Prop firm accounts · Passing a challenge

How to pass a prop firm challenge: what the evaluation measures

There is no way to pass a challenge, and anyone selling you one is selling a result they do not control. What does exist, and can be read in full before you pay, is the mechanism: an evaluation does not measure whether you are right, it measures whether you step outside a set of limits the firm defines and calculates itself.

This page takes that mechanism apart using the objectives FTMO publishes: what is measured, how each limit is calculated, and which ones get breached without anyone noticing until the account is already closed. You will not find a single trading recommendation here, because that would be advice and this site does not provide it.

Sources read at origin on 08/09/2026 · linked at the end

This page explains how an evaluation works. It gives no trading advice

The five objectives that get measured

Profit target: a percentage
of initial capital
Daily loss: on equity
recalculated daily
Overall loss: trailing or static
depending on programme
Spread across days: a cap
on your best day
Trading days: a minimum
of days with an opening

That is the complete list of FTMO's published objectives. Not one of the five measures accuracy

What an evaluation actually measures

A profit target, two loss limits, a cap on how much your best day can weigh, and a minimum number of trading days. That is the whole list, and there is nothing else inside it.

Start with what is missing. FTMO's published objectives contain no win rate, no reward-to-risk ratio, no minimum number of trades and no measure of the quality of a decision. Nobody is going to look at whether your analysis was any good. What gets measured is where the account sits relative to a few lines, and those lines check themselves.

The second thing worth knowing is that the numