You are trying to earn the exact sum that deletes the account
Dual Step on $5,000 is a 4% day and a static 8% maximum. In cash that is $200 today and $400 for the life of the book, so equity at $4,600 is the end. Phase 1 is 8%, also $400. Phase 2 is 5%, or $250. Three minimum trading days still apply, so the $400 cannot be one ticket. Nexus uses the same $200 day and $400 static floor. Its step targets are a separate contract, and these Phase 1 dollars describe Dual Step.
Lightning on this purchase is a 3% day, or $150, and a 6% end-of-day trail, or $300. A trader who memorizes $200 and then sits Lightning is through the official day while the note still shows room. Sign up on Venasri with Dual Step or Lightning written on the profile before the first 0.05 lot goes out.
A $25 stop is 0.12 lots of FX or 0.05 lots of gold
Half a percent of $5,000 is $25. At $10 per pip on 1.00 lot, a 20-pip stop at 0.12 lots costs $24. At 0.13 lots it costs $26 and the unit is gone. Gold at $10 per 0.10 move needs 0.05 lots on a 50-pip stop to risk $25. A 0.10 lot gold idea is $50 here, which is 1% of the account and a quarter of the entire day. Two of those are the day.
If the 50-pip gold stop fills at 100 pips, 0.05 lots costs $50. That is a quarter of the $200 day from one widened fill. The bot desk should cap computed cash risk at $25, which means gold stays at 0.05 lots unless the stop is shorter than 50 pips. There is no aesthetic reason to round this account up to a tenth of a lot.
Phase 2 asks for $250 after you have already matched the floor
A 2R winner on the $25 unit pays about $50. Eight of those, with no losers, are the $400 Phase 1 target. Losers make the path longer, which is acceptable because the minimum is three days. Risking $75 to finish faster means three losses are $225, already through the $200 day. Phase 2 then asks for another $250 on a balance that still dies $400 below the start.
The reset is 00:00 ThinkMarkets time, GMT+2 or GMT+3, from the higher of balance or equity. A $150 open winner is 3% of this book. Held through the snapshot, it can become the next day base. A full giveback spends most of a fresh $200 hole. Close or partial it. Lightning should be even stricter, because its whole day is $150 and a float of that size is the entire allowance.
Flatten Dual Step near $162 and Lightning near $112
Equity Guard on Dual Step should flatten near $162 of daily loss, 3.25% of $5,000, inside the official $200. Lightning should flatten near $112, inside the $150 day. A guard copied from a $100,000 article, set at $3,250, will never fire here. The account will be gone while the software still thinks the day has barely started.
Two full Dual Step days are the maximum and the target at the same time. You do not have a spare $200 to donate to a rounding choice or to a gold lot that only looked small on a larger account. Store 0.12 FX lots and 0.05 gold lots as the only defaults, and rebuild them if a scale ever changes this $5,000 balance.