Which prop firm rules quietly fight a scalping style?

[Shadow Trader]

The rules that hurt scalpers are rarely the headline ones. Daily drawdown and profit target get all the attention, but the clauses that cause trouble tend to sit a few pages further down.

Take a minimum trade duration clause. Someone who exits in 20 seconds on a fast move can have those trades discounted or flagged, and sometimes the profit from them is stripped out of the total. Then there is the consistency rule, where no single day can account for more than a set share of total profit. Scalping produces lumpy days around news and session opens, so one very good Tuesday can stall a payout instead of speeding it up.

Another one is the daily loss limit measured on equity instead of balance. Floating loss on a scalp that is open for a few seconds during a spread spike can count toward the limit even though the trade would have closed fine a moment later.

Also worth reading closely: restrictions on trading around high-impact news, which sometimes apply to a window both before and after the release, and rules about hedging across accounts or copying signals. Those are written broadly and enforced differently from firm to firm.

The pattern is that evaluation rules are usually built around swing-style behavior, so scalping fits only if the specific wording is checked against actual trade frequency and hold times. Reading the terms with a stopwatch in mind, not a profit target, changes which firms look workable.

Which clause in a prop firm rulebook has caught a scalper out most often, the wording itself or the way it was enforced?