A Pre-Payout Checklist for Funded Futures Accounts

Why check before you ask

Most payout rules look backward at your whole track record: how your profit was spread across days, how many days you traded, whether you were inside a news window or holding past the session close, and what your other accounts were doing. By the time a request is denied, those trades are history. Checking first turns a surprise into a decision.

The checklist

Run through these before you submit a request:

1. Confirm which rule set applies to payouts. Evaluation rules and funded-account rules often differ, and payouts can have their own conditions. Read the current payout policy, not the evaluation rules you remember.
2. Check your best-day share. If your firm has a consistency rule, divide your best day's profit by your net profit across every trading day. Losing days lower the denominator.
3. Count your qualifying trading days. Firms define a trading day differently (any trade, or a day above a minimum profit, for example). Count them the way your firm does.
4. Check the buffer you are asked to hold. Some firms want a minimum balance above the starting balance or above the drawdown floor before a request. Know whether your trailing floor has locked and where it sits now.
5. Look for restricted windows. If your rules limit trading around scheduled news, check your trades against those windows.
6. Check overnight and session-close holding. If holding past the session close is banned on your account, check that no position crossed it.
7. Check what your other accounts did. If you copy-trade or run several accounts, opposing positions across your own accounts can look like hedging to a firm. Know what your firm's rules say.
8. Check open positions and pending orders. Some firms want the account flat, or specific conditions met, when you request.
9. Keep your own records. If a request is questioned, a clear per-trade history is your evidence. Keep it somewhere other than the firm's platform.

A worked example (illustrative numbers, not any firm's rules)

A $50,000 funded account, nine trading days, $2,400 net profit. Your best day made $900.

• Best-day share: $900 / $2,400 = 37.5%.
• If your firm's cap is 30%, you are over it. With the same best day, you would need about $3,000 of net profit ($900 / 0.30) to be inside the cap.
• Nothing about the best day was a mistake. The share is high because the other eight days netted only $1,500.

Finding this a few days early leaves you time to read your firm's rules on what to do next, instead of finding out from a denial.

What a tool can and cannot do

On the Payouts page, Fillbook's payout readiness check (Core plan) shows OK, Warning or Can't tell lines for your consistency share, minimum trading days, an optional payout buffer, trades inside a news-blackout window, positions held across the session rollover, and possible opposing positions across your own accounts. It is built only from the trades logged in Fillbook, and the news window, overnight rule and buffer come only from the settings you enter on your own rules. No firm's payout rules are built in, and missing data shows as Can't tell, never as OK. It is a checklist, not a verdict.