Live Program Rules

1. Who these rules apply to

They apply to a trader Options Funding has admitted to the Live stage and who has signed the Live Trader Agreement. Admission is at the firm’s discretion and is not something a trader can request or earn by right.

Trading at the Live stage uses the firm’s own capital. The account is the firm’s, not the trader’s. A trader contributes no capital, holds no ownership or withdrawal right in the account itself, and never bears a trading loss: a losing day reduces what the trader can earn, and is never a debt they owe.

2. Allocation, drawdown and the daily loss limit

Your figures are set by the funded plan you are promoted from. Where you hold more than one funded account, the largest eligible plan sets your terms; plans are never added together.

One Live account, sized by your largest eligible plan. A trader holds exactly one Live account no matter how many evaluation or funded accounts they held. Allocated capital is set by the single largest eligible funded account held on the date of the Notice, and is never the sum of the accounts you held. A trader who held five funded accounts receives the same Live account as a trader who held one of the same size.

Every funded plan size we publish is eligible for advancement: $25,000, $50,000 and $100,000. A $100,000 funded plan gives $50,000 allocated capital, $50,000 buying power at entry, a $5,000 max drawdown, which is also its lock threshold, and a floor that locks permanently at $50,100. A $50,000 funded plan gives $25,000 allocated capital, $25,000 buying power at entry, a $2,500 max drawdown, which is also its lock threshold, and a floor that locks permanently at $25,100. A $25,000 funded plan gives $12,500 allocated capital, $12,500 buying power at entry, a $2,000 max drawdown, which is also its lock threshold, and a floor that locks permanently at $12,600. The table below is the same figures, plus each size’s daily loss limit.

Eligible does not mean selected. It means your plan size is capable of being advanced, and nothing more. Admission is still at the firm’s discretion, is still not something you can request, and the same standard is applied at every size. A $25,000 account is held to it exactly as a $100,000 account is.

Say it plainly: the Live account is smaller in real dollars than the combined simulated nominal you held. The capital at Live is real and it is the firm’s, so it is sized to real risk rather than to the sum of simulated account labels.

The drawdown floor. Your floor starts one drawdown below your allocated capital and trails your peak equity upward. It never moves down. Reaching it closes your open positions and ends the Live account. That is a permanent outcome, not a reset.

How reaching the floor is measured. Your account is measured against your floor on the lower of two figures: the net liquidation value the broker reports, and what your positions could be closed for right now at the prices quoted in the market (every position you hold long at the bid, every position you are short at the ask), together with your cash. The second figure moves with every quote, while the broker recalculates its figure only every few minutes, so it can reach your floor first. If either figure is at or below your floor, you have reached it, even while the broker's figure still reads above it. When the second figure cannot be measured reliably at that moment, for example because a position has no two-sided quote, the broker's figure alone is used.

The lock. Your lock threshold is your plan’s drawdown, the figure in the Drawdown column, and your floor locks at the figure in the last column, one hundred dollars above your allocated capital. Your floor locks at $100 above break-even at the end of the first day on which your total profit (every payout taken, the firm's share included, plus the profit in the account, unrealized included) reaches the lock threshold published for your plan size (that plan's maximum drawdown) and your equity is at least $200 above break-even. If your profit gets there on a day your equity does not, the lock waits for the first day both are true. It never moves again after that, the trailing drawdown and the daily loss limit both stop applying, and the restrictions in section 4 continue to apply in full.

What a payout does to your floor. Your floor trails the highest value your account has held at the end of a trading day, by your maximum drawdown, and never rises above break-even while it is trailing. Taking a payout sets it at break-even, and it never goes below break-even after that. It stops moving for good when it locks.

The threshold is fixed. It is your plan’s drawdown, and nothing reduces it, brings it forward or offsets it. An account you closed, a payout request cancelled when you moved to Live, or anything else you did at an earlier stage counts for nothing toward it.

The daily loss limit applies while your floor is still trailing. Hitting it closes every open position in your account and holds trading until 9:30 AM ET on the first trading day after the day you reach it. It is not a breach and it does not end the account, and it stops applying once your floor is locked or you have taken your first payout. It exists to stop a bad day becoming a final one, and once your floor is locked the firm’s downside is zero.

