Every prop firm guide, comparison and review

When a passing service is the wrong choice

This site sells a service, so it is worth stating plainly when you should not buy it.

• When your firm prohibits third-party trading and enforces it. The funded account can be voided after the fact, and that risk is yours. If your firm takes that position, either trade the evaluation yourself or move to a firm whose terms are clearer.
• When the evaluation is not what is stopping you. If your failures come from market selection rather than from breaching limits, a passing service solves the wrong problem. The guides here are more useful to you than the service.
• When you want to learn the constraint set. Many traders pass their first evaluation deliberately as training, and a service removes that practice.
• When the account is intended as a learning vehicle rather than an income source. Funded accounts require their own discipline, and the funded phase is entirely yours — the service ends at handover.

For everyone else — traders who can manage risk but keep breaching one specific rule — the flat $220 fee with retries covered is a straightforward trade of money for execution. The passed challenges page shows what that looks like in documented results, and the contact page explains what to include in a first message.

How to pass a prop firm challenge: the twelve-step version

Everything in this library reduces to a sequence. Followed in order, it removes most of the ways an evaluation ends early.

1. Read the full rulebook before buying. Target, daily loss limit, its measurement basis, maximum loss, drawdown type, minimum trading days, consistency rules, time limits, permitted instruments and news restrictions. Most failures are traceable to a rule that was not read rather than a trade that went wrong.
2. Convert every percentage into currency. A 5% daily limit on $200,000 is $10,000; on $25,000 it is $1,250. Thinking in percentages hides how small the budget is on a small account.
3. Identify the failure condition first. Write down the exact equity level at which the account fails. On a static floor, that number never changes. On a trailing floor, it changes with every winning session and must be recalculated.
4. Set risk per trade at no more than a third of the daily budget. Three consecutive losses are a normal event, not a catastrophe, and sizing for that possibility is what keeps the account alive through ordinary variance.
5. Set a hard daily stop in currency, not in feeling. When the day's realised loss reaches roughly 80% of the daily limit, trading stops. The last 20% exists to absorb slippage on a closing position, not to be spent on one more setup.
6. Decide the pace before the first trade. Calculate how many sessions the target requires at the planned daily profit. If the arithmetic says eighteen sessions and the firm has no time limit, the plan is eighteen sessions — not five sessions of over-sized attempts.
7. Avoid the first hour if the rulebook is unclear. Spreads are widest and news is most likely at the open. A plan that begins mid-session gives away less to execution costs and avoids the news windows firms restrict.
8. Cap any single day at a third of the target. This is the consistency rule applied pre-emptively. Even where a firm only enforces consistency at payout, building the habit during the evaluation makes the funded phase mechanical.
9. Log every session with four numbers. Closing equity, distance from the failure floor, percentage of target completed, and days used. A log is the only way to see a pattern — such as consistently losing on Mondays — while it can still be corrected.
10. Do not add size as the target approaches. The instinct to accelerate near the finish is the most expensive instinct in evaluation trading. Reduce size instead: on a trailing structure it is required, and on a static structure it is still the lower-variance path to the same result.
11. Check the minimum day count before declaring victory. Reaching the target on day three of a ten-day requirement is not a completed evaluation.
12. Read the funded rules before you request a payout. Minimum days, profit threshold, consistency window and KYC are all separate conditions, and the first withdrawal usually fails for one of them rather than for performance.

Steps five, six and ten do most of the work. Almost every failed evaluation in our own records breached either the daily budget or the trailing floor in a single session — and almost all of those sessions were a plan failure rather than a market failure.

The five most common failure modes, with the fix

• Oversized position after a losing morning. The trader tries to recover the day in one trade and consumes the remaining daily budget. Fix: fixed risk per trade at a third of the daily limit, and a stop when 80% of the day's budget is spent.
• Trailing floor after a strong session. A large winning day lifts the failure level, and the next normal pullback ends the account. Fix: recalculate the failure level after every session, and reduce size as target completion rises.
• Consistency failure at payout. One dominant day makes up too large a share of total profit. Fix: cap individual days at a third of the target during the evaluation and add ordinary winning days before requesting a withdrawal.
• Racing the minimum day count. The target is hit early and the trader keeps trading to "stay active" instead of stopping. Fix: once the target is reached, trade minimum size on the remaining required days, or stop entirely where the firm permits.
• Ignoring news and instrument restrictions. A legitimate position is held through a restricted window or in a prohibited instrument. Fix: write the restrictions into the plan as hard rules and treat ambiguous definitions as the stricter reading.

