Field Manual 25 RULES · TWO PARTS · EVERY RULE SOURCED

The Prop Firm Rulebook

Every lesson from the books and the 1,797-trade research, distilled into rules you can carry into a live challenge. Part general discipline, part hard data. This is the carryable system behind the Trader B Diary.

Get the PDF → Back to the Research Lab

Mechanical rules

Parts

1,797

Trades behind them

Clean-living checks

This rulebook takes everything from two places and turns it into rules you can actually trade by. The first is the books, the Mind, Method, and Money framework from The Complete Trader's Edge. The second is the research, the Inside 1,797 Trades series, where one real trader's entire career across twelve prop firm accounts was opened up and read like evidence.

The General Rules are universal discipline from the M·M·M framework, true for any trader. They are fixed. The Trader A Rules are empirical, pulled straight from the dataset. They are not laws of the market, they are what the data showed for one trader. Trader B adopts them, follows them mechanically, and re-tests them against his own results after thirty days.

The honesty clause. Following this rulebook is not a guarantee of a pass. Nothing is. It is a system for trading with discipline and learning from the outcome, win or lose.

Part One

The General Rules

From The Complete Trader's Edge. Universal. Fixed.

Mind

Your rules are absolute.

Trade the written rule, never the feeling in the moment. The instant you start making exceptions, you no longer have a system, you have moods.

CTE Ch.18, Your Trading Rules

Think in probabilities, not certainties.

No single trade means anything. The next hundred mean everything. Judge yourself on whether you followed your process, not on whether the last trade won.

CTE Ch.3, The Probability Mindset; Ch.13, Consistency

Never increase size after a loss.

Making it back is the single fastest way to breach an account. Revenge trading is the most dangerous pattern there is. After a loss you reduce or you stop, you never press.

CTE Ch.6, The Ego Trade; Ch.8, Revenge Trading

Never chase.

If you missed the entry, it is gone. There will be another. No fear-of-missing-out trades, no boredom trades, no trading for the sake of being in the market.

CTE Ch.9, FOMO; Ch.18, boredom trading

Protect the operator.

Sleep, food, and state decide your trades more than your charts do. A tired or hungover trader is a careless trader. This rule carries its own tracked protocol, the Physical Edge Protocol below.

CTE Ch.14, The Trader's Body; Ch.16-17, Routines

Method

No trade without higher-timeframe bias.

Top-down, every time. Know the daily and four-hour story before you touch a fifteen-minute chart. A trade against the higher-timeframe bias is a coin flip with extra steps.

CTE Method pillar, multi-timeframe analysis

Only planned setups, only with confluence.

Daily directional bias, then four-hour fair value gaps and order blocks plus pivots plus the news calendar, then a fifteen-minute precision entry. If the confluence is not there, there is no trade.

CTE Ch.45, Building a Strategy

Price action leads. Indicators only confirm.

Never enter on an indicator alone. Read what price is doing first, let the rest support the decision, never make it.

CTE Method pillar

Every trade is planned before it is placed.

Entry, stop, target, and size, decided and written down before you click. If you cannot state all four in one sentence, you are not ready to take the trade.

CTE Ch.47, The Trade Plan

Trade only inside your defined windows.

Outside the plan, the screen is closed. The market runs all day, you do not.

CTE Ch.43, The Session Map and Kill Zones

Money

Risk a fixed small percentage per trade.

Default one percent, never above two. Size every trade by the formula, never by how confident you feel. Confidence is the most expensive way to size a position.

CTE Ch.54, Risk; Ch.55, Position Sizing

Minimum one-to-two reward to risk.

The ratio you accept defines your long-term result more than your win rate does. Below one-to-two, the maths is working against you.

CTE Ch.56, Risk : Reward

Know your numbers.

Expectancy and risk of ruin are not optional. If your expectancy is negative, you stop and rebuild. If your sizing pushes your risk of ruin up, you are gambling, not trading.

CTE Ch.57, Expectancy; Ch.58, Risk of Ruin

Drawdowns are certain. Have a protocol.

Step your size down at defined triggers and pause at defined limits. The protocol is written in advance, never improvised while you are hurting.

CTE Ch.59-60, The Drawdown Protocol

Treat the account like a casino edge, the fee like an expense.

The house wins because it has an edge and the discipline to play it across thousands of hands. The challenge fee is a cost of doing business, not a lottery ticket. Decide your withdrawal plan before you are funded.

CTE Ch.61, Prop Firms; Ch.64, Withdrawal Strategy

Part Two

The Trader A Rules

From Inside 1,797 Trades. Empirical. A hypothesis, re-tested live.

Every number below is real, drawn from one anonymised trader's 1,797 trades across 12 FundedNext accounts, August 2024 to January 2026. They are true for Trader A. Trader B follows them mechanically, then checks them against his own data after thirty days.

