Consistency rules: the clause that quietly delays payouts

A consistency rule, in most firm rulebooks, says no single day's profit may exceed a set percentage of your total profit. Most traders read it once at signup and forget. The math is unforgiving: pass an evaluation with a few thousand dollars of total profit, then land one outsized winning day on the funded account, and you can breach a consistency cap without ever touching the drawdown. The payout is not refused outright. It simply is not released until you trade enough additional days to bring that single day back under the threshold. Three things to check, on every firm, before you fund: 1. **Is the consistency rule in the marketing copy, or only the rulebook?** If it lives only in a sub-clause, the firm is downplaying it. That is a tell. 2. **Does it apply to the evaluation, the funded account, or both?** Some firms drop the rule once you are funded. Others enforce it on every payout. 3. **What is the percentage?** A higher cap is more forgiving; a tight cap forces a fundamentally different position-sizing approach. Silent enforcement tends to show up at firms with thin verified-payout track records. That is exactly what our rule-change feed exists to catch: we re-parse each firm's rulebook on a schedule and publish any verified change. Read the cap before you wire, and check whether it has moved recently.