What Is a Soft Breach on a Prop Firm Funded Account?
A soft breach is a rule break a prop firm penalises without closing the account. At Alpha Capital the trade's profit is voided; the loss stays.
A soft breach on a prop firm funded account is a rule violation the firm penalises without closing the account. A hard breach, by contrast, is a loss-limit failure that ends the account. What it costs is set by each firm’s published rules: at Alpha Capital Group the trade’s profit is ineligible for a performance fee while the loss stays.
Updated 9 October 2026: new search title and summary; the article text is unchanged.
That second sentence is the whole subject. The phrase “soft breach” is used across the industry as if it had one meaning, and it does not. It has one meaning per firm, written into that firm’s rules page, and the generic explainers that fill the search results for this question do not read any of those pages. This desk did, on 11 September 2026, and the results are below: one firm’s rule in full, and an honest account of what the other three UK-facing firms this site reviews would and would not let a reader see.
This is an evergreen explainer. The definitions do not expire; the specific rule figures are as read on the date given, and rules pages move, so the reading date is part of every present-tense claim here.
What is a soft breach on a prop firm funded account?
Start with the two words the industry borrows and then blurs.
A breach is any failure to keep to the rules attached to a funded account. The rules come in two families. The first is the loss limits: a daily loss cap and a maximum drawdown, expressed as a percentage of the starting balance and, at some firms, trailing behind the high-water mark. The second is the conduct rules: what you may trade, when you may trade it, whether a stop-loss is mandatory, whether you may hold over a weekend, whether you may execute inside a news window, and a longer tail of clauses about consistency, copy trading and account sharing.
A hard breach is a failure of the first family. Cross the daily loss cap or the maximum drawdown and the account is closed. There is no grading, no warning and no partial penalty, because the limit is the product: the firm sells a simulated account with a defined worst case, and the worst case has arrived. The Prop Journalist’s drawdown guide, the longest page this desk read on the question, spends some four thousand words on how those limits are calculated and never once needs the phrase “soft breach”, which tells you which family it belongs to.
A soft breach is a failure of the second family, at a firm that has chosen not to treat every conduct failure as fatal. The firm records a violation and attaches a penalty short of closure. The penalty is the firm’s to define. The Velotrade explainer this desk read lists the generic menu: a warning, invalidation of the offending trade, or disqualification at the evaluation stage. SizeProp’s founder, writing about his own product, says his firm has no soft breaches at all and that every breach is a hard one, then notes that other firms operate soft breaches that reset at the end of the day, without naming one. Surge Funded’s explainer talks about a “soft breach limit” in its headings and cites no firm’s page for it.
So the honest definition is short. A soft breach is whatever the firm you have paid says it is. The rest of this post is about finding out.
What is the difference between a soft breach and a hard breach?
Laid out as a rules examiner would lay it out:
| Hard breach | Soft breach | |
|---|---|---|
| Triggered by | Daily loss limit or maximum drawdown crossed | A conduct rule broken while the loss limits hold |
| Effect on the account | Closed | Stays open |
| Penalty | The account itself | Set by the firm’s rules: at Alpha Capital, profit from the trade ineligible for a performance fee |
| Is the loss removed? | Not applicable, the account is gone | At Alpha Capital, no: the loss is the trader’s |
| Warning first? | No | Firm-specific; Alpha Capital’s article states none |
| Can it escalate? | Not applicable | Firm-specific; Alpha Capital’s article states no count |
Two points on that table deserve a line each.
First, the direction of the asymmetry. A hard breach costs you the account but ends the accounting. A soft breach keeps the account and keeps the accounting running, which is why the interesting question is not “am I still funded” but “what did that trade just cost me”. At Alpha Capital the answer is the profit, not the loss, which is a penalty that only bites when the offending trade went well.
Second, the word “soft” is doing marketing work. It sounds lenient. Read against the Alpha Capital clause below it is a plain commercial term: the firm keeps the upside of a trade it says you should not have made and leaves you the downside. That is not lenient or harsh; it is a rule, and the point of this post is that you can only judge it by reading it.
