One equity engine and one gold engine. Per firm. Maximum.

This is the hardest rule we ask anyone to follow, and it is not about profit. It is about not getting your accounts closed.

What a prop firm actually is

You pay a fee, you prove you can trade to their standard, and then they let you trade their money and keep a share of what you make. The money is not yours and the account is not yours. You are trading under their rules.

One of those rules is about hedging

Hedging means being long and short the same thing at the same time — buying gold in one account while selling gold in another. It cancels out. To a prop firm it looks like someone gaming the evaluation rather than trading, and almost every firm bans it.

The penalty is not a warning. It is usually closure of the accounts and forfeiture of the profits. And the firms check across every account you own with them, because they are all registered to you.

Why automation makes this inevitable

Rules-based engines make their own decisions independently. None of them knows the others exist. So if you run two engines that trade gold in two accounts at the same firm, sooner or later one decides to buy while the other decides to sell — not because anything is broken, but because that is what independent strategies do.

You would not be doing anything wrong, and you would still be in breach.

We can put a number on it, because we measured it on our own published backtests. Over a thirteen-month window there were 112 occasions where two of our same-class engines held opposite positions in the same market at the same moment. Every same-class pair that overlapped at all went opposite at some point. Not most of them. All of them.

The requirement

Never more than one equity-index engine per firm. Engines trading MES and MNQ are all trading the US stock indices. They move together, and firms treat them as the same exposure.

Never more than one gold engine per firm. Two engines on the same gold contract at one firm is the clearest breach available to you.

An equity engine and a gold engine together is fine. Different markets, they cannot cancel each other out, and no firm treats that pairing as a hedge. That is your two accounts per firm, and it is the ceiling.

To run a third engine, you open an account at a different firm. Not another account at the same one.

Before you take that advice, know who is giving it

“Spread your accounts across more firms” is precisely the advice you would expect from someone earning a referral fee per signup.

We have no financial relationship with any proprietary trading firm. No affiliate links, no referral codes, no revenue share, no arrangement of any kind. We receive nothing if you open an account — at one firm, at four firms, or at none.

That is deliberate, and this rule is why. When we tell you to spread across firms, the only reason on the table is the compliance mechanic above.

Position-conflict counts are measured on our own published backtests over the published window. Firm rules vary between firms and between products within a firm, and they change without notice — verify the rules of the account you actually hold.