What Happens When You Breach a Prop Firm Account?

A prop firm breach is the moment your account crosses a rule it is measured against. The platform force-closes your open trades and closes the account, and any profit you had not already withdrawn is typically forfeited. The account cannot be reopened. To keep trading, you buy a new one.

Before the detail, the disclosure that governs everything below. Ordane accounts operate on simulated capital. No live funds are traded and no deposits are accepted. Clause P-2 of the Ordane Rulebook v1.0 requires that declaration (retrieved 2026-07-25), and this page is information, not advice.

The rest of this article is the detail behind that answer: what you keep, what you lose, which rules can actually breach you, and how one firm writes the aftermath down before you ever hit it. The rules that trigger a breach live in their own guides; this page owns what the breach does.

The short answer: closed, not recoverable, buy again to continue

A breach is terminal for that account. It is not a warning, not a pause you wait out, and not a setting you switch back. Words that sound close to breach carry different consequences, and they are separated below.

A 45-word definition, quotable as written

A prop firm breach is a rule violation that closes your trading account. Open positions are force-closed, evaluation progress is lost, and profit you have not yet withdrawn is typically forfeited. The account is not recoverable: to continue, you buy a new one. Only a rule the firm can point to should trigger it.

At Ordane, the aftermath is written down in advance (Ordane, FAQ, retrieved 2026-07-25): A breach closes the account. To trade again you purchase a new account under the rulebook version current at that time.

Breach vs reset vs closure, the words that get confused

These three get mixed up, and the difference decides whether your account survives the day.

Pause, breach and reset, and what each does to the account
Term	What triggers it	What happens to the account	A rule violation?
Pause	Hitting the daily loss limit (Topstep)	Open positions flattened and pending orders cancelled, new trades stopped until the next session; the account stays eligible	No (Topstep Help Center, retrieved 2026-07-29)
Breach	The balance hitting the Maximum Loss Limit at any point in the day, including on unrealized profit and loss (Topstep)	The account is liquidated immediately and closed for good	Yes (Topstep Help Center, retrieved 2026-07-29)
Reset	Buying a fresh start after a breach	A new account begins with the clock at zero; the breached account is not restored	Not applicable, it follows a breach

A pause is a protective stop that is not a violation. At Topstep, hitting the daily loss limit flattens your open positions and cancels your pending orders, then stops new trades until the next session, and its own help center is explicit that triggering it is not a rule violation and the account stays eligible (Topstep Help Center, retrieved 2026-07-29). You lost the rest of the day, not the account.

A breach is a violation that closes the account. At Topstep again, the Maximum Loss Limit, a threshold that trails the account's end-of-day balance rather than sitting fixed, is the hard line: if the balance hits it at any point in the trading day, including on unrealized profit and loss, the account is liquidated immediately (Topstep Help Center, retrieved 2026-07-29). The same threshold, crossed, is a different outcome.

A reset is buying a fresh start after a breach. It does not restore the account you broke. It is a new account with the clock back at zero.

The lesson for checking a firm before you pay: read each rule for its consequence, not just its number. A rule that pauses you is survivable. A rule that liquidates you ends the account.

What you keep and what you lose in a breach

A breach sorts everything in the account into two piles: what leaves with the account, and what was already yours. The table below is drawn from the named firms' own documentation, and each row carries its own retrieval date.

A four-row table showing what happens to open positions, evaluation progress, unpaid profit, and withdrawals in a prop firm breach. Open positions are force-closed, evaluation progress is lost, unpaid profit is forfeited, and already-withdrawn funds are kept, each row citing its source. — What a prop firm breach takes and what it leaves behind. Only already-withdrawn money stays yours.

What a breach closes, and what stays with you
Line item	What a breach does	Where this is documented
Open positions	Force-closed at the moment of breach, including on unrealized profit and loss	Topstep Help Center, Maximum Loss Limit page (retrieved 2026-07-29)
Evaluation progress	Lost; the account is disqualified or made ineligible until reset	FTMO, Forbidden Trading Practices (retrieved 2026-07-29); Topstep Help Center, Maximum Loss Limit page (retrieved 2026-07-29)
Unpaid profit, earned but not withdrawn	Typically forfeited with the account	FTMO, Forbidden Trading Practices (retrieved 2026-07-29)
Already-paid withdrawals	Kept: a withdrawal that has cleared to you has already left the account, so it is not part of what the breach closes	Reasoning: a completed withdrawal is no longer in the account
The account fee	Spent; a one-time fee buys the account, not an outcome, and a breach does not refund it	Reasoning: the fee purchases access, not a result

The line that surprises people most is the third. Profit you earned but had not yet withdrawn is usually gone the moment the account closes. FTMO states that a breach can trigger corrective actions up to disqualification from the evaluation, forfeiture of any potential rewards, and termination of all agreements with the trader (FTMO, retrieved 2026-07-29). FundedNext defines a breached account plainly as one terminated for violating account rules (FundedNext Help Center, retrieved 2026-07-29). The profit was real inside a simulated account, but it was never withdrawn, so it closes with the account it lived in.

