How to Use EAs and Automated Trading at Funded Guru

The short answer: automated trading and Expert Advisors are permitted at Funded Guru. The rules that apply to manual trading apply equally to automated strategies – if the underlying logic is legitimate, the fact that it's automated doesn't change anything. What's not permitted is using an EA to run prohibited strategies: martingale, grid trading, latency arbitrage, tick scalping, or any approach that exploits platform inefficiencies.

What counts as an EA or automated strategy?

An Expert Advisor is a program that opens, manages, and closes trades automatically based on predefined logic. This includes fully automated systems that require no manual input, semi-automated tools that suggest entries and execute with one click, and copy trading systems that mirror your own positions from one account to another.

All of the above are permitted at Funded Guru, subject to the same rules that govern manual trading. Using someone else's signals or a third-party copy trading service that mirrors another trader's positions is not permitted – your trades need to be driven by your own strategy, whether that strategy is executed manually or through code.

What's prohibited for EAs

The prohibited strategy list applies in full to automated systems. An EA cannot use martingale logic – meaning it cannot increase position size after a loss to recover previous losses. It cannot use grid trading – placing buy and sell orders at fixed intervals above and below a price regardless of direction. It cannot exploit latency in price feeds to gain execution advantages. It cannot execute trades in under 2 minutes as a systematic strategy. And it cannot use high-frequency logic designed to take advantage of platform limitations rather than genuine market movement.

These aren't loopholes that automation can get around. If the EA's code contains martingale position-sizing logic, it will be detected in the trading data. The pattern of increasing lot sizes following consecutive losses is visible in trade history regardless of whether a human or a program placed the orders.

Configuring your EA for Instant Funding – the 1% rule

This is the most critical configuration step for anyone running an EA on an Instant Funding account. The 1% combined floating loss rule means that at any moment, the total open floating loss across all positions – including all positions opened by your EA — cannot exceed 1% of your current account balance.

Most EAs are designed with a per-trade risk parameter. If your EA risks 0.5% per trade and opens two trades simultaneously, your combined floating exposure is 1%. That's already at the ceiling – any additional slippage, spread widening, or commission pushes you over. The risk engine fires automatically with no warning, all trades are closed, and the account is suspended.

The practical configuration rule is this: your EA's maximum combined open risk across all simultaneous positions must be set to no more than 0.7–0.8% of account balance. This leaves a buffer for commissions, spread, and slippage above what the EA calculates as its "intended" risk.

If your EA doesn't natively support a combined exposure cap – only individual trade risk – you need to either limit it to one open trade at a time, or modify the logic so that new trades are only opened when existing trades have moved sufficiently into profit that the combined floating loss cannot reach 1%.

Configuring your EA for the 2-Step Challenge – daily and overall limits

On the 2-Step Challenge there's no per-position risk cap, but the daily loss limit of 5% and overall loss of 10% still apply in real time. An EA that runs freely through a bad session without a circuit breaker can breach the daily limit before you've even opened your computer.

Configure a daily drawdown stop in your EA – a maximum loss threshold for the day at which point the EA stops opening new trades and closes any open positions. Set it at 3–4% of initial balance to leave margin above the 5% hard limit. Most robust EA frameworks support a daily equity drawdown parameter. If yours doesn't, add it or use a separate account protection tool.

Similarly, configure a maximum overall drawdown stop at 7–8% so the EA halts trading if the account approaches the 10% overall limit. The EA should not be running unattended without these safeguards in place.

Testing your EA before going live on a funded account

Never deploy a new EA directly onto a funded account at full size. The funded account is real – a breach closes it permanently and any undrawn profits are forfeited.

The right process is to run a new phase on the smallest available account size first, with the EA at minimum lot size, and observe its behaviour across at least 20–30 trades. Check that the combined floating loss never approaches 1% on Instant Funding. Check that the daily drawdown protection triggers correctly on losing days. Verify that the EA's lot sizing is calculating from current balance, not a fixed input that might become outdated as the account grows or shrinks.

Pay particular attention to how the EA behaves around news events. Many EAs don't have built-in news filters. If yours doesn't, either add one – there are free news filter plugins for most platforms – or manually disable the EA 4 minutes before and after scheduled high-impact releases.

Running multiple EAs simultaneously

Multiple EAs running on the same funded account are treated as one account for the purposes of all rules. The combined floating loss across all positions from all EAs counts toward the 1% threshold on Instant Funding. The combined daily drawdown from all EAs counts toward the daily loss limit.

If you're running two EAs simultaneously on the same Instant Funding account, each EA must be configured to a maximum open risk of 0.35–0.4% to keep the combined total under 0.8%. Three EAs means each one gets roughly 0.25%. The math compounds quickly and leaves very little room per system.

Running multiple EAs on the 2-Step Challenge is more manageable – the 5% daily limit gives more room and there's no combined position cap. But the principle remains: total daily risk across all running systems must be bounded by the account's daily loss floor, not managed independently per EA.

Copy trading your own strategies across multiple accounts

Copying your own trades from one of your Funded Guru accounts to another is permitted. What's not permitted is using an external signal service or copying another trader's positions.

If you're managing several funded accounts and want to mirror entries across them, you can do so using a copy trading tool – provided the source account is your own and the strategy is your own. Each account remains independent for the purposes of rules, drawdown, and payouts – a breach on one account doesn't affect the others.

What happens if a prohibited EA is detected?

If a review of your trading data identifies patterns consistent with a prohibited strategy – martingale lot scaling, grid placement, sub-2-minute tick scalping – your account will be closed. There's no warning and no appeal for confirmed violations. It doesn't matter that the trades were placed by a program rather than manually. You are responsible for what runs on your account.

If you purchased an EA from a third party, verify its logic before deploying it. Ask the developer directly whether it uses martingale or grid components. Many retail EAs marketed as "safe" or "low risk" use hidden martingale recovery logic that isn't obvious from the marketing material.