EA & Algo Trading on Funded Accounts: What Is Allowed

Most prop firms treat automated trading as an exception to be approved. Nordic Funder does not: your own expert advisors and algorithms are allowed on every account, with no approval step, no application form and no surcharge. That single line in the FAQ is doing more work than it looks, so this post covers what it actually permits, where the boundary sits, and which of the nine tracks is genuinely hospitable to an automated strategy.

The short version: the permission is real and unusually broad, but three mechanical details — the daily loss basis, the leverage ceiling and the weekend gap — decide whether your EA can survive the assessment at all. Pick the wrong track and a profitable algorithm will still fail.

What "EA trading allowed" covers

It covers running your own automated strategy on your own account. In practice that means:

• Any platform-native automation. DXtrade, Match-Trader and cTrader are all integrated via GooeyTrade, and automation written for the platform you pick runs on it.
• No approval queue. There is no EA whitelist to get onto and no code review to pass before you switch it on.
• No premium. Automated accounts are priced identically to discretionary ones. There is no "algo" add-on.
• Copying your own strategy across your own accounts. Running the same EA on several accounts you hold is fine.

What it does not cover is coordinated trading across accounts held by different people. That is the line between scaling your own system and operating a group scheme, and it is the one place where multi-account automation stops being permitted.

Where the boundary actually sits

The prohibition is not on automation. It is on strategies that extract profit from the simulation rather than from the market. Because assessments run in a simulated environment against aggregated live pricing, a strategy that targets the gap between that simulation and the underlying market is not demonstrating trading skill — it is exploiting infrastructure.

Concretely, the practices that fall outside the permission are latency arbitrage, execution against stale or mispriced quotes, tick scalping that depends on feed lag rather than direction, and coordinated cross-account trading. An EA that does any of those is prohibited whether a human or a script pulls the trigger.

An EA that reads price, forms a directional view and manages risk is fine, however it is built — trend, mean reversion, breakout, grid, news-avoidance, machine-learned, it does not matter. The test is what the strategy depends on, not how it was written.

If your edge disappears when execution is perfect, it was never a trading edge.

One honest caveat: the published terms describe the prohibited categories rather than enumerating every technique. If your strategy sits near the line — sub-second holding periods, or anything whose profitability depends on fill quality rather than direction — ask support before you buy rather than after you pass. A rule check costs nothing; a forfeited fee does.

The three mechanics that decide whether your EA passes

1. The daily loss basis matters more than the drawdown

This is the single biggest determinant of whether an automated strategy survives, and it is not the headline number.

The three staged FX tracks — One-Step, Two-Step and Three-Step — measure daily loss on end-of-day balance. The limit is anchored to the previous session's close and holds still all day. An EA can run a position into unrealised profit, give it all back, and never touch the daily rule.

Every other track uses an intraday trailing daily loss, which follows the highest equity the account touches that session. Unrealised profit immediately becomes part of what you can lose. For a grid, a martingale, or anything that holds through adverse excursions, that is a categorically harder constraint — and the tightest version, Instant Funding Lite at 1%, will end a session on a move most discretionary traders would not notice. The full mechanics are in Trailing vs Static Drawdown.

2. Leverage sets your position sizing, and the Lite tracks are the outliers

Staged FX tracks run at up to 20:1 on forex and metals, 10:1 on indices, 5:1 on oil and up to 2:1 on crypto. One-Step Lite runs at 30:1 and Two-Step Lite at 100:1 — and the Double Leverage add-on doubles whichever ceiling applies, taking Two-Step Lite to 200:1.

A strategy calibrated on a 20:1 broker account will size very differently on a 100:1 ceiling. That is an opportunity if your EA is margin-constrained and a hazard if it sizes as a fraction of available margin, because the same code will take five times the risk without anyone changing a setting. Check what your position-sizing function reads before you move a tested system across.

3. Weekend gaps, and the add-on that does less than it sounds like

Weekend holding is available as an add-on — but only cryptocurrencies actually trade at weekends. Buying it does not let an FX position trade through Saturday; it lets the position remain open across the gap and reprice at the Monday open.

For an EA with a hard stop, that distinction is expensive: a weekend gap can jump straight through the stop level, and the fill happens wherever Monday opens. If your strategy holds over weekends, either buy the add-on and size for gap risk explicitly, or have the EA flatten before the Friday close. If it flattens anyway, the add-on is spend you do not need.

Costs your backtest probably has wrong

Spreads are raw and commission is $7 round turn per lot on FX and metals, with $0 on indices, oil and crypto. Two things follow.

First, a backtest run against a fixed-spread or commission-free feed will overstate a high-frequency strategy badly. At $7 per lot round turn, a system taking twenty round turns a day on one lot is paying $140 a day — $2,800 across a twenty-day month. On a $10,000 One-Step, whose 10% target is $1,000, that cost structure cannot work regardless of hit rate. Re-run the numbers with commission before you buy anything.

Second, the zero-commission instruments change the calculus. On indices, oil and crypto, cost is the raw spread alone, which makes those markets materially friendlier to higher-frequency automation than FX on the same account.

Which track suits an automated strategy

Matching the strategy to the rule set, rather than to the fee:

• Holds through drawdown, or trades intraday swings — a staged FX track, for the EOD daily loss basis. The Two-Step pairs it with the widest static drawdown at 8%.
• Tight stops, quick exits, never holds a loser — the intraday trailing limit is survivable, so One-Step Lite at $25 is a cheap way to prove it.
• Needs high leverage — Two-Step Lite at 100:1, doubled to 200:1 with the add-on.
• Crypto-native, runs 24/7 — the Crypto tracks, the only ones whose market genuinely trades at weekends. Note the 14-day inactivity limit.
• Already proven and wants no assessment — Instant Funding Lite skips the target entirely, at the cost of a 1% intraday trailing daily loss.

Before you switch it on

Four checks, in order. Re-run your backtest with $7 round-turn commission on FX and metals. Confirm which daily loss basis your chosen track uses and whether your strategy's worst intraday excursion survives it. Check what your position sizing reads, so a higher leverage ceiling does not silently multiply your risk. And confirm the inactivity limit — 30 days on staged FX, 14 days on crypto, equities and instant funding — because an EA that waits patiently for a setup can breach it by doing nothing at all.

There is no time limit on passing, so a slow, low-frequency system is not penalised for taking months. The only clock is inactivity.

Automation conditions by track

All figures are the published rules for each track. Commission is $7 round turn per lot on FX and metals and $0 on indices, oil and crypto; spreads are raw throughout. EA and algo trading is permitted on every track listed. Rules are identical across account sizes within a track — only the fee changes.