What "no EA that trades" rules actually restrict, and what they don't

A lot of funded account programmes and challenge providers ban expert advisors that place trades, automated systems that open and close positions on your behalf. It's a reasonable rule from the firm's side: they can't verify a human made every decision if code is doing the deciding.

What that rule doesn't restrict, in every set of terms I've actually read closely, is software that only reads your account and displays information. A panel that shows your equity, your daily P&L, your drawdown against a limit, or does arithmetic and prints a number on the chart isn't placing trades, modifying trades, or closing trades, it has no order-sending code in it at all. It's closer to a very fast mental-math assistant than to a trading robot.

The distinction matters in practice because the two categories of mistake it prevents are different. An EA that trades can violate the letter of the rule by sending an order. A pure display tool can't violate that letter, no matter what it shows, because it never touches the trade. What it can do is remove the excuse of not knowing where you stood, most disqualifications aren't from a rule-breaking EA, they're from a trader who genuinely lost track of their own daily loss limit mid-session and found out only after checking the account status page, by which point it was already over.

This is the whole reasoning behind why I built Risk Mirror as strictly read-only: it puts your daily loss limit, drawdown, and profit target on the chart with the real number left, and locks a banner across the screen when you hit either one, but it sends no orders, modifies nothing, and closes nothing, so it stays on the right side of that rule by construction rather than by promise. It's free on the MQL5 Market if it's useful.

Worth reading your own firm's actual rule text rather than assuming, though. Wording varies, and this is a general pattern, not legal advice for any specific contract.

Risk Mirror on the MQL5 Market: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/189247