Forbidden Gambling practices are Overleveraging without a system, One-sided bets, Account rolling and Achieving the Profit Target in one trade (or in a few similar trades on the same instrument within one day).

Leverage is a tempting mechanism that allows traders to multiply their potential profits but also their potential losses if the trade does not go as planned.

Overleveraging is a frequent problem among many beginner traders who aim for a "get rich quick" scenario. They often decide to open large trading positions with high leverage recklessly, without considering the risk of losing everything, or in our case hitting the drawdown limits, if the trade goes awry.

At Fintokei, we are looking for systematic traders. If someone is placing random large trades, without having a pattern or strategy behind them, or without being able to explain it to us, it will be flagged.

A single overleveraged position does not necessarily make someone a gambler. But if we detect cases that might indicate overleveraging, we will first notify the trader, allowing them some leeway to explain their strategy and approach, or correct their trading style. If the random overleveraging continues, we might need to impose the so-called consistency rules or restrictions, as described below, on the trader’s account to limit this kind of behavior.

The term "one-sided bets" itself should signal that something is wrong. Trading is not about betting; it's about understanding the market you trade, the macroeconomic indicators that affect its price, and the price action that can steer the probability of success in your favor.

Placing one or more abnormally large trading positions, without comprehensive market analysis, usually before a single market event, in hopes of an above-average profit is akin to playing roulette and betting everything on one color. That is why we don’t want to endorse such behavior either.

As a trader, you should always aim for repeatable, consistent trading practices. Consistency is the key to successful trading, not sporadic profit spikes based on luck.

Another form of trading that closely resembles gambling is the practice of account rolling. In this approach, traders purchase multiple trading challenge programs, trade aggressively or recklessly, and hope to complete some of them. The idea is that whenever they blow up an account through such aggressive or reckless trading, they can switch to another and continue in the same manner. They believe that eventually, their “strategy” will pay off, leading to a huge profit.

Although this technique does not slow down our servers or harm other traders, it goes against the principles of sensible trading, and it is obviously very hard for us to utilize any trading data from such a trading approach. Why did we decide to introduce anti-gambling policy?

This practice could actually sum up, or complement, the previous three. Every Fintokei evaluation program has a profit target that traders need to meet to complete it. To prevent gamblers and lucky shooters from finishing the challenge with a single fortunate, over-leveraged or one-sided betting set of trades, we have set a minimum trading days metric. This metric requires a minimum number of days to complete the challenge, which for us is three. This is to avoid someone completing the challenge by placing one high-volume, high-leverage lucky trade within 30 minutes of purchasing the evaluation program.

However, some traders have found a way to circumvent this rule. After achieving the profit target with a single set of trades, they open additional, much smaller trades in the following days (typically very small ones, like 0.01 lots, and for a very short time) just to meet the minimum 3-day trading requirement (so called “flipping trades”).

Below you may find a few clear examples that contain the above mentioned practices and were performed by some of our customers. Our rules have allowed it so far, and we honestly treated them, including processing the payouts. However, we would not want to endorse such trading styles anymore.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

At Fintokei, we are trying to find, nurture, or help to create long-term, consistent traders who will have a certain edge over the market. But as you can imagine, the whole evaluation program actually misses the point in cases like this, as it says nothing about such traders and their strategies at all, except that they like undue risk and would not be much of a strategic long-term investment.

We are also very well aware that every trader or strategy is different and somehow unique. That is why we don’t apply any default consistency rules or further restrictions on our ProTrader or SwiftTrader programs.

However, traders who engage in any of the practices described here are simply not valuable to us in the long run.

In general, we obviously don’t want to burn bridges with our customers, such as deny payouts or ban anyone from using our services unless absolutely necessary. We understand our mutual trust is the top priority. That is why we will always try to engage in dialogue and find a way of how to continue instead of termination. But if we are to continue to cooperate with such traders, we will need them to adjust their trading strategy, so it is in line with what we are looking for.

We are therefore regularly monitoring the activity on all trading accounts. In case we identify one or more situations with the above-described behavior, we reserve a right to apply certain restrictions, or consistency rules, on your trading account, on an individual ad-hoc basis.

Read more about Consistency rules in FAQ