At Fintokei, we are in the business of backing real traders—those who have the skills, discipline, and consistency to trade profitably over the long term. However, not all trading strategies are actually “trading” in the professional sense. Some patterns resemble pure randomness, making them similar to flipping a coin or system exploitation rather than calculated decision-making that would contain an “alpha”, or edge over the market.
With over 400 million processed trades, we’ve developed powerful advanced models to detect randomness and artificial trading behaviors. Even if each individual trade seems fine, the overall flow sometimes reveals a lack of real market logic. And that is unsustainable in the long run.
Why this matters: The problem with random or hedging arbitrage trading
📌 Random or hedged trades do not demonstrate skill.
Some traders attempt to game the system by placing random trades and offsetting them between different prop firms or between a prop firm and a personal brokerage account—this is known as hedging arbitrage. This creates fake stability, but such trading would never last in the real market.
📌 Without a sustainable strategy, results can’t be repeated in real markets in the long term.
Some traders do manage to get a few payouts from prop firms using random or hedging-based methods. In the short term, you might get lucky, but here’s the problem.
• There’s no edge over the market.
• Over time, your losses across all accounts outweigh your wins.
• This approach cannot be replicated on the real accounts anyhow.
• You can’t scale with such a trading style, nor manage bigger investors’ capital.
📌 The data is unusable—for yourself, for us, for anyone.
If your strategy cannot be applied to personal trading accounts or fund management, then it holds no value for us, and we don’t want to support it.
📌 Hedging arbitrage is not real trading.
It may help some traders to pass challenges and generate payouts to some extent, but such trades cannot survive on one account, cannot scale, and violate the purpose of prop trading entirely.
That’s why we (and every serious prop firm) treat this behavior very carefully.
📌 If the trading strategy is indistinguishable from flipping a coin, it’s not trading—it’s gambling.
Prop firms exist to back and grow real traders, not to bankroll randomness.
How do we identify random or artificial trading patterns?
We utilize multiple data-driven methodologies to analyze trading behavior, including:
🔹 Markov Chain Analysis – Tracks transitions between trade outcomes to determine if decisions follow a non-random probability distribution.
🔹 Shannon Entropy – Measures the level of unpredictability in a trader’s actions; high entropy suggests a lack of structured decision-making.
🔹 Z-Score of Trading Strategies – Evaluates deviations from expected performance to spot outliers that indicate unnatural trading behavior.
🔹 Runs Test for Non-Randomness – One of the most reliable ways to determine if a strategy exhibits repeatable patterns or is merely a sequence of random events.
🧩 Think of it like a highly experienced trader watching over thousands of accounts—sometimes, a trader’s flow just doesn’t feel right, even though individual trades seem fine. Our robust, data-driven detection methods allow us to pinpoint when a strategy lacks consistency, repeatability, or genuine trading logic.
What happens if your trading resembles randomness?
⚠️ If flagged, we take a fair but firm approach:
1. You’ll receive a notification and the explanation of the findings. Following day, we will need to apply the Consistency Rules (e.g. leverage reduction, profit/loss caps) on all your existing and future accounts with Fintokei for the time being. This can be further reviewed in the next 3-6 months.
2. If you believe your strategy is wrongly evaluated by our system, you will be asked to submit a 6-month verified track record (trading statement) and may be invited for a video call with our team in order to prove its sustainability.
3. Alternatively, you can decide to close your account and receive a refund of the initial fee for any active account (provided no contract fee rewards have been issued for those accounts yet), plus any earned performance reward if applicable. We don’t want to keep anyone locked into a trading style they don’t agree with.
🚫 However, in clear and proven cases of system abuse (e.g. hedging arbitrage) where we hold enough supporting evidence:
We will breach all your active accounts
And we will terminate your access to our platform immediately, according to the applicable General Terms and Conditions.
We only want to work with traders who respect the framework and aim to improve.
🔍 Can someone’s trading be flagged even without having any bad intentions?
Theoretically yes. It is probable that not every flagged trader is intentionally trying to cheat. Given the scale of hundreds of millions of trades running through our platforms, there will always be edge cases and statistical anomalies.
However, the outcome is the same: if a trader’s performance data resembles randomness, we are not able to use it—regardless of whether it happened by accident or design.
📢 This is never personal—it’s about ensuring that our platform supports sustainable trading with added value.
✅ Fintokei backs traders—not systems they don’t control
We’re here to back:
• Traders who build sustainable approaches
• Traders who can repeat success
• Traders who are here to grow
If your strategy is based on chance, reverse-engineered tricks, or hedging arbitrage—you’re not building a trading career. You’re chasing payouts. And that’s not what Fintokei is here for.
📌 We back skill and long-term approach. We don’t fund randomness.