Hold every trade at least sixty minutes.

The single most powerful rule in the dataset. On its own, with nothing else changed, it turned the career from minus $3,103 to plus $7,095. If you feel the urge to close inside an hour, that urge is exactly what this rule exists to stop.

Study: The Hold-Time Paradox

Trade only 08:00 to 16:59 server time.

The London and New York overlap is where the edge lived. The hours outside it quietly gave the gains back.

Study: A Winning Trader Who Traded at the Wrong Time

Skip the Asian session entirely (00:00 to 07:59).

Low liquidity, low edge. Nothing in the data justified trading these hours.

Study: trading-hours analysis

Trade only the instruments that paid.

Gold, silver, US30, the DAX, oil, and the JP225. Cut Bitcoin, the Nasdaq, Ethereum, and GBP/JPY. Trading the wrong markets cost $7,048.

Study: The Cost of Trading the Wrong Markets

A hard stop on every single trade. No exceptions.

The trades left without a stop were the difference between a career and a wreck. Consistent hard stops would have saved $29,633.

Study: The Stop-Loss That Would Have Saved $29,633

Skip Friday 15:00 to 16:59.

The late-Friday window bled money with nothing to show for it. Stand down.

Study: The Friday Anomaly

Run the lean core, not the kitchen sink.

Trading hours plus the asset filter plus the sixty-minute hold produced plus $5,813 at a 69.9 percent win rate across 379 trades. Stacking every rule on top dropped it to plus $2,545. More rules are not better rules.

Study: the stacked-counterfactual synthesis

Cap the day, then cool off.

A tilt cascade took two accounts in thirty-six minutes and stacked twenty-two losing trades in twenty-two. Set a hard daily loss limit. Hit it, or hit a set number of losses in a row, and you are finished for the day.

Study: The 36-Minute Autopsy; The 22-Trade Spiral

Do not chase win rate. Survive the worst trade.

You can go nine winners out of ten and still breach on the single trade you let run too far. Survival is about the size of your worst loss, not the count of your best wins.

Study: You Can Go 9-for-10 and Still Blow the Account

The line between passing and breaching is a handful of decisions.

The same trader, same strategy, twelve accounts, passed six and breached six. The difference was discipline on a few specific trades, not a better system. Treat every trade as if it might be one of those six.

Study: Same Trader, Same Strategy: 6 Passed, 6 Breached

The Clean-Living Layer

The Physical Edge Protocol

Rule 5, turned into daily action items Trader B scores against the results.

The body is not separate from the trading account. Sleep, fuel, movement, and state feed straight into decision quality, and decision quality is the whole game in a challenge. Trader B logs every item below alongside the trades, to measure whether clean living actually moves the results.

Recover · Sleep

Seven or more hours of sleep

Sleep and wake within an hour of yesterday

No screens for the last thirty minutes before bed

Fuel · Zero Alcohol

Zero alcohol, the night before and on trading days

Two to three litres of water through the day

A real meal before the session, no sugar crash

Caffeine stable and early, no mid-session top-ups

Move · Exercise

Real movement today, thirty minutes minimum

A short walk before the session to settle the state

Regulate · State

Pre-session breathing before the first trade

After any loss, one slow breath cycle before the next decision

Environment · Workspace

Desk clear, charts only, no competing tabs

Phone out of reach, notifications off

Daylight or good lighting, not trading in the dark

The Clean-Living Score

Count the boxes you tick, fourteen in all, and write that score at the top of the day's journal entry, right next to the day's profit or loss. Across the challenge, the diary plots one against the other and answers a simple question: do the clean days actually trade better? Either way, Trader B runs the experiment on himself instead of guessing.

Start here

The Lean Core

If you do nothing else, trade these. The minimum stack Trader B starts the challenge on.

Risk one percent per trade, sized by formula. Rule 11
Minimum one-to-two reward to risk. Rule 12
A hard stop on every trade. Rule 20
Hold every trade at least sixty minutes. Rule 16
Trade only 08:00 to 16:59 server time. Rule 17
Trade only the instruments that paid. Rule 19
Hard daily loss cap, then stop. Rule 23

Take it with you

Get the rulebook PDF.

The full twenty-five rules, the Physical Edge Protocol, and the daily checklist in one branded document you can keep beside your charts.

Get the PDF → Open the tracker

The Complete Trader's Edge. For education, not financial advice. Trading carries risk; past results, including Trader A's, do not predict future outcomes.

Keep Reading

The Complete Trader's Edge The full Mind · Method · Money framework. 70 chapters. View on Amazon →

Market Mayhem 400 years of bubbles, crashes, and the pattern that keeps repeating. Buy on Amazon →

Greatest Companies How the world's greatest companies were built — and what traders learn from them. View on Amazon →