What the explainers ranking for this question do not tell you
This desk read four of the pages that rank for the question on 11 September 2026. The pattern is consistent enough to state as a finding.
The Prop Journalist’s drawdown guide, dated 10 February 2026 in its page metadata, is a thorough treatment of balance versus equity, static versus trailing drawdown, and what “breached” means when a loss limit is crossed. It does not define a soft breach, because it is a guide to the hard kind.
Velotrade’s page, stated on the page as 9 June 2026, separates hard-breach conditions from “soft violations” and lists the generic consequences. It names no firm’s rules page.
SizeProp’s page, 12 May 2026 in its metadata, is the founder’s account of why his firm designed out soft breaches entirely. It is a useful negative case and says nothing about any other firm’s terms.
Surge Funded’s explainer, 26 February 2026, is generic throughout.
Two further pages in the results could not be read: Forex Tester’s article refused a plain fetch with a 403, and Meridian Funded’s page, dated 10 September 2026, sent a client-rendered shell of about a hundred words. Neither is counted in the finding, and neither is described.
None of the four readable pages quotes a named firm’s soft-breach rule. That is the gap, and it is the one this post fills, to the extent the firms’ own pages allowed.
Alpha Capital Group’s soft breach, read clause by clause
Alpha Capital Group is a UK-facing firm this site has reviewed. Its help centre carries an article titled “Can I trade news?” which is where the term appears. This desk read it in full on 11 September 2026. The page carries only a relative stamp, “Updated over 2 weeks ago”, and no absolute date, so the figures below are as read on that day and nothing older or newer is claimed for them. The article is the primary source for every figure in this section.
Clause one: the evaluation is exempt. During the evaluation phases the article says you can trade freely through all news releases. The rule begins only once you pass and become what the firm calls a Qualified Analyst. A reader who has only ever traded an Alpha Capital challenge has never met this rule.
Clause two: the window. On Qualified Analyst Pro, One, Three and Direct accounts, the trader is not permitted to execute any new trade or close any existing trade on the targeted instruments within 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the listed news releases. The article’s own summary repeats it for each plan in the same words: a 10-minute window, 5 minutes either side, with no trades to be executed.
Clause three: what “execute” means. This is the clause that makes the rule bite. The firm defines executing a trade as opening or closing one, whether by market execution or by a pending order, and it states in terms that a pending order includes a stop-loss or a take-profit. Holding through the window is allowed provided the trade was opened more than 5 minutes before the event. So a position opened at 13:20 ahead of a 13:30 release may be held; the same position with a take-profit that fills at 13:31 has, in the firm’s language, executed inside the window.
Clause four: the soft breach itself. The operative sentence deserves its own paragraph, because it is the only place in the four firms’ pages this desk could read where the term is both used and priced. If a Stop Gain, which the article defines as a stop-loss moved into profit, or a Take Profit is triggered or filled inside the restricted window, the article says it will be considered a violation, classified as a Soft Breach, and that any profits earned will not be eligible for a performance fee. The next sentence closes the other side: any losses incurred during news trading are the trader’s responsibility and will not be removed.
Read those two sentences together and the economics of an Alpha Capital soft breach are exact. The account survives. The offending trade’s profit is struck from the performance-fee calculation. The offending trade’s loss, if there was one, stands against the account’s loss limits. The penalty is asymmetric by design, and the article does not soften it: no warning stage is described, no daily reset, no strike count, and no route to appeal is mentioned on the page.
Clause five: the Swing carve-out. Alpha Swing accounts are treated differently. News trading is allowed on them. But a trade initiated within 2 minutes before or up to 2 minutes after a release, a 4-minute window, must exceed 2 minutes in duration to be valid. The article adds that Swing accounts are also subject to what it calls gambling rules, a term this desk quotes as the firm’s own and does not expand.
Clause six: the instrument table. The rest of the page is a table of which releases restrict which instruments. Three events restrict all instruments: USD CPI, the Federal Funds rate decision with its statement and press conference, and Non-Farm Employment Change. Gold and silver pairs carry every high-impact USD, AUD and CAD release and every EUR and GBP high-impact speech, plus interest rate decisions, CPI, GDP, PCE, PMI and employment figures for all currencies. Each currency then has its own list, which for GBP runs from PMI and CPI through Nationwide house prices, mortgage approvals and the claimant count to Bank of England rate decisions and speeches. Oil carries all CAD high-impact news and the crude inventories print. The article notes that calendars disagree on what counts as high impact and that the firm’s own list governs.
