How to pass a prop firm evaluation: a five-day plan without a trade quota

An evaluation (the paid test a firm grades before funding you) ends on rules, so the plan starts by copying them down before the first order. Four published facts do the work. The drawdown type and today's buffer: the drawdown floor is the loss line that ends the account, and it either follows your live equity peak including open profit (intraday trailing), ratchets only on the settled daily close (end-of-day), or never moves (static); the buffer is the distance between current equity and that floor, and it is the quantity every trade spends. The daily loss limit, the firm's own stop for a single session, comes in three kinds across the sourced plans (none, soft (locks out new trades for the day, no fail) and fixed (a published dollar cap for the day)) and several sourced plans publish none, so on those the only daily brake is the one you set. The consistency rule, a cap on one day's share of total profit, is published between 20% and 50% where it exists. And the minimum trading days: for evaluations bought today, sourced figures run zero to three, and four of the eight firms publish none.

The fifth number is yours: a loss ceiling for the whole attempt, set stricter than the firm's maximum loss. The firm's limit ends the account; your ceiling ends the attempt while the account still exists and a decision is still yours to make. The worked example below sets it at $600 against $120 of per-trade stop risk, exactly five full planned losses, so a single number answers the only planning question that matters: how many times may this idea be wrong.

Dividing a $3,000 target into $600 daily installments creates a quota that no published rule asked for, and it forces trades on days without a setup. Each forced trade spends buffer, and on six of the eight sourced firms the evaluation drawdown floor is enforced live against open equity, a catch-up trade that dips through the line ends the account mid-session, even on plans whose floor only moves at the daily close. The remaining two publish no timing sentence at all, so assume the same. The quota converts a behind-schedule day into account risk; skipping the same day converts it into nothing.

The pacing the rules actually impose points the other way. Where a consistency rule applies, one day may not dominate: under the example's 50% gate, a lone $3,000 day is 100% of total profit and clears nothing. You would have to keep trading until total profit reached $6,000 before that day qualified. Two $1,500 days clear the same gate immediately. Which phase the gate hits (evaluation, funded, or both) and whether a breach delays the pass or the payout is a per-plan fact carried in each plan's rulebook snapshot.

A session's job is a decision you can grade, written before the open. A trade day's job: enter only the planned setup, and only while the drawdown buffer covers at least two planned losses, $240 at the example's $120 risk. A no-trade day's job: buffer under $240 or no setup by your cutoff time, so log the reason and stop. A review day's job: no new risk; recompute win rate and average loss from the log. A day graded pass or fail against its own job produces evidence the five-session review can use; a profit figure alone cannot say whether the plan was followed.

Constraints change on a schedule. The close of a red day, or an unusually green one, is the wrong moment to move a stop distance or the ceiling. Record the one-line closeout (plan followed, or the named mistake), then change a constraint the next morning with the reason written beside it. When the account trails the modeled date, the inputs move first: a logged win rate that comes in under the win rate the model assumed is a model correction, and it shifts the date without adding anything to today's trade count.