This is why paid withdrawals sit in the keep pile. A withdrawal that has already cleared to you is no longer part of the account, so a later breach does not reach back for it. The forfeiture applies to the balance still inside the account when it closed.

Which rules can actually breach you

A breach comes from a rule violation, and two numbered rules cause most of them: the maximum drawdown and the daily loss limit. This page does not re-teach how each is measured, because each has its own guide. What matters here is that crossing either one closes the account.

The two rules that close most accounts: a fixed 5 percent maximum drawdown floor and a 3 percent daily loss limit. What makes the aftermath knowable is a closed list of violations, not the number.

At Ordane both are published as fixed figures. Ordane's maximum drawdown is 5 percent and static: account equity may never fall below 95 percent of the initial balance. The floor is fixed on day one, never trails upward, and a breach closes the account (Ordane Rulebook v1.0, clause R-1, retrieved 2026-07-25). The daily loss limit is 3 percent, measured against the balance at the start of the server day. A breach closes the account (Ordane Rulebook v1.0, clause R-2, retrieved 2026-07-25). Whether a floor is static or trails your balance changes how much room you actually have, a distinction covered in full in the guide on static versus trailing drawdown; how a daily limit is calculated, and where firms quietly differ, is worth checking against each firm's own published methodology.

The differentiator is not the number. It is whether the list of things that can breach you is closed or open. An open list leaves room for a rule you never saw to be applied at the payout. A closed list does not: only a named practice can breach you, so the aftermath is knowable the day you sign up rather than discovered at the worst moment. Whether a firm can enforce a rule it never wrote down is a separate question, and it is the reason that distinction holds up in a dispute.

How Ordane handles a breach, in its own words

Ordane sells one product, Ordane Direct: an instant account with direct access, no evaluation phase and no challenge, on simulated capital. The breach rule below applies to every account, because there is only the one.

The honest starting point: Ordane is new and has no payout history. There is nothing to show yet, and no payout history will be manufactured (Ordane, payout ledger, retrieved 2026-07-25). What can be checked today is not a track record but a written rule, published before the first account is sold.

Here is that rule, copied as it stands. A breach closes the account. To trade again you purchase a new account under the rulebook version current at that time (Ordane, FAQ, retrieved 2026-07-25). There is no discretionary step in between.

That path stays predictable because the prohibited-practice list is closed. Ordane's prohibited-practice list is closed. Clause R-6 names six practices: latency, reverse or hedge arbitrage; high-frequency or bulk automated exploitation; copy trading between Ordane accounts; straddling news releases with paired opposing orders; platform or data-feed exploitation; and gap abuse. If a behavior is not listed in that section, it is not a violation. Discretion is not a rule (Ordane Rulebook v1.0, clause R-6, retrieved 2026-07-25).

What Ordane cannot walk you through yet is what each of those practices looks like in operation. Rulebook v1.0 states that each prohibited practice is defined with examples in Appendix A. Appendix A is not published on ordanemarkets.com as of 2026-07-25 (Ordane Rulebook v1.0, clause R-6, retrieved 2026-07-25). The six practices are named; their worked examples are not in the public record, and no honest article invents them.

The phrase "the rulebook version current at that time" is doing real work, because a repurchase lands under whatever version is live then. The Ordane rulebook is public, numbered and versioned, and no rule is ever applied retroactively to an open account. Changes produce a new version with a dated changelog entry, and the version you sign up under is the version that governs your account (Ordane Rulebook v1.0, changelog notice, retrieved 2026-07-25). Your open account is frozen to its version; a new account is a new agreement.

Your options after a breach

Once an account is closed, three real choices remain.

Three options after a breach: buy a fresh account starting at zero, walk away, or dispute only if the breach cited a rule not in the signed rulebook version. Below, a risk-reduction note that withdrawing eligible profit on schedule, with a first withdrawal 7 days after activation and every 14 days thereafter, keeps money out of reach of a breach. — After a breach closes your account, three paths remain. Only the dispute path works if you signed under a different rulebook version, and withdrawing on schedule keeps profit out of a breach's reach.

Buy a fresh account and start again. The common path. The old account stays closed; the new one begins at zero. At FundedNext, for example, a breached challenge account is not reopened as it was: a reset starts a fresh cycle before the account returns to active (FundedNext Help Center, retrieved 2026-07-29).

Walk away. If the breach exposed a habit the rules kept catching, the cheaper move can be to stop rather than re-buy the same test.

Dispute, but only on a specific ground. A dispute has weight when the breach cites a rule that was not in the version you agreed to. This is where a versioned rulebook, of the kind described above, decides the argument: the rule either appears in your version or it does not.

Before any of that, one habit limits the damage: withdraw eligible profit on schedule, so less of it is ever exposed to forfeiture. The first withdrawal is available 7 calendar days after account activation, and the cycle thereafter is every 14 days (Ordane Rulebook v1.0, clause PA-1, retrieved 2026-07-25). Money you have taken out is money a breach cannot take back. The withdrawal-eligibility rules for that first payout cover what has to be true before it clears.