At CTI, our mission is to help traders build long-term, sustainable profitability.
Gambling behaviour and over-leveraging undermine that goal because they rely on luck rather than skill, discipline, or risk management.
These behaviours also make it impossible to monetise your trading in real market conditions, which is essential for maintaining the CTI funding model.
This article explains what these behaviours are, why they matter, and how CTI evaluates them fairly.
🔷 Why These Behaviours Cannot Be Monetised in Live Markets
CTI works with live market execution and real liquidity. That means your trading must be sustainable and replicable in the long term.
Gambling behaviour and over-leverage cannot be monetised because:
Live markets cannot safely execute extremely oversized trades.
High-risk strategies distort performance data.
Risking the entire account on a single trade idea is not viable for replicating in a live environment.
To put it simply:
👉 If a strategy cannot survive real market conditions, CTI cannot allocate capital to it.
Our goal is to fund traders whose strategies are stable, controlled, and suitable for long-term scaling.
🔷 Why These Rules Protect You
These guidelines help you:
Build a consistent trading discipline.
Avoid account blowouts.
Protect capital.
Develop professional habits.
Become a long-term, scalable trader.
They also ensure CTI’s funding model remains fair, transparent, and sustainable.
🔷 What Is “Gambling Behaviour”?
"Gambling" refers to trading in a way that abandons structured risk management. It includes:
1. Trying to pass the challenge with one single trade idea
Taking overleverage trades (or stacking multiple positions on the same symbol) to hit the target instantly.
2. Taking randomly oversized positions
If a trader suddenly uses larger lot sizes than their typical behaviour (especially when they're in a drawdown), only to hit the profit target in 1 trade idea. This is flagged as gambling.
3. Over-Leveraging Trades
Over-leveraging occurs when a trader uses their entire available margin on a single trade idea, causing the Margin Level to fall to 150% or below. This includes:
Opening one oversized position.
Stacking positions on the same symbol.
⚠️ Example Violation: The Margin Level drops to 140% because the trader opened a position far too large for their balance.
This is considered gambling, not strategic trading.
🔷 CTI’s Fairness Approach — Mistakes Are Okay
We understand honest mistakes happen. That’s why you may receive one or more of the following:
A notice explaining what to correct.
One free retry.
Reduced leverage.
A limit on the number of trades you can open per day.
A 1% maximum risk-per-trade-idea rule.
(A trade idea is a single position or splitting a trade into multiple positions on the same symbol or highly correlated symbols).
⛔ If the Behaviour continues, CTI may apply:
Challenge failure.
Funded account termination.
Ineligibility for payouts or upgrades.
Formal warnings (depending on history).
These measures are in place to help traders improve — not punish them.
As an evaluation firm, our mission is to help you improve while ensuring the trading flow you generate is high-quality, consistent, sustainable, and monetisable.
By maintaining strong trading standards, we can produce cleaner, more reliable trading data, thereby strengthening our stability as a firm and contributing positively to the prop trading industry as a whole.
⁉️ Need Help or Have Questions?⁉️
Reach out to us. We’re always here to help you stay compliant and grow.