What is a retroactive rule change at a prop firm?
A retroactive rule change is when a prop firm alters its rules — profit split, drawdown, minimum trading days, payout conditions — and applies the new version to accounts that were bought, or already passed, under the old version. You agreed to one set of terms; you are now being held to another.
Why it is different from an ordinary rule change
Firms change their rules all the time, and most of the time that is fine. A firm that raises its challenge price for new buyers has made a business decision you can simply choose not to take. Anyone who already paid is unaffected.
A retroactive change is different because it reaches backwards. The money has already changed hands. The evaluation has already been passed on the old rules. There is no "choose not to take it" — the only options are to accept the new terms or walk away from an account you already paid for.
What it has looked like in practice
The pattern that tends to precede trouble has a recognisable shape: several changes land at once, each one worse for the trader (a lower split, a higher target, a new minimum hold time, a new payout condition), and the wording says or implies that they apply to existing accounts "effective immediately".
That is the pattern our classifier is built to flag. When a change matches it, the entry in our change log is labelled Retroactive. It is the only label on this site that we treat as urgent.
Two caveats, because they matter. First, a flag is triage, not a verdict — it means the text looks like the pattern and a human should read it, not that the firm has done anything wrong. Second, we can only see public pages. A change announced only in a dashboard, an email or a Discord post will not appear here.
How to spot one yourself
- Keep a copy of the terms page on the day you buy. A screenshot is fine; the Internet Archive is better because it is timestamped by a third party.
- Watch the wording around any change: "for all accounts", "existing and new", "effective immediately" are the phrases to look for.
- Check the firm's page on this site — every firm we track has a full history of what changed and when, with an archived copy of each version.
What this site does about it
We read every tracked firm's public terms pages on a schedule, compare them with the copy we kept last time, and publish anything that changed as a before → after diff. Each version is sent to the Internet Archive so it cannot be quietly edited away later. The method is published in full.