If you trade 2–8 tick targets on ES, your holding time is often measured in seconds. That puts you squarely in the zone several firms police. The rules come in a few flavours — and the wording matters, because enforcement is usually pattern-based, not a single-trade trip-wire.
01The four rule patterns
- Hard minimum hold. Every trade must last at least X seconds/minutes. Most common on CFD products; rarer on futures.
- Percentage-of-profit rule. A set share of your trades and profit must come from trades held longer than a threshold (e.g. more than half held over 10 seconds).
- Micro-scalp pattern ban. Opening and closing within ~10–15 seconds as a core strategy is prohibited, judged on the pattern across the account.
- Tick + time combo. Trades under N ticks and under M minutes, done repeatedly without a plan, are classed as tick scalping and banned.
Why it's dangerous
These rules are often enforced at payout time, retroactively. You can pass, trade for weeks, then have profits voided because the account review flags your holding-time profile. Check before you fund — not after.02How firms tend to land
| Scalp-fit | What it means | Typical profile |
|---|---|---|
| Clean | Scalping allowed, no relevant minimum-hold rule | Sub-second flags only on extreme cases (e.g. <5s generating most profit) |
| Grey | Scalping fine, but micro-scalp (~≤15s) banned as a core strategy | Workable if your average hold clears the threshold — measure it |
| Risk | Hard rule that bites a tick profile | Percentage-held rules, or explicit tick+time bans, or no-100+-trades caps |
The pattern worth internalising: the newer, EOD-friendly firms are the ones most likely to attach a scalp constraint, because the forgiving drawdown is balanced by tighter behavioural rules. The cleanest scalp-fit often sits with the more established futures-native firms.
03How to protect yourself
- Measure your own profile in sim. Pull your real distribution of holding times and percentage of profit by bucket. Know your numbers before you read the rulebook.
- Read the funded-stage rules, not the marketing. Anti-scalp rules live in "prohibited trading practices," not the headline features.
- Verify at the source. Help-center wording beats any third-party review — including ours. Rules change monthly.
- Watch the combo rules. A "<10 ticks AND <2 minutes" ban only triggers when both are true and repeated — sometimes a slightly longer hold or clear plan keeps you clear.
Bottom line
Drawdown decides whether you survive; scalp-fit decides whether you're even allowed to play your game. Treat it as a kill-criterion equal to drawdown, not an afterthought.Every firm on the index carries a colour-coded scalp-fit tag — green, amber, or red — so you can filter out the rules that would void your style.