iFunds Removes Its Minimum Trading Days Requirement, So a Target Hit on Day One Can Be Banked on Day One
iFunds has removed the minimum trading days requirement from its evaluation structure, which means a trader who reaches the profit target on the first session can progress immediately instead of being made to keep trading to fill a quota. The rule being dropped is one of the least discussed and most quietly damaging in the industry, because it does not stop a trader from losing an account, it actively makes losing one more likely. iFunds does not currently have a review page on JoinProp, so the detail below comes from the firm’s published change rather than from our own rule audit.
The Rule That Forced Traders to Trade
A minimum trading days rule says a trader must place trades on some number of separate days before an evaluation counts as passed or a payout becomes available. Four days, five days and ten days have all been common. Firms defend it as a sample size requirement, on the argument that one good day proves nothing about a trader’s process.
The argument has a surface logic and a real problem underneath it. A trader who has already hit the target has nothing to gain from the extra days and everything to lose. Every additional position is risk taken for an administrative reason rather than a strategic one, against a drawdown limit that is still live. The firm’s own description of the problem is that a trader who has met the objective may still feel compelled to open positions, creating exposure with no clear reason behind it.
That is not a hypothetical failure mode. It is one of the more common ways a passed evaluation turns into a failed one: the target is reached, the trader is waiting out a day count, the market is quiet, and a trade gets taken out of impatience rather than out of a setup. Our explainer on minimum trading days covers how the requirement is usually written and where it bites.
Who Gains Most From the Change
The traders most penalised by a day count are the ones with the fewest trades. A trader running selective entries on a handful of instruments may legitimately see two valid setups in a week. Under a five day rule that trader has to choose between forcing three low conviction trades and leaving the evaluation unfinished.
Low frequency discretionary styles are hit in the same way, and so is anyone trading a specific session or a specific catalyst. A trader who only trades the London open on high impact days is not being lazy, they are executing a defined plan. A day count rule treats that plan as incomplete and asks for filler.
Removing the requirement moves the test back onto performance rather than elapsed time. It does not make the evaluation easier in any meaningful sense, because the profit target and the loss limits are unchanged. It removes a mechanism that was costing accounts without screening anyone out, which is the clearest kind of rule to delete. How often that distinction decides an outcome is visible in our prop firm survival rates analysis.
What Has Not Changed, and the New Temptation
Dropping a day count does not loosen anything else. Profit targets, daily drawdown, maximum drawdown, risk rules and the payout conditions attached to each program all remain in force exactly as written. A trader who reads this as a general relaxation will be surprised by the first drawdown breach.
There is also a new behavioural risk, and it is worth stating plainly rather than treating the change as a pure win. When nothing forces a trader to slow down, the pressure flips: instead of being pushed to keep trading after the target, a trader can now be pulled toward finishing the target as fast as possible. Rushing a 9% or 10% objective into one or two sessions means oversizing, and oversizing against a fixed daily loss limit is the single most reliable way to fail an evaluation.
The mechanical fact to hold onto is that the daily loss limit does not care how many days are left. A trader with no day count still has exactly one number standing between them and a dead account on any given session, and compressing the target into fewer sessions raises the size needed per trade to get there. The firms whose rules we have read side by side are compared in our analysis of 12 prop firm challenges.
What This Means for the Broader Prop Industry
Minimum trading days have been in slow retreat for about two years, and iFunds is following a direction rather than setting one. The reason is competitive rather than philosophical. Day counts are easy to explain and easy to criticise, they generate support tickets, and they produce the worst possible outcome for a firm’s reputation: a trader who hit the target, was made to keep trading, and lost the account anyway. That story travels.
What tends to replace a day count is a minimum profitable day requirement, which asks that a defined share of the gain come from more than one session. That is a different rule with a different effect, and traders should not assume that the absence of a day count means the absence of any distribution requirement. Reading for what replaced the rule is as important as noticing that it went, and our retroactive rule change playbook covers what to do when the substitution lands mid-evaluation.
For buyers the useful move is to stop treating day counts as a headline feature and treat them as one line in a rule set. A firm with no day count, a trailing drawdown and a thirty day payout cycle is not obviously better than a firm with a four day count, a static drawdown and a fourteen day cycle. The trailing drawdown is usually the line that decides the outcome, and it rarely appears in the marketing.
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