The PDT rule is gone. Your speed bump doesn’t have to be.

On June 4, 2026, FINRA’s amendments to Rule 4210 took effect (Regulatory Notice 26-10, approved by the SEC in April). Three things were eliminated outright: the “pattern day trader” designation, the day-trade count that triggered it, and the $25,000 minimum equity requirement that came with it.

Brokers have until October 2027 to finish implementing the replacement framework, so for the next year and a half the same order can be accepted at one broker and rejected at another. Alpaca switched on June 4: the PDT designation, day-trade counting, and the $25,000 floor are gone from its platform, replaced by its intraday margin framework.

Almost nobody liked the PDT rule. It locked small accounts out of day trading and turned the fourth day-trade of the week into a compliance event. But it had one accidental benefit, and traders have spent the past week saying so out loud: it was a forced speed bump. Three day-trades in five days meant you had to pick your spots. You could not revenge-trade your way through a bad morning, because the rule physically would not let you.

As of June 4, you can.

The new framework computes an intraday margin deficit — whether your intraday exposure exceeded what your equity supports. Real-time monitoring is optional for brokers; end-of-day calculation is allowed. Deficits must be met promptly, and repeated failures trigger a 90-day restriction on new short positions and increased debits.

Notice what kind of mechanism that is. It is a consequence, not a guardrail. It fires after the loss, settles after the damage, and restricts you next quarter for what your account did this morning. Nothing in the new regime pauses you before the order goes out.

Titan Fortress is a pre-trade gate: it sits between your signal source (a TradingView alert, a Python bot, a REST call) and your broker, runs each signal through 26 safety checks, and forwards or blocks before the broker ever sees an order. Three of those checks are, almost exactly, the discipline the old rule imposed by accident — except these are configurable, and they are yours:

One honest difference: these are daily caps and cooldowns, not the old five-day window. And one structural difference: the old rule was enforced by your broker against you. These run on Titan’s infrastructure, outside your bot’s code and outside the heat of the moment — your strategy cannot talk its way past them at 9:47 a.m.

When a check blocks a signal, you do not get a silent failure. You get a decision receipt: what arrived, what every check decided, and when — hash-chained, with daily commitments anchored to Bitcoin, verifiable by anyone in the browser. This is a real one, from a sandbox account with its cap set to three trades a day — the fourth buy of the morning, refused:

An automated strategy meets the new margin regime faster than a human does — a bot can produce a day’s worth of intraday exposure in minutes. Titan’s public API includes a preflight that estimates, from the evidence it actually has, whether an order risks an intraday margin problem before you submit it:

curl -s -X POST https://www.titandiagnostics.io/api/public/v1/preflight/intraday-margin \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TITAN_AGENT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"symbol": "AAPL", "side": "BUY", "qty": 50}'

When the evidence isn’t there — no recent fills pushed, no broker state — the verdict comes back unknown, with the reason, and every receipt lists its known limits. A preflight that guesses confidently would be worse than none.

FINRA stopped imposing discipline on June 4. It did not stop discipline from being a good idea. The difference now is who owns the speed bump: nobody, or you.