Self-owned and risk EAs are in bounds
The published permission is risk-management EAs and self-owned EAs. A tool that attaches stops, moves them to breakeven, and scales out is the kind of risk EA the sentence covers. An EA you wrote and can stand behind is the other half. This is not a ban on automation and it is not a free pass for any file you downloaded. If you cannot explain the logic as yours or as protection, do not point it at a CTI login.
Platforms are MT5 and Match-Trader. A stop that exists only on one of them while the fill lives on the other is not a stop. Create a Venasri login and prove, on a tiny test, that the protective order appears on the same platform that holds the position. The $509 fee on $100,000 is a bad way to discover a platform mismatch.
The stop belongs on the fill inside a minute
Mandatory stop placement is not a end-of-day tidy-up. The firm wants the stop on the order inside 60 seconds of the fill. A manual trader who clicks and then calculates the lot in a spreadsheet has already used the minute. Manual Trade Guard exists so the stop is attached as part of the click, not as a follow-up task. Match-Trader fills count. MT5 fills count. The clock does not care which one you find more comfortable.
A missing stop is a rule breach even if the 5% daily line is untouched. That is the point of the primary failure on this firm: a manual trade opened and left naked. Bot controls should refuse to consider the entry complete until the stop is confirmed. If confirmation does not arrive, flatten. A naked gold lot does not get a second minute because London is busy.
2,000 requests a day is a real ceiling
Activity is capped at 2,000 server requests a day. Every tweak of a trailing stop spends that budget. An index scalp that rewrites the stop on every point can exhaust the cap during the New York open and then fail to modify when you actually need to. The account can be flagged while the P&L is fine. Step the trail in price. Take a few partials. Leave it alone.
This cap sits next to the 60-second stop rule. A bot that is so busy it cannot place the initial stop in time fails both tests at once. Quiet protection beats clever trailing. The 2-step day is still $5,000 on $100,000 if you ever get past compliance. Many CTI accounts never get the chance to spend it. They fail on a naked ticket or a noisy trail first.
Equity Guard is the backstop, not the missing stop
Equity Guard near $4,250 on a $100,000 2-step account flattens a day that is getting away. It does not satisfy the per-trade stop rule. You still need a stop on the ticket. On 1-step put the guard near $3,250 because the day is 4%, not 5%. Using the guard as an excuse to trade naked is how you fail the 60-second test with a sophisticated tool running in the background.
News straddles are banned on funded accounts in the two minutes before a high-impact release and the two minutes after. An EA that fires inside that window can be compliant on stops and still be non-compliant on news. Keep the bot aware of the funded-stage window. The evaluation is not the funded book. Do not train one set of habits and hope the payout desk uses the other.
