What it measures
The consistency rule caps how much of your total profit may come from your single best day:
best-day share = best day's profit ÷ total profit
If the threshold is 40% and your best day produced more than 40% of everything you made, the rule bites. Thresholds around 30%, 40% and 50% are all in use, and the number is only half the rule — the other half is what it gates.
The two gates, and why they are different rules
Payout gate. You passed. The account is funded and the profit is real. The rule simply holds the withdrawal until the distribution looks acceptable. This is survivable by continuing to trade: more profitable days shrink the best day's share, and the money is still yours in the meantime.
Pass gate. The rule blocks the evaluation itself. You reached the target and did not pass, because one day carried too much of it. This one can turn an otherwise successful challenge into a stalled one — the target is met, so continuing to trade is now purely about reshaping the ratio.
Same name, same percentage, completely different consequence. Our engine carries the gate as an explicit field for this reason, because reporting "consistency 62%" without saying which gate it feeds tells a trader nothing about what happens next.
The arithmetic of fixing it
The useful output is not the ratio, it is how much more profit you need for the ratio to clear.
required total = best day ÷ threshold
still needed = required total − current total
Make $4,000 on your best day with $8,000 total against a 40% threshold: the share is 50%, the required total is $10,000, and you need $2,000 more — spread across days, none of which may become a new best day large enough to restart the problem.
Two things follow that are not obvious:
- A new big day makes it worse, not better. If the additional $2,000 arrives as a single $2,000 day, the total becomes $10,000 and the best day is still $4,000 — exactly 40%, which clears only if the rule is strictly greater-than. Make $4,500 in one day instead and the best day is now $4,500 of $12,500, which is 36% and clears. The dependency is not monotonic in the way people assume, and it is worth computing rather than estimating.
- Withdrawals do not change it. Cash movements are excluded from profit, so taking money out neither helps nor hurts the ratio. It does reduce your buffer to the drawdown floor, which is a separate consequence covered in equity versus balance.
Whether the counter resets
Some firms reset the consistency window after each payout; others measure across the account's whole life. This changes the long-run behaviour completely.
With a reset, one exceptional day is a problem for one payout cycle and then stops existing. Without one, a single outsized day early in the account's life follows it forever, and every future payout is measured against a best day you had months ago.
Our engine carries this as a switch because there is no sensible default — assuming a reset would overstate how free you are, and assuming none would understate it.
What the rule is actually for
It is easy to read the consistency rule as a way of avoiding payouts. There is a more straightforward reading, and it is the one that makes the rule predictable.
A trader who makes their entire month in one trade has not demonstrated a repeatable method. They have demonstrated one trade. The firm is about to give leverage to someone whose record contains a single data point, and a rule that requires the profit to be spread out is a crude but functional test that there is a process rather than an outcome.
Which means the rule is not really an obstacle to a consistent trader — it is close to invisible to one. It bites exactly the traders whose results depend on a small number of large events, and for those traders it is telling them something true about their record, at a moment when it costs money to hear it.
The version of this measurement that is useful independent of any firm is on the consistency rule entry, which computes the same share from your own trade history whether or not anyone is checking.