What you may hold overnight. Anything you hold overnight is capped at 70% of your remaining drawdown room. Remaining drawdown room is your equity less your trailing floor, so the cap moves with your account rather than with your plan size. Each checkpoint measures the aggregate maximum theoretical loss of the positions it covers, priced at current marks rather than at what you paid. An index option that settles in cash at a close is not carried through it, so it does not count against the cap, and the checkpoint in front of that close never closes it. An option on a stock or an ETF expiring today is left to the expiration close at the checkpoint in front of its own market's close; if you still hold it after that, it is measured at the later checkpoints that day, because what it becomes at expiration, shares from an exercise or an assignment, is carried. If what a checkpoint measures is over the cap while it is open, the firm closes only enough to bring you back under it, whole positions at a time: first any position with no maximum loss; then the smallest position that is enough on its own to bring you back under; if none is, the largest, and then the same again until you are under. One position is every option you hold on one underlying with the same expiration date and the same option class (SPX and SPXW are two classes), so both legs of a spread go together. If you also hold shares of that underlying, the shares and all of its options are one position. Where one expiration holds more short calls, or more short puts, than long ones, it is one position with every other expiration of that underlying that holds a long one of the same type, so a calendar or a diagonal is one position, and it goes short leg first or not at all. A long option is never sold while a short option it may cover stays open.

There is a checkpoint in front of each market's close, in the last five minutes that market is open, and never earlier: options on single stocks and on ETFs that stop at 4:00 PM ET, and your shares of them, from 3:55 PM ET; SPY, QQQ, IWM, DIA and the other ETF options that trade until 4:15 PM ET and your shares of them, and OEX, XEO, DJX, MRUT and NDX options, NDXP weeklies included, from 4:10 PM ET; and SPX, SPXW, XSP, RUT, RUTW, VIX and VIXW, which trade in the Curb until 5:00 PM ET, from 4:55 PM ET. On its expiration day an SPXW, XSP, RUTW, MRUT or NDXP option stops at 4:00 PM ET and settles then, and an OEX or XEO option stops at 4:15 PM ET and settles then (1:00 PM ET and 1:15 PM ET on an early-close day). On its last trading day a VIX or VIXW option, weeklies included, stops at 4:15 PM ET and is checked from 4:10 PM ET, while an SPX or RUT monthly that settles to the next morning's opening print trades until 5:00 PM ET and is checked from 4:55 PM ET. Each checkpoint measures the positions in its own market and anything already shut by then that no later checkpoint that day covers, and it closes only positions in its own market, and only enough to bring you back under the cap. Each is re-measured continuously until one minute before its market shuts, rather than fired once, so a position opened after it starts is measured too, and no closing order for a position is sent later than 30 seconds before its own market shuts: 3:59:30 PM ET for options on single stocks and ETFs that stop at 4:00 PM ET, 4:14:30 PM ET for SPY, QQQ, IWM, DIA and the other ETF options that trade until 4:15 PM ET and for the index options that stop then, and 4:59:30 PM ET in the Curb. The index options that trade in the Curb shut at 5:00 PM ET and do not reopen until 8:15 PM ET, and over a weekend that gap is about fifty-one hours, with no way to close a position inside it. No warning is sent to you before a checkpoint: the firm checks at 3:30 PM ET (4:30 PM ET for the index options in the Curb), and what you hold when the checkpoint opens is what it measures, so reduce it yourself before then. The firm may also check the index options that trade in the overnight session (SPX, SPXW, XSP, RUT, RUTW, VIX and VIXW) in front of their five-minute pause at 9:25 AM ET: on a trading day, from 9:20 AM ET until 9:24 AM ET, if what those index options can lose is over the cap, it may close only enough of them to bring you back under it, in the same order, and no closing order is sent after 9:24:30 AM ET. Options on stocks and ETFs, and the index options that trade only in the day session, are not part of this check, because their market is shut until 9:30 AM ET. There is no such check on a market holiday. On an early-close day there is no Curb: options on single stocks and on ETFs that stop at 1:00 PM ET, and your shares of them, are checked from 12:55 PM ET, with no closing order after 12:59:30 PM ET; and everything else, SPY, QQQ, IWM, DIA, the other ETF options that trade 15 minutes longer and every index option, from 1:10 PM ET, with no closing order after 1:14:30 PM ET. On the holidays when the overnight index session runs to 11:30 AM ET, the index options that trade in it are checked from 11:25 AM ET, with no closing order after 11:29:30 AM ET.

