Time limits
Freedom of time is restricted by both firms through minimum trading requirements and inactivity traps. At Audacity, you cannot rush your evaluation; you are forced to trade for at least 4 days in the Ability Challenge and 5 days in the Funded Trader Program. Even after getting funded, you cannot simply sit on your account; a 6-month inactivity rule will eventually close your access if no trades are placed.
Funding Traders imposes tighter immediate pressure. While their Instant Funding has no minimum days, their 2-Step Pro accounts require 4 days per phase. The most significant limit is their inactivity rule: you cannot let 30 days pass from the moment of purchase without trading, or the account is permanently failed. This forces you to trade even when market conditions might not suit your strategy.
Weekends and news
Trading around high-impact events is heavily restricted. At Audacity, you cannot open new trades or increase positions within a 3-minute window before and after high-impact news or official speeches. This effectively silences your strategy during the most volatile market moments.
Funding Traders creates a complex map of "don’ts." On Instant Funded accounts, you cannot have any open trades during high-impact news; doing so results in immediate account termination. On Pro accounts, you cannot earn more than 30% of your total profit from news-influenced trades. While both firms allow weekend holding, you cannot escape the risk of gaps and widened spreads, and at Funding Traders, you cannot avoid swap fees during these periods.
Where you can trade from
Your physical location determines whether you can even participate. Audacity does not allow traders from the United States, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. If you reside in any of these territories, your access is completely blocked.
Funding Traders has a different set of geographical barriers. You cannot trade with them if you are in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Morocco, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine, Venezuela, or Vietnam. Notably, unlike Audacity, they do not restrict traders from the United States.
What the platform limits
The technical environment restricts both your tools and your style. At Audacity, you are limited to MetaTrader 4 and 5. You cannot use third-party or commercial EAs; only self-developed code is permitted. Furthermore, you cannot employ High-Frequency Trading (HFT), Martingale, or Dollar Cost Averaging strategies. Copy trading is also restricted: you cannot copy signals from third parties, only between your own Audacity accounts.
Funding Traders limits you to MetaTrader 5 and TradeLocker. Their EA policy is even more restrictive: you cannot use bots that automatically place trades unless you personally developed them and can explain the code to their risk team. You cannot use Grid trading, Latency Arbitrage, or any trade lasting less than 15 seconds (HFT). Stacking positions to hit targets is also prohibited.
What the rules cost you
The price of these accounts limits how many "lives" or attempts your capital can sustain. At Audacity, a $200,000 challenge costs $999, which is a significant barrier to entry. Their Funded Trader Program limits your initial earnings: you cannot take more than 50-60% of the profits in several tiers, which is significantly lower than the industry standard. Additionally, you cannot cross a drawdown limit based on the highest value between balance and equity.
Funding Traders' costs scale up to $2,349 for their largest instant account, severely limiting the number of retries for most traders. Their risk rules are rigid: you cannot lose more than 2% of the initial balance on any single "trade idea" (grouped trades) in Pro accounts. On Instant Funding, you cannot withdraw the first 3% of profit—it is a mandatory "safety cushion" that you can never touch; requesting it results in account termination.
Restrictions that add up
The true limitation appears when these rules collide. At Funding Traders, the combination of a 50% consistency rule (no single day can exceed half your profit) and the strict news prohibition on instant accounts means you must trade frequently but with capped gains, all while dodging the 30-day inactivity clock. At Audacity, the requirement to maintain a consistency score above 70, combined with the ban on commercial EAs and the 3-minute news blackout, creates an environment where only manual, highly disciplined traders can survive without breaching the contract.
