin level to 150% or lower is a violation. In practice the binding constraints are the leverage limits (1:30 FX, 1:10 indices and commodities, 1:2 crypto) and the maximum floating loss ceiling of 2% — or 1% on $300k/$400k accounts and on 1-Step Pro — which SFX Protect enforces automatically by closing every open position.

Order layering is separately restricted: splitting one trade idea into more than roughly four smaller orders to work around slippage or risk controls is treated as prohibited activity, so you cannot build a large position in slices.

SFX publishes a maximum-lot-size calculation guide in its help centre; run your intended size through it before your first trade, because an over-leveraging finding can cost you profits or the account outright.

The complete list of allowed and prohibited trading strategies is available on SFX Funded official website.