An independent challenge-passing service — and nothing else

A worked example: pacing a $100,000 two-phase evaluation

Abstract descriptions of risk discipline are easy to write and hard to apply. A concrete example is more useful, so here is how a standard two-phase forex evaluation — 10% target on phase one, 5% on phase two, 5% daily loss limit, 10% maximum loss — is typically paced when ElitePropX trades it.

Starting conditions

Balance $100,000. Profit target phase one: $10,000. Daily loss limit: $5,000. Maximum loss: $10,000. Minimum trading days: four. No time limit, which is the single most helpful rule in the rulebook, because it means a flat week costs time rather than the account.

The plan sets maximum risk per trade at $1,600 — roughly a third of the daily limit. That number is chosen so that three consecutive losses, which happen regularly to any strategy with a normal win rate, still leave the account intact and the day unfinished by only a fraction of its budget.

Week one: build distance from the floor

The first sessions are about creating separation between equity and the $90,000 failure level. Sessions are short: one or two high-quality setups per day, no chasing, no averaging into losers. A realistic week-one outcome is $2,000 to $3,500 of profit, or a small loss with the daily budget barely touched. Both are acceptable. The purpose of week one is not progress toward the target; it is arriving at week two with a cushion and no rule breach.

Week two: convert the cushion

With a cushion in place, the same risk per trade can produce a larger share of the target, because a losing sequence no longer threatens the maximum loss level. Sessions lengthen slightly and the target is approached in increments. Traders who want to know the arithmetic can check it directly: at $1,600 risk per trade and a 1.8:1 average reward-to-risk, roughly nine winning trades at $2,880 each reach the $10,000 target — a quantity of trades that fits comfortably inside two to three weeks of disciplined execution.

Phase two: smaller target, tighter margins

The second phase usually has a smaller target and the same daily limit, which sounds easier and is not. Complacency is the failure mode here: traders who sprinted phase one with loose sizing discover that a 5% target still has a 10% maximum loss attached, and one oversized attempt can erase both phases of work. The second phase is traded more conservatively than the first, with maximum risk per trade reduced and the profit taken in smaller pieces.

What the progress log looks like

Each session is logged with four numbers: closing equity, distance from the failure floor, percentage of target completed, and trading days used against the firm's minimum. A client reading the log can see immediately whether the evaluation is ahead or behind, and whether the risk budget was respected. There is no interpretation layer between the numbers and the client, which is deliberate — a summary can hide a week, a log cannot.

How this compares with the alternatives

There are four realistic ways to get a funded prop account, and they are not interchangeable. Each has a cost structure, a failure mode and a type of trader it suits.

The important distinction is between services that sell an edge and a service that sells execution. A signal group or mentorship addresses the question "what should I trade?" — a question that remains open forever and is never actually answered by a subscription. A passing service addresses a closed, measurable question: did the account reach the target without breaching a rule? When the answer is yes, the engagement is over and the client owns an asset.

Copy-trading arrangements look superficially similar because someone else is pressing the buttons, but the economics are opposite. With copy trading, the trader who provides the account keeps a permanent share of profit, and the account relationship typically continues indefinitely. With ElitePropX, the fee is paid once and the funded account has no ongoing claim attached to it. A trader who later generates $40,000 on a funded account keeps all $40,000; under a typical 20–30% copy-trading split, $8,000 to $12,000 of that would be gone permanently.

When you should not use a passing service

Three situations justify doing the evaluation yourself. First, your firm prohibits third-party trading and enforces the policy — in that case any passing service puts the funded account at risk, and the correct answer is to trade it yourself or choose a different firm. Second, you are deliberately using the evaluation as practice to build evaluation-specific discipline, which many traders do as a form of training. Third, your strategy is already producing consistent results within your firm's constraints; if the constraint set is not the bottleneck, removing it saves nothing.

For everyone else — traders who can trade but keep breaching one rule — the arithmetic usually favours paying once for execution rather than paying repeatedly for attempts.

What "independent" means in practice

Almost every prop firm pays affiliates a commission for sending traders to their evaluation checkout pages. Those commissions are frequently large — a meaningful percentage of the challenge fee — and they create an obvious conflict: the more evaluations a site sends, the more it earns, regardless of whether any of them are passed.

ElitePropX takes no affiliate commission from any firm. That is why this site does not push you toward whichever firm has the best referral programme this month, and why the firm comparison pages rank firms on drawdown structure, payout reliability and evaluation mechanics rather than on the size of an introductory offer.

It also means you should expect recommendations that do not always serve a firm's interests. When a firm's rules make a passing service a poor idea — because third-party trading is explicitly prohibited and enforced — the right answer is to say so, even though it costs a sale. That standard is easier to hold when no one is paying you per referral.

What we publish, and why

The public material on this site is meant to be useful whether or not you ever hire us. Three pieces in particular exist because traders ask for them constantly:

• The prop firm comparison puts every major firm's target, loss limits, drawdown type and payout terms side by side — the information you need before choosing where to spend a challenge fee.
• The rules matrix is the raw version of the same data: exact numbers, no narrative, designed to be checked against a firm's own documentation.
• The guides library covers evaluation mechanics in depth, from the complete challenge-passing guide to firm-specific breakdowns for FTMO and Apex.

Nothing there requires a purchase. Some readers use it to pass their own evaluation without us, which is a perfectly good outcome.