The programme context for those account names comes from the firm’s own rules explainer, read the same day, which states that Alpha One is a one-step plan with a 10% target, a 6% trailing drawdown and a 4% daily loss, and that Alpha Pro is a two-step plan sold in 6% and 8% variants with static drawdown of the same figure and daily loss of 3% and 4% respectively. The same page states that the evaluations run on simulated accounts with simulated funds, and tells readers to confirm the live rules on the help centre before trading. That last instruction is the firm’s, and this desk repeats it.
The firm-by-firm table: what the published pages say
The plan for this post was a four-firm table of soft-breach terms for the UK-facing firms this site has reviewed. Here is what the firms’ own pages returned on 11 September 2026, recorded exactly.
| Firm | Page tried | What came back | Does the readable text use “soft breach”? | Stated consequence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alpha Capital Group | Help centre, “Can I trade news?” | Full body, status 200 | Yes | Profit from the trade ineligible for a performance fee; losses not removed; account stays open |
| FTUK | ftuk.com FAQ | Status 200; readable text limited to the fee non-refundability line and the general risk warning | No | Cannot be stated from that page |
| City Traders Imperium | citytradersimperium.com FAQ at /faq/ and /faqs/ | Status 404 on both paths, navigation chrome only | Could not be read | Cannot be stated |
| Funded Trading Plus | fundedtradingplus.com FAQ | Status 403, Cloudflare block page | Could not be read | Cannot be stated |
The three empty rows need reading with care, because the temptation is to turn them into a finding they do not support.
The FTUK FAQ row means one thing only: the text of that page which reached this desk did not use the term. It does not mean FTUK has no soft-breach rule; it means the page as fetched did not say so in the portion that could be read. FTUK’s rules live elsewhere in its dashboard and terms, which this desk did not read for this post, and the site’s FTUK review covers what it did read at the time.
The City Traders Imperium row means the FAQ was not found at either of the two obvious paths. Search snippets from third-party sites assert that CTI treats a stop-loss not placed within one minute of entry as a soft breach. This desk could not verify that against any CTI page and does not report it as CTI’s rule; it is recorded here as an unverified third-party claim, and readers should look for it in CTI’s own terms. The site’s City Traders Imperium review is the nearest thing to a read of those terms on this site.
The Funded Trading Plus row means the firm’s FAQ blocked an automated fetch. That is a fact about the fetch and says nothing about the rules either way.
So the table delivers one sourced row and three scoped absences. That is a thinner result than the plan, and it is reported as such rather than dressed up. It is still one row more than any page ranking for the question had.
What happens if you break a prop firm rule?
The consequence tracks the family of rule, and then the firm.
Break a loss limit and the account closes, at every firm this site has reviewed and at every explainer this desk read. There is no soft version of a drawdown breach; SizeProp’s founder is right on that point even about firms other than his own, because the loss limit is the definition of the product.
Break a conduct rule and you are in the firm’s own terms. The generic menu the explainers offer, a warning, the trade invalidated, a disqualification, is a list of things firms have been seen to do; it is not what any particular firm will do to you. Alpha Capital’s page is a case where the firm has written the consequence down: the trade is a soft breach, its profit is excluded from the performance fee, and its loss is yours. The Hola Prime case this site reported on 4 September is a reminder of the other property of conduct rules, which is that they move: a stop-loss mandate arrived across that firm’s funded accounts within a day of a programme being marketed on its absence.
The practical rule is the one Alpha Capital itself gives its customers: confirm the live rules on the help centre before trading. If a firm’s page does not state a consequence for a conduct rule, then the consequence is unstated, and an unstated consequence is not a mild one.
Do you lose your funded account after a soft breach?
Not by definition. The term exists to name the category of violation that leaves the account open. At Alpha Capital, on the article read on 11 September 2026, a soft breach costs the performance fee on the offending profit and nothing else the page describes.