Twelve questions to answer before buying any evaluation

A challenge fee is a small amount of money and a large amount of time. Answering these questions first takes twenty minutes and prevents the most common purchases that were never going to work.

1. Which market will I trade on the funded account? Forex evaluations are percentage-based with static or end-of-day trailing drawdowns; futures evaluations are dollar-based with intraday trailing thresholds and payout-stage consistency rules. Buying an evaluation in a market you do not intend to trade adds a variable you cannot control.

2. Is the drawdown static or trailing? This is the single most consequential difference between firms and the one most often glossed over. If the answer is not immediately clear from the firm's documentation, that ambiguity is itself a warning.

3. Is the daily limit measured on equity or on closed balance? The difference roughly doubles the required discipline at the same headline percentage.

4. Is there a consistency rule, and when does it apply? At payout is more manageable than during the evaluation, and none at all is the easiest to plan around.

5. Are there minimum trading days? And what counts as a qualifying day — a closed trade, an order fill, or a held position.

6. Is there an overall time limit? A window compresses the required profit per session and removes the option of waiting out a bad week.

7. Which instruments are permitted, and at what maximum size? Instrument lists are usually published; lot and contract caps sometimes are not.

8. What are the news and weekend holding rules? And how strictly are they enforced relative to the published definition.

9. What are the payout conditions on the funded account? Minimum days, profit threshold, consistency window, processing time and withdrawal methods.

10. What does a reset cost? Free within a window, a reduced fee, or a full new challenge purchase — this changes the true cost of an evaluation substantially.

11. What does the firm's client agreement say about third-party trading? If it prohibits it and enforces the policy, the funded account can be voided after the fact. That risk is worth knowing before paying anyone.

12. If I fail twice on this rulebook, what will I change? If the answer is "try harder", the plan is not a plan. A useful answer names a specific change: a different firm, a smaller size, a lower profit target per session.

Traders who answer all twelve before buying rarely end up surprised. The questions that produce the most consequential answers are two, three, eleven and twelve — and they are the four that no marketing page volunteers.

Three reading paths through this library

The articles here answer different questions, and reading them in publication order is the least useful way to use them. Three paths cover most situations: you are choosing a firm, you are mid-evaluation and something has gone wrong, or you are trying to get paid after a pass.

Path one: choosing a firm before buying anything

Start with the rules matrix, which reduces each firm to the four numbers that decide difficulty: how the daily limit is measured, whether the maximum loss trails, the minimum trading days, and any consistency rule at payout. Then read the comparison article for the reasoning behind the table, and the firm-specific guides only for the two or three firms you are actually considering. Reading eleven firm reviews before you know which three matter is how a week disappears.

Path two: mid-evaluation, and the rules are biting

If you are approaching a limit rather than a target, the sequence is different. Read the guide to the consistency rule first, because a rule that applies at payout can invalidate an otherwise clean pass and it is the most commonly misread constraint. Then the drawdown explainers — daily, trailing, and the arithmetic of a trailing floor — since those decide how much room actually remains. The firm-specific guides are useful here for pacing rather than rules: what a realistic pass looks like on that particular rulebook.

Path three: passed, and the payout has not arrived

The payout process article covers the sequence from target to funded login to first withdrawal, including the waiting periods that surprise people. Read it before you reach the target, not after, because the profit threshold and the minimum day count usually have to be planned together — a trader who reaches a target on day six and requests a withdrawal that needs twenty days has not lost anything, but they have lost the ability to plan.

How to read a 4,000-word article in five minutes

Long pages exist because short pages cannot explain a rule that has exceptions. But they are not meant to be read linearly when a specific question is pressing. Every article opens with a key-takeaways box that states the conclusion, then a contents list. If the takeaways answer your question, you can stop; if they raise a second question, jump to that section.

The worked examples are the part worth slowing down for. A table of rules tells you what a constraint is; a worked example tells you whether it applies to your account size, your instrument and your style of trading. Where an article contains arithmetic — the multiple of a best day required by a consistency rule, the distance from a trailing floor, the trade count needed to reach a target in R terms — that arithmetic is the content, and the prose around it is the explanation.

Every page carries a review date in its header. Rules change, and a page that was accurate in the spring may describe a challenge that no longer exists. If a figure matters to a decision you are about to make, check it against the firm's own rulebook on the day, and treat the article as the explanation rather than the source of record.

One last note on how to use the library when two articles appear to disagree. They usually are not disagreeing; they are describing different account types at the same firm, or the same rule before and after a revision. The review date resolves most of it, and where it does not, the firm's own terms resolve the rest.