What we flag before accepting an assignment

ElitePropX works with every firm. What changes between firms is disclosure, and the four things below are stated in writing before payment rather than discovered later.

Firms that prohibit third-party trading. FTMO, Apex and most large firms state that the account must be traded by the holder and that credentials may not be shared. We work with those firms when a client instructs it, but the consequence is that a funded account can be voided later, so the clause and the risk are put in writing before any payment. The enforcement risk stays with the account holder, as clause 8 of the terms says.

Evaluation models where the outcome is genuinely random. Some promotional evaluation structures use tight limits and no time limit, which is workable; others use short windows, tight limits and aggressive trailing floors, which compresses the pass into luck. When the rules leave no room for normal variance, the honest answer is that nobody can pass it reliably, including a service that claims to.

Requests to keep trading the funded account. Clients occasionally ask whether the same arrangement can continue after funding, sometimes offering a profit share that looks generous. The answer is always no. Running funded accounts for a cut turns a fixed-fee execution business into a profit-sharing arrangement with payout-timing conflicts, and it takes the account out of the hands of the person whose name is on it.

Impatient timelines that conflict with the rules. "Can this be passed by Friday?" is a fair question and sometimes the answer is yes. When the firm requires a minimum number of trading days, or when a target that large cannot be reached inside the daily loss budget without gambling, the timeline is refused rather than attempted. A rushed evaluation fails and consumes a retry that a correctly paced attempt would not have needed.

How an assignment is run internally

Most of what decides a pass happens before the first order and after the last one, so it is worth describing the process in the order it actually happens rather than presenting the outcome as though it were the method.

Stage one: reading the rulebook properly

Every firm publishes terms pages, and most of them contradict themselves somewhere between the marketing page and the schedule of charges. The first task on an assignment is to reconcile those pages into one sheet: what the daily limit is measured on, whether the maximum loss trails or stays static, whether the target is balance or equity based, what the minimum trading days are, and what happens at payout. Where the published terms are genuinely ambiguous, the firm is asked directly and the answer is kept in writing.

This stage is unglamorous and it is where most of the value sits. A trader who misreads one line — for instance treating a trailing maximum loss as static — is not making an analysis error, they are solving a different puzzle than the one they bought.

Stage two: converting the rules into four numbers

The rulebook becomes an index card: daily loss budget in dollars, distance to the failure level, target expressed in R multiples of the per-trade risk, and any consistency constraint that applies at payout rather than during the evaluation. Those four numbers decide position size, session length and pacing. They are recalculated every morning of the assignment, because three of the four change as equity moves.

Stage three: trading the plan, not the chart

The evaluation itself is deliberately boring. A fixed instrument set, a fixed session, constant risk per trade, and a hard stop at eighty percent of the daily budget. Progress is measured in trading days completed and rule violations incurred, not in distance to target — because distance to target is the number that produces the behaviour which fails accounts.

Where a firm permits leverage that would allow a target to be reached in a single session, the correct response is to ignore it. The target is not the constraint; the constraint is surviving a normal losing sequence while reaching it, and that arithmetic does not care how much margin the firm offers.

Stage four: the handover

On a pass, the firm issues the funded account in the client's name. The handover includes the certificate or dashboard evidence, the rulebook as it stood on the day of the pass, and the payout schedule. What it does not include is ongoing discretionary trading on the funded account: the account is the client's, and whether it is traded by them or by another service is a separate decision with its own terms.

What we measure, and what we do not claim

Two numbers appear on this site: challenges passed and pass rate. Both are self-reported and both should be read with that caveat. The pass count is the number of evaluations completed to target or to a funded certificate, and it excludes attempts that were abandoned by the client. The pass rate is calculated against evaluations started in the same period, not against enquiries, which is the more generous denominator and the more misleading one.

What is not claimed is equally important. There is no claim of a proprietary edge, no claim that a pass is guaranteed, and no claim that past results predict the next attempt. Prop firm evaluations are a rules puzzle with a variance component; a service that has solved the rules puzzle still loses to variance sometimes, and the retry clause exists for exactly that reason.

Corrections policy

Firm rulebooks change without notice, and this site carries a lot of numbers that can go stale. Where a figure is found to be wrong — a loss limit, a target, a fee, a payout term — it is corrected on the page and the review date in the header is updated. Where a firm has changed its terms in a way that invalidates an article's central argument, the article is rewritten rather than patched, because a page whose conclusion no longer follows from its evidence is worse than no page at all.

Complaints are handled the same way. A client who believes a fee was misquoted, a timeline misrepresented or a rule misread is asked for the correspondence and the date. Where the complaint is correct, the fee is refunded and the page that caused it is fixed. Where it is not, the reasoning is written out in full — a service that cannot explain its own pricing to an unhappy client has a pricing problem, not a communication problem.

Why the site carries long articles rather than a sales page

A single-page service site has to compress everything into persuasion, which is why so many of them are unreadable. The articles here exist for a different reason: the questions clients ask before buying — how a trailing drawdown actually updates, why a consistency rule blocks a payout after a clean pass, what happens when a firm forbids third-party trading — have long answers, and a client who has read the long answer tends to make a better decision than one who has read a bullet list.

That also sets the editorial standard. Pages are dated and reviewed, firm numbers are attributed to the rulebook rather than to memory, and where a rule varies between account types the variation is described instead of averaged away. None of that makes the content immune to being wrong; it makes being wrong visible, which is the more useful property.