A two-minute window with an uneven bill
On funded accounts the restricted window is two minutes around the high-impact release. The firm can exclude profit made in that window unless the news add-on is active. The loss side has no such kindness. If price runs your stop during the print, the loss is real equity and it counts against the 4% daily line at once. On $100K that line is $4,000. A gold stop of $2,500 during CPI is more than half the day, and it is not refunded because the spread was unfair.
The 1-Step and the 2-Step share that $4,000 daily figure. They do not share the lifetime floor. A news loss that the 2-Step can survive inside a static $8,000 maximum can shove a 1-Step account through a 6% end-of-day trail of $6,000 if the trail has already stepped up. Start on Venasri with the window stored as a funded block, not as a note you remember on NFP Friday.
Excluded profit still moves the midnight base
If a news winner is still open at 00:00 UTC+2 or UTC+3, the daily anchor uses the higher of balance or equity. A float of +$1,800 raises the next base even if the firm later excludes that profit from a payout because it was booked in the window. You can be denied the payday and still be charged a higher 4% floor the next morning. Flatten or partial before the snapshot if the trade only exists because of the print.
Equity Guard at $3,250 does not know whether a dollar will be payable. It knows equity. Set it on Equity Guard so a slipped news stop flattens the rest of the book before $4,000. The add-on, if you bought it, changes what profit they keep in the payout math. It does not change the $4,000 breach.
The 40% day and the news spike
Instant and Triple Payday cap a single day's contribution around 35% to 40% of cycle profit. A CPI winner of $3,200 on a cycle that has only reached the $8,000 Phase 1 target is 40% by itself. If part of that $3,200 is later excluded, you may have both a consistency problem and a hole where the payout number used to be. The safer news decision on those tiers is no new risk, not a larger lot.
Three minimum trading days do not require you to trade the release. A 0.5% day, $500 on $100K, qualifies as one of the profitable days for the on-demand payout path. You can log that $500 far from CPI. Public pass-bots that straddle the print also collide with the EA rules and with the 2,000 request cap if they modify orders through the spike.
Block the window, then trade the hour after
Bot Control should flatten or freeze new entries for the 2-minute window on funded logins and should stay out of the first impulse on NAS100 at 13:30 UTC when that bar is also a red-folder bar. After the window, one ticket sized at $350 to $650, the lot-plan band, is the most the day should add. A $2,000 news idea is half of the daily line on a single headline.
Weekend gaps are not the news window, but they spend the same $4,000. Holding through Sunday under the crypto and CFD margin limits is allowed, and a gap stop is still a daily loss. If Friday's plan depended on a Monday CPI entry, be flat over the weekend so the gap and the release are not the same ticket. The $398 fee is cheaper to keep than to replace after one excluded winner and one very real loser.
