There are a few core rules that apply to every account, but with different numbers depending on which model you're on. Here's buffer requirements, consistency, max contract size, and news trading laid out account by account.

Buffer Requirements

A funded buffer is the amount your balance needs to clear above your starting balance before a payout becomes available. Not every account has one.

Account Size	Standard	Reserve	Express	Direct
$25,000	$1,600	No buffer	$1,600	No buffer
$50,000	$2,100	No buffer	$2,100	No buffer
$100,000	$3,600	No buffer	$3,600	No buffer
$150,000	$5,100	No buffer	$5,100	No buffer

Standard and Express both hold you to a buffer before you can withdraw anything. Reserve and Direct skip this entirely and use other conditions instead (winning days for Reserve, profit goals for Direct).

Consistency Rule

This limits how much of your total profit can come from a single trading day.

Account Type	Consistency Requirement	Applies To
Standard	40%	Funded account only
Reserve	50% (51% with the 1% cushion)	Challenge/evaluation only
Express	40%	Challenge only
Direct	20% on 1st payout, 25% on 2nd, 30% on 3rd+	All payout requests

Notice Standard checks consistency on the funded account, while Reserve and Express check it during the evaluation. Direct is the odd one out, its consistency requirement actually gets easier to satisfy as you take more payouts, since the allowed percentage per day goes up.

Max Position Size

This is the maximum number of contracts you're allowed to hold at once, shown as minis / micros.

Account Size	Standard	Reserve (Evaluation)	Express (Evaluation)	Direct
$25,000	1 Mini / 10 Micros	2 Minis / 20 Micros	1 Mini / 10 Micros	1 Mini / 10 Micros
$50,000	4 Minis / 40 Micros	4 Minis / 40 Micros	4 Minis / 40 Micros	4 Minis / 40 Micros
$100,000	8 Minis / 80 Micros	8 Minis / 80 Micros	8 Minis / 80 Micros	8 Minis / 80 Micros
$150,000	12 Minis / 120 Micros	12 Minis / 120 Micros	12 Minis / 120 Micros	12 Minis / 120 Micros

Reserve and Express switch to a progressive scaling system once you're funded, so your contract limit on those two models grows as your account grows rather than staying fixed like it is during evaluation.

News Trading

Account Type	News Trading
Standard	Allowed
Reserve	Allowed
Express	Allowed
Direct	Allowed

All four models let you trade through high-impact news events on both the evaluation and funded stages. Blue Guardian doesn't restrict it, but does warn that slippage and wider spreads are more likely during volatile news releases, so it's on you to manage that risk.

If you're trading with Blue Guardian Futures, there are a handful of rules that sit outside the usual profit targets and drawdown limits, but they matter just as much. These cover how many funded accounts you can run at once, how close you can trade to a CME price limit, what risk-to-reward ratio they expect from you, and how they view stop losses. Let's go through each one and what it actually means for how you trade.

How Many Funded Accounts Can You Have?

You can buy as many Evaluation accounts as you want. There's no cap there. The limit kicks in once accounts turn funded: you can only have 5 funded accounts open and trading at the same time.

This matters if you're the type of trader who likes to run several accounts in parallel. Say you already have 5 funded accounts active and you pass a 6th evaluation, or you buy a Direct account that skips evaluation entirely. That new account doesn't get canceled, but it also doesn't go live right away. It sits inactive until one of your other 5 slots opens up, whether that's because an account got breached, closed, or otherwise dropped out of your active count. Once a slot frees up, the next eligible account in line gets activated automatically.

Practically, this means you should think about your funded accounts as a rotation of 5, not an unlimited stack. If you're planning to scale by running multiple accounts, keep that number in mind before you buy your next evaluation.

The 2% Price Limit Rule

CME futures contracts have built-in price limits: the maximum a contract's price is allowed to move in a session before the exchange steps in. When a contract hits that limit, the market can pause, lock within the limit, or halt trading for the day depending on the product.

Blue Guardian doesn't want you anywhere near that edge. Their rule is simple: don't trade within 2% of a CME price limit. The idea is to keep you out of the kind of violent, illiquid price action that happens right as a market hits its limit, where slippage and erratic fills can wreck a position in seconds.

To follow this in practice, you need to know two things: what the price limit is for the contract you're trading, and how far the current price is from it. CME updates these limits daily at 5:05 PM EST, and you can check them on the CME Price Limits page. Most platforms show you the % Net Change for a contract, which is the number to watch. If the limit is 5% and your contract is already up or down 3%, you're inside that 2% danger zone and should be stepping back, not adding to a position.

One thing worth knowing if you trade equity index futures: contracts like ES, MES, NQ, MNQ, RTY, M2K, YM, and MYM have had their overnight price limits extended from 5% to 7%. That changes where your 2% buffer zone actually sits during overnight sessions, so don't assume the daytime limit still applies after hours.

Risk-to-Reward: The 5:1 Ceiling

Blue Guardian caps how much risk you're allowed to take relative to your profit target, at a maximum ratio of 5:1. In plain terms, if you're aiming to make $100 on a trade, your stop loss can't be set more than $500 away. Or in ticks: a 10-tick profit target means your stop can't sit more than 50 ticks out.

This isn't about forcing you into tight stops on every trade. It's aimed at the setups where someone sets an unrealistic profit target next to a stop that's way too wide, essentially betting that the market moves their way before it moves 5x that distance against them. That's a low-probability bet dressed up as a trading strategy, and it's exactly what this rule is meant to prevent.

Mental stops are allowed, so you don't have to place a hard stop order on the exchange if that's not how you trade. But the 5:1 ceiling still applies to whatever stop you're mentally committing to. If you blow past it, expect a warning at minimum, and repeated violations can get you disqualified from payouts.

The rule also tells you something about how to manage trades once they're working in your favor: move your stop forward to lock in gains, don't loosen it to give a losing trade more room. Widening a stop after entry to avoid taking a loss is the opposite of what this rule is protecting against.

Stop Losses, Risk Management, and What Counts as Gambling

Blue Guardian doesn't require you to use a stop loss on every trade, but they're direct about what happens if you don't use one properly. Trading without a stop loss and using the account's trailing drawdown as your safety net isn't a strategy in their eyes. It's shifting all your risk onto the firm while you keep 100% of the upside if it goes your way, and they call it what it is: gambling. Accounts trading this way risk being disqualified from moving to a live funded account.

The standard they hold every strategy to, including scalping, is having a defined initial stop loss before you enter. A couple of examples show what that looks like in practice: a scalper going for 10 ticks might use a 30-tick stop, and someone aiming for 20 ticks might set a 60-tick stop. Notice both of these examples already sit inside the 5:1 ratio from the previous section. That's not a coincidence: the stop-loss rule and the risk-to-reward rule are really the same principle looked at from two angles.

A few other practices get flagged specifically:

• Inconsistent position sizing, especially increasing your size after a loss to try to win it back. This is a martingale approach, and Blue Guardian treats it as a red flag for account review.
• No stop loss on longer-term or trend trades. When you don't have a clean profit target because you're trying to ride a trend, the stop loss becomes even more important, since it's the only thing defining your actual risk. Trailing your stop as the trade moves in your favor is the recommended way to lock in gains without capping your upside.

The underlying message across all of this: know your risk before you enter, size your positions consistently, and let a backtested system dictate your stops and targets rather than adjusting them trade by trade based on how you're feeling. That's the behavior Blue Guardian is trying to reward, and it's also just good trading practice regardless of which firm you're funded by.