Avoidable Breaches and Payout Problems.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. When traders tell the story of a lost account, they usually blame the market. A spike, a bad fill, a news candle. When you read the trade log, the cause is often something smaller. They added a second position on a day they had less room than they thought. They forgot a trade was still open on Friday. They had not looked at the account for eight days.

Those are process failures, and process failures are the good news. You cannot control the next candle. You can control whether you check your floor before you click buy.

This unit goes rule by rule through the problems that end accounts or slow payouts on OA Funded. For each one you get the rule in plain words, the way traders actually trip over it, and a short routine that prevents it. Read it with the rules page open next to you. If anything here ever reads differently from the published rules, the rules win.

On OA Funded the daily loss limit works like this. At the start of each trading day, we take the higher of your balance and your equity. Take away 5% of your initial balance. That is your floor for the day. If your equity, including open trades, falls below it, the account breaches.

Two words in that rule catch people out. The first is equity. Equity is your balance plus or minus whatever your open trades are doing right now. A losing trade you have not closed still counts. A trade can close flat at the end of the day and still breach the account if it dipped far enough while it was open.

The second is higher. If you hold a winning trade overnight, your start-of-day equity can be higher than your balance. The floor for the new day is then set from that higher number. Floating profit you carried over can lift your floor, and if the trade gives the profit back, you have less room than your balance suggests.

The trading day follows the trading platform's server day. The exact cut-off time is shown in your dashboard. Check it there rather than guessing from your own clock.

The maximum loss on OA Funded is 10% static. Your equity, including open trades, must stay above 90% of your initial balance. The floor is fixed from day one. It never moves up with your profits. On a $10,000 account, the floor is always $9,000. On a $25,000 account it is $22,500.

Traders who are up rarely think about the static floor. Traders who are down often forget it for a different reason: they are focused on the daily limit. Once your balance has slipped below the starting balance, the static floor can sit above today's daily floor. On that day the static floor is the line that matters, and your real room is smaller than the 5% you have trained yourself to expect.

The fix is one habit. Each morning, write down both floors and circle the higher one. That circled number is your line for the day.

Two OA Funded rules give you warnings before they breach the account. That is a kindness, and it is also a trap, because traders treat a warning as a free pass.

Minimum trade duration. Every trade must stay open for at least 2 minutes. You get two warnings in each phase (Phase 1, Phase 2 and funded). The third trade closed in under 2 minutes in that phase is a breach. Open at 9:00 AM: do not close before 9:02 AM. The usual way people hit this is not deliberate scalping. It is panic. Price ticks against you ten seconds after entry and you slam the close button. Or you fat-finger a size, close it instantly, and reopen. Both count.

The news window, funded accounts only. News trading is unrestricted during the evaluation. On a funded account, you may not create or increase exposure from two minutes before to two minutes after a designated high-impact event. You can still hold, close or reduce. Your stop loss and take profit can still execute. A pending order that triggers inside the window counts as new exposure. The first trade opened in a window is a warning. The next one is a breach.

Notice the difference in budget. The duration rule gives you two warnings per phase. The news window gives you one. Treat your first warning on either rule as the end of the budget, not the start of it.

Inactivity. An account breaches if no trade is taken on it for 7 days. The clock starts when the account is issued. It restarts every time you take a trade on that account. We email you a warning 3 days before the breach. Traders hit this after a bad week when they step away to reset, which is healthy, or when they buy an account and wait for the perfect setup. Taking a break is fine. Just put a reminder in your calendar on day 4 so the warning email is never the first you hear of it.

Weekend holding. Weekend holding is not allowed on OA Funded. Close open positions before the applicable weekend market cut-off. The cut-off will be shown in your dashboard before funded trading is available. Overnight holding during the week is allowed. The trader who gets caught is the one with a swing idea on Thursday who tells themselves they will decide on Friday afternoon, then gets busy.

Banned styles. Hedging of any kind is banned, including opposite positions on a single account and across accounts. Grid trading and martingale are banned too, and the rules page defines both precisely, so read those definitions once. If hedging, grid or martingale trading is detected, we pause trading on the account and review it. A pause is not an automatic breach. You cannot take any trade on a paused account. The simple way to stay clear: one view per instrument at a time, and never add size to a loser to bring your average price back.

Some problems do not end the account. They just slow you down, and slow money tempts traders into rushed decisions. Knowing the payout conditions in advance takes that pressure off.

On OA Funded, your first 14-calendar-day cycle starts with your first trade on the funded account. You need at least five traded days in the cycle. You can request a payout once per 14-calendar-day cycle, and each later cycle starts from your last payout payment. The minimum payout is 1% of the account or $100, whichever is higher. Payouts go by bank transfer. Requests are approved in under 48 hours. Your dashboard shows the amount available to request when you meet the payout conditions.

The common delays are all self-inflicted. A trader counts days from when they passed Phase 2, not from their first funded trade. Or they trade on four days and wait for day 14, then realise they are a day short. Or they request less than $100. None of these is a mystery. Put the cycle start date and your traded-day count on a sticky note.

Two more points save a lot of frustration. Evaluation fees are never refundable. That includes when you get a payout, and when identity verification fails. And misrepresenting your identity, ownership, copier setup or who controls the strategy is a prohibited practice, as is sharing credentials or letting a third party manage your account. Buy the account in your own legal name, use details that match your ID, and never let anyone else trade it. If something about your details is unclear, ask support before you start trading. Support hours: Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm Eastern Time.