3. Buying power and scaling

Buying power starts at the entry figure above and increases as realized profit grows, as a multiple of your plan size:

• At entry: 0.50× your plan size.
• At $2,500 realized profit: 0.75× your plan size.
• At $5,000 realized profit: 1.00× your plan size.
• At $10,000 realized profit: 1.25× your plan size.

A step up additionally requires at least thirty closed trades in the Live account whose average result is statistically greater than zero. Until thirty live trades exist, buying power stays at the entry level however much profit you have made. Profit alone does not move you up; the firm needs evidence the result is skill rather than a short lucky run.

The firm may reduce your step at any time, including where realized profit falls back below a threshold, where the statistical test no longer passes, or in response to elevated risk-taking. A reduction is not a termination.

4. What you may trade

US listed stock options and US listed index options, on any ticker. There is no symbol whitelist at the Live stage, and same-day expiries are permitted.

Stock itself is closing only. You can close or reduce a stock position you already hold, including shares you were assigned, and you cannot open a stock position or add to one.

Spreads are permitted, credit or debit, including vertical spreads, iron condors, butterflies and calendars, and so is selling a put without cover, a naked short put. Selling a call without cover, a naked short call, is not permitted, and the broker refuses the order. A calendar or a diagonal, whose legs expire on different dates, is measured one expiry at a time at an overnight checkpoint, so its short leg is measured there as if it had no cover, and the whole position can be closed there, its short leg first. If assignment, exercise, or the expiry or closure of another leg leaves you holding a naked short option, a put or a call, closing it is always permitted.

Everything else is refused at the broker before the order reaches the market: futures, futures options, foreign exchange, bonds, mutual funds, metals, crypto, CFDs, warrants, structured products, event contracts and non-US products.

Options at the Live stage may be bought, and may be sold with cover, and a put may also be sold without cover. Credit and debit spreads, iron condors, butterflies and other spreads are permitted, and so are naked short puts, subject to your account's margin and drawdown rules. A naked short call, a short call with no long call or shares covering it, is not permitted: you may not open or increase one, and the broker refuses the order. If you hold a naked short option and a sharp move in the underlying could take your account through its drawdown floor, the firm's risk engine may buy it back, in whole or in part, at once and without notice. That is a right the firm keeps, not a promise that a naked option will be closed before your floor is reached. At an overnight checkpoint a naked short put is measured at its worst case, the strike times 100 per contract less what it would cost to buy back now. On an index, and on most stocks, that is more than the overnight cap of 70% of your remaining drawdown room, so a naked short put you still hold when a checkpoint opens will normally be closed there, along with the rest of what that checkpoint closes. A cash-settled index put expiring that day is not carried through the close at which it settles, so the checkpoint in front of that close does not close it. A short call left without cover has no limit to its loss, so it cannot be carried overnight: one you still hold is closed at the first checkpoint that can still trade it, however much room you have, which for an index call is normally the Curb. A cash-settled index call expiring that day is not carried through the close at which it settles, so the checkpoint in front of that close leaves it to settle. Assignment can leave stock in your account, and the firm may close it at any time. Closing or reducing something you already hold is always permitted, including an option left without cover after an assignment.

Options on stocks and ETFs expiring the same day are closed automatically before their market shuts: from 3:55 PM ET, or 4:10 PM ET for SPY, QQQ, IWM, DIA and the other ETF options that trade until 4:15 PM ET, and on an early-close day from 12:55 PM ET, or 1:10 PM ET for those. The last closing order goes out 30 seconds before that market shuts, at 3:59:30 PM ET (4:14:30 PM ET for those ETFs; 12:59:30 PM ET and 1:14:30 PM ET on an early-close day), in time to fill before it does; no scheduled close is sent for it after that. Anything still open then stays open into expiration and the firm is alerted to it, except a long option nobody bids for, which expires worthless. This removes the assignment tail on American-style contracts.

