A breach isn’t a single event. Some rule breaks end your account in the same second they happen; others trigger a warning, a voided trade, or a manual review. Knowing which is which is the difference between panicking and responding.
Hard breach: instant account termination
A hard breach is the kind everyone fears, and rightly. These are the bright-line rules where crossing them ends the account immediately and without appeal:
- Blowing the maximum drawdown — the overall equity floor.
- Breaking the daily loss limit in a single session.
When one of these trips, the account is typically closed automatically. There’s no review, no benefit of the doubt, no “I was about to close it anyway.” The equity crossed a threshold, and the system acted. On trailing-drawdown accounts this is especially easy to trigger by accident, because the floor moves up with your equity — worth re-reading how trailing drawdown tracks your peak before you assume you have room.
The only real defense against a hard breach is not reaching the line in the first place. This is exactly what Shibiki’s broker-enforced hard limits are for: your loss ceiling is pushed down to the account, so a losing position closes at your line before it ever touches the firm’s. A rule that only lives in your trading plan fails at the exact moment you need it; a rule enforced at the broker holds regardless of what you’re feeling.
Soft breach: warnings, voided trades, and reviews
A soft breach is a rule break that doesn’t automatically kill the account but does have consequences. These usually involve prohibited behavior rather than a blown equity threshold. Common examples include:
- Trading during restricted windows, such as certain high-impact news releases where the firm bars entries.
- Prohibited strategies — some firms disallow specific hedging, arbitrage, or copy patterns across accounts.
- Consistency violations, where one outsized day dominates your results.
- Exceeding a maximum lot or position cap on an individual trade.
The outcome depends entirely on the firm and the rule. A soft breach might mean a warning, a voided trade (the profit from the offending trade is removed but the account survives), a held payout pending review, or — if it’s serious or repeated — escalation to termination. Because the response is discretionary, the exact policy matters enormously, and it differs between firms. Read your specific firm’s rulebook rather than assuming; the consistency and news rules in particular vary widely between shops like The5%ers and Blue Guardian.
Consistency violations are the sneakiest
The most common soft breach among otherwise disciplined traders is a consistency violation — one day or one trade making up too large a share of total profit. You didn’t break a risk rule; you just had a great day at the wrong time. Because it’s about the distribution of your profit, you can trip it while being perfectly profitable. Running your results through a consistency rule calculator before requesting a payout tells you whether your best day is over the line while you can still even it out.
Reset options and when they apply
A reset re-arms an account after a failure so you can try again without buying a brand-new evaluation from scratch. Key things to understand:
- Resets almost always apply to evaluation accounts, not funded ones. A hard breach on a funded account is usually final.
- A reset is a new attempt with a fee, discounted or not. It restores the starting conditions; it doesn’t erase the history.
- Reset offers can change what carries over — a discounted reset might drop a refundable-fee promise that the original purchase had.
Deciding between a reset and a fresh challenge is a cost question, not an emotional one. Model the total outlay across attempts with the prop-firm challenge calculator rather than clicking “reset” because it’s the cheaper-looking button in the moment.
How breaches affect payouts and refunds
A breach doesn’t just threaten the account — it can vaporize money you thought was yours. Two ways this bites:
- A hard breach before a payout wipes the account and everything in it. Unbanked profit is gone.
- A soft breach at payout time — most often a consistency violation — can hold or reduce a withdrawal, and can void a refundable challenge fee that was tied to reaching a clean first payout.
The lesson is that the moments around a payout are the highest-risk moments in the whole cycle. You’re closest to real money and most tempted to force one more trade. A payout calculator helps you see what’s actually at stake so you stop trading when the number is already good enough.
Recovering — or moving on — after a breach
After a hard breach, the account is over. What’s left is the decision of what to do next, and here honesty beats hope.
Ask whether the breach was process or variance:
- If a real risk rule failed — oversized position, no stop, revenge trade — the fix is the process, and resetting into the same behavior just pays to fail again.
- If your process was sound and an ordinary streak reached the floor, the fix is usually smaller size and a bigger buffer, then a considered restart.
This is where a real record separates the two cleanly. Shibiki auto-journals every trade, so the post-breach review is grounded in what actually happened rather than a foggy memory of a bad week. Its live edge-health read — a Wilson confidence interval on each strategy — tells you whether your edge is genuinely intact or whether the breach was the market confirming it isn’t. And when you rebuild across several funded accounts, copying your validated setup across them keeps every account under the same enforced limits, so one tilt session can’t take down the whole stack. The drawdown-recovery calculator is a sobering, useful reality check on how far back a blown buffer really puts you — usually far enough to make the smaller-size lesson stick.
Related: Drawdown-recovery calculator · Trailing drawdown · The5%ers