The question underneath is whether soft breaches accumulate. Some firms are said to count them, and a count that converts into a hard breach would make the “soft” label temporary. Alpha Capital’s article states no count and describes no escalation, and this desk does not infer one. For the other three firms the answer could not be read from their pages on the day. A reader with a funded account at any firm should look in the rules for three things in this order: the word “breach” with any qualifier, any number attached to violations, and any sentence that begins with “repeated”.
What happens if you lose a funded account?
The account is closed, and the money already paid stays paid. FTUK’s FAQ, in the portion this desk could read on 11 September 2026, states that its fees are generally non-refundable, with an exception where applicable law requires a refund, and this site’s reviews of UK-facing firms treat the evaluation fee as the sum at risk throughout.
Because the accounts are simulated, there is no live capital to return and no broker position to unwind; what is lost is the fee and the access. Whether the firm sells a reset, a discounted re-entry or a fresh evaluation, and at what price, is a matter for its own terms, and the explainers’ talk of “reset options” is a description of the market rather than of any firm you have paid.
How to read your own firm’s rules for the word
This desk’s method, offered for any firm and any reader:
- Find the page, not the summary. The term lives in help-centre articles and terms pages, not on the plan comparison page. Alpha Capital’s appears in an article on news trading, not in a rules overview.
- Read the definition of the verb. Alpha Capital’s rule turns on what “execute” means, and the definition includes stop-loss and take-profit fills. A rule that restricts “opening” trades is a different rule from one that restricts “executing” them.
- Find the price. A soft breach is a penalty. Look for the sentence that says what it costs: a trade closed, a profit excluded, a strike recorded, a day’s profit removed. If no sentence says, the price is undisclosed.
- Check both sides of the ledger. Alpha Capital removes the profit and keeps the loss. Another firm may remove both. The difference is the whole economics of the rule.
- Look for the count. Any number attached to violations, or any clause about repetition, converts a soft breach into a delayed hard one.
- Note the date you read it, and read it again before you rely on it. Alpha Capital’s page carries a relative stamp only. Rules pages move without notice; the Hola Prime case moved twice in two days.
Questions searchers ask
What is the difference between a soft breach and a hard breach?
A hard breach ends the account: the daily loss limit or maximum drawdown is crossed and the firm closes the funded account. A soft breach is a rule violation the firm penalises without closing the account. At Alpha Capital Group, as read on 11 September 2026, the stated penalty is that profits from the offending trade are not eligible for a performance fee, while losses stay. Other firms define their own penalties, or do not use the term.
What happens if you break a prop firm rule?
It depends on which rule and which firm. Crossing a loss limit is a hard breach at every firm this site has reviewed and closes the account. Breaking a conduct rule, such as trading inside a restricted news window, is handled under that firm’s published terms: at Alpha Capital Group the trade is classed a soft breach and its profit is excluded from the performance fee. Read the firm’s own rules page, not a generic explainer, for the actual consequence.
Do you lose your funded account after a soft breach?
Not by definition: in the firms’ own usage a soft breach is the category of violation that does not close the account. Alpha Capital Group’s news-trading article, read on 11 September 2026, attaches a financial penalty instead, with profits ineligible for a performance fee. Whether repeated soft breaches escalate into a hard breach is a firm-by-firm question: the Alpha Capital article states no escalation count, and no count could be read from the other three firms’ pages on that date.
What happens if you lose a funded account?
Under the rules pages this desk has read, the funded account is closed and the evaluation fee stays paid: FTUK’s FAQ, read on 11 September 2026, states its fees are generally non-refundable, with an exception where applicable law requires a refund. Because the accounts are simulated, there is no live capital to return; what is lost is the fee and the access. Whether a reset or re-entry is offered is set by each firm’s own terms.
The plain line
None of the four firms named here is described in this post as regulated, authorised or licensed by anyone, because no such claim has been read from a primary source and the accounts in question are simulated. A soft breach is a clause in a contract for a paid evaluation, and the fee for that evaluation is money at risk whether the breach is soft, hard or never happens. Trading carries a substantial risk of loss, and nothing here is advice.