Index options on DJX, MRUT, NDX, OEX, RUT, RUTW, SPX, SPXW, VIX, VIXW, XEO, XSP are not closed by the expiration close. They are left to expire, and closing them before expiry is your responsibility; the overnight checkpoint in section 2 can still close one you would carry over the cap, reaching your daily loss limit or your drawdown floor (section 2) closes them like any other position, and a naked one can be bought back as described above. Of those, SPX, SPXW, XSP, NDX, RUT, VIX settle in cash rather than assigning, so nothing can be delivered against your account. OEX is the exception you need to know about: it is American-exercise, so a short leg can be exercised against you for cash on any day before expiry, and the expiration close does not close it either. An option expiring that day on any ticker outside that list is sent to close before its market shuts, as described above.

You may not, unless the firm permits it in writing:

• Open or increase a naked short call, a short call with no long call or shares covering it. Closing one you were left holding is always permitted.
• Hold a short option position through expiration where assignment is reasonably foreseeable.
• Exceed any position, order size, notional or concentration limit set for your account.
• Open or increase a position your account's margin does not support.

The firm configures pre-trade controls at the broker that reject orders breaching these limits. Those controls are a backstop, not a permission set: an order the broker does not reject is not thereby authorised.

Test orders the firm places on your account. The firm checks that the broker really refuses what those controls are meant to refuse. Before your IBKR login is handed to you, and from time to time after that, the firm may place a test order on your Live account. A test order is one the broker's controls are expected to refuse, and it is priced so that it cannot fill: for example, an order to buy 1 share of SPY at about half of its market price. It carries the order reference "of-fence-probe", and it may appear in your IBKR order history as rejected or cancelled. A test order is the firm's, not yours. You do not need to do anything about it. Do not cancel or change an order you did not place; if you see one working on your account, tell us.

The firm may close positions, suspend order entry, reduce allocated capital or restrict instruments at any time and without prior notice, including for reasons that have nothing to do with anything you did: firm-wide exposure, market conditions, or a broker requirement.

5. Payouts

You keep 80% of realized net trading profit. At the Live stage a payout is your contractual share of profit actually earned trading the firm’s capital, paid by the firm from its own funds.

• Minimum payout: $100.
• You can only ever withdraw profit, never the firm’s capital.
• You can withdraw profit down to $100 above your drawdown floor and never below that, and a payout never includes what your open positions can still lose, so an open spread reduces what you can take until you close it. The $100 is there because reaching your floor ends the account, and a payout must never be the thing that reaches it. Nothing else is held back. You can make one payout request per Eastern Time calendar day.
• We decide your payout request when you make it, and we can decline or hold one that does not meet these rules or that is associated with conduct under review. Once it is approved the full amount is taken out of your account at once and your 80% share is sent the same day. Identity verification and tax documentation have to be complete before any payment is sent.
• Your floor trails the highest value your account has held at the end of a trading day, by your maximum drawdown, and never rises above break-even while it is trailing. Taking a payout sets it at break-even, and it never goes below break-even after that. It stops moving for good when it locks.
• Identity verification and tax documentation must be complete before a payout is paid.

6. The Live Program Notice, your 30 days, and what each answer does

Can I decline and stay on my funded account? You can decline, but you cannot keep trading either way. Nothing closes when the Notice is sent: you have 30 days to answer, and every account you hold stays open and tradeable until you do. Declining ends your participation and closes your accounts, and every payout request you had pending at that moment is paid to you in cash, up to $3,000 in total.

The Notice closes nothing. On the date your Live Program Notice is sent, no account of yours closes. Every evaluation and funded account stays open and tradeable. Billing is unchanged. Nothing is barred. Accounts close only when you answer, or when the 30 days run out. The one thing the Notice does act on is payouts, and that is set out below.

