Two Prop Firm Bosses Just Trashed the Consistency Rule, Then Explained Why They Still Use It
The most disliked rule in prop trading just got criticised by two of the people who enforce it. Adam Bock, Head of Challenges at Eightcap, was asked which single rule he would delete from the industry. His answer was profit consistency. Archie Cade, Founder and Director of TTT Markets, told the same interviewer that some competitor consistency rules are “structured more to catch traders out.” Both men run firms that still apply a consistency requirement, and both defended their own version of it.
The comments came from two interviews published by ResponsibleTrading.com in July, the Eightcap one on July 15 and the TTT Markets one on July 31, and were picked up this week. Taken together they are the clearest admission yet from inside the industry that consistency rules are treated as a necessary evil rather than a feature traders are supposed to like.
Why Consistency Rules Are the Industry’s Sorest Point
A consistency rule caps how much of a payout can come from a single trading day or a single trade. The stated purpose is to filter out traders who pass an evaluation on one lucky position rather than a repeatable process. The practical effect, from a trader’s side, is that a legitimately profitable month can be trimmed at withdrawal time because one day ran hot.
That is why the rule shows up again and again in trader complaints across prop firms. Bock said outright that profit distribution generates the most disputes at Eightcap. When the person running the challenge product names his own rule as the top source of friction, the problem is not a communication issue.
The Versions Both Firms Still Enforce
Eightcap calls its rule Profit Distribution. It limits how much of a requested payout may come from one trading day during the Payout Stage. Current terms set that daily limit at 30% for newer One-Phase accounts and 35% for newer Two-Phase accounts, with lower limits applying to accounts opened before February 11. Bock said the firm keeps it to encourage consistent strategy and risk management.
TTT Markets applies a consistency requirement on at least its 1-Step funded accounts. Cade said account reviews look at whether profits were produced under program rules and flag one-off trades, coordinated hedging or other prohibited activity. Crucially, he said a consistency problem at TTT Markets usually results in an adjustment to the reward rather than a flat rejection of the payout. That distinction, adjust versus deny, is the line he drew between his firm’s version and the ones he criticised.
Eightcap’s Exit and Return Tells a Second Story
Bock also revised the public account of why Eightcap walked away from prop firm partnerships in early 2024. The firm had previously framed the exit around industry turbulence and get-rich-quick marketing. This time Bock put the MetaQuotes restrictions first, saying the primary objective was to protect the core business when MetaTrader access for prop-linked US accounts came under pressure. Concerns about the sector’s marketing came second.
Eightcap says it powered more than 300,000 challenges across 40 prop and education brands between 2021 and 2024 before pulling out. It returned in November 2025 with its own simulated trading product. The group holds regulated entities in Australia, the United Kingdom, Cyprus, the Bahamas, Seychelles and Mauritius, but Eightcap Challenges is run by the Seychelles company and its own site states the challenge products are not issued under those brokerage permissions.
Prop Firms Keep Buying Their Way Into Brokerage
The interviews also confirmed how far the brokerage convergence has gone. TTT Markets began a limited CFD brokerage rollout in January, running on MetaTrader 5 plus its own technology, though Cade said roughly 95% of its clients are still trading challenges. The founders of The5%ers launched the CySEC-regulated TSG brokerage in late 2025. FTMO closed its OANDA acquisition in December. The Trading Pit added a Seychelles-regulated CFD operation in March 2026.
Eightcap is the mirror image of all of them. It is a brokerage group that bolted a challenge product on, rather than a challenge provider reaching for a licence. Both routes end in the same place: a business that earns from evaluation fees and from live spread revenue at the same time.
Neither Executive Is Asking Regulators to Stay Away
Cade said sensible regulation would be a positive for traders and expects future rules to cover capital, liquidity, governance and transparency rather than ban retail prop trading outright. That matches earlier survey work showing about 70% of traders want the sector regulated. Asked what share of TTT Markets traders stay funded beyond six consecutive months, Cade gave no figure, saying only that hundreds have held funded accounts since 2025.
That non-answer is worth noting. Retention past six months is the number that would settle most arguments about whether funded trading is a viable career path or a churn business, and it is the number almost nobody publishes.
What This Means for the Broader Prop Industry
Two things are happening at once here, and they point in the same direction.
First, the consistency rule is losing its defenders. When operators publicly agree it is the rule they would remove, it stops being an industry standard and becomes a competitive liability. Firms that scrap it outright now have a marketing line their rivals cannot easily counter, which is exactly the pattern already visible in the race to drop trailing drawdown and daily loss limits. Expect consistency requirements to get looser, get renamed, or quietly disappear from headline offers over the next few quarters, while surviving in the small print of payout terms.
Second, the regulatory perimeter is being drawn from the inside. Firms are not lobbying against oversight, they are positioning for it by acquiring licences and stacking regulated entities around an unregulated challenge product. Eightcap’s own framing, that the gap between its licensed brokerage and its unlicensed challenge business is “a runway” rather than a gap, is the honest version of what most of the sector is doing. The firms with brokerage revenue will absorb compliance costs. The ones running on challenge fees alone will not.
For traders, the practical read is simple. Rule transparency is now a genuine differentiator, and firms willing to state exactly how a consistency check is applied, and whether a breach adjusts or cancels a payout, are telling you something useful about how they treat withdrawals. Firms that leave it vague are telling you something too.