You have 30 calendar days from the date of the Notice to accept or decline. The deadline is shown to you and is recorded on your account.

New payout requests are paused while your Live Program Notice is open. Every payout request you had already submitted is held while your notice is open. It is not cancelled, and it is not paid in the meantime. It is resolved by your answer: accepting cancels it without payment, and declining pays it in cash, up to the cap.

If you accept, then and only then: every evaluation and funded account you hold is closed; the subscription behind each closed account is cancelled; every payout request then pending is cancelled and you are paid nothing for it; you may not open, purchase or hold a further evaluation or funded account, including under a different email address; and a Live account is opened for you. Your accounts closing at that point is part of accepting. This is expected and not an error.

Accepting means giving up the payouts you had already asked for. Nothing is paid for them, nothing is credited in their place, and no part of them is carried into your Live account or applied to your lock threshold. If those requests matter more to you than the Live account does, decline instead, and they are paid in cash under the cap below. We would rather you read that here than discover it after you have answered.

If you decline, every payout request pending at the moment you decline is paid in cash. The amounts are summed across every account you hold and capped at $3,000 in total for you as a trader. The cap is per person, not per account: five accounts with $2,000 pending each pays $3,000, not $10,000. Payment is made through the ordinary payout rail and requires the same tax and banking details, the Mercury W-9 or W-8BEN plus your bank details, that any payout requires. Your accounts then close, billing stops, and re-entry is permanently barred. No Live account is opened.

If you never answer, an unanswered notice expires after 30 days and is treated as a decline. No settlement is payable on an expired notice. Your accounts close, billing stops, and re-entry is barred, exactly as on a decline, but nothing is paid, and every held payout request is cancelled without payment.

Nothing pending means nothing paid. A trader who declines with no payout request pending is paid nothing. The settlement pays the requests you had already submitted, so where there are none, there is nothing to pay.

Fees already charged for a closed evaluation or funded account are not refunded, at this or any other stage. Declining is not a breach. It creates no debt or liability to Options Funding and is not treated as misconduct.

If the broker declines your application, the Live Trader Agreement terminates automatically, the firm restores the accounts that closed and lifts the restriction on opening new ones, and your rights at the prior stage are unaffected. You are not penalised for a decision a broker made.

7. When the Live account ends

Your Live account ends if you reach your drawdown floor, measured as section 2 says, if either party terminates the Live Trader Agreement, or if the broker withdraws your authorisation. Profit you have already realized and become entitled to is payable under section 5 whatever the reason, except where it arises from conduct prohibited by the Live Trader Agreement.

8. Changes to these rules

Amendment. Options Funding may amend the Terms, the Program Rules and any published rule set at any time and in its sole discretion, including for risk, compliance, legal, brokerage or business reasons. An amendment takes effect when it is posted with a stated effective date, or on the date stated in a notice. Continued use of the Services or of any account after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

What an amendment cannot reach. An amendment does not apply to a payout request properly submitted and pending before the effective date, or to a decline settlement already owed under section 6. Each of those is governed by the rules in effect when it arose. These Program Rules themselves govern every Live account from their stated effective date, whichever version of the Live Trader Agreement you executed.

Suspension and termination for cause. Separately and at any time, Options Funding may suspend or close any account, halt trading, or withhold a payout pending investigation where it reasonably believes there has been a rule violation, manipulation of the simulated environment, prohibited trading, fraud, chargeback activity, identity misuse, or where a legal, brokerage or regulatory requirement applies. No notice period applies to this.

Changes are not applied retroactively: a rule change does not reopen a completed trading day, retrospectively breach an account that complied with the rules in force at the time, or reduce profit you had already realized under the previous rules. Changes are published here with a new date at the top of the page.

The firm may change your risk parameters at any time, including during a trading session, where market conditions or your exposure warrant it. A change of that kind takes effect when it is communicated to you or configured at the broker, and applies from then onward.

9. Questions

If anything here is unclear, ask before you sign rather than afterwards. Support is reachable from your dashboard and by reply to any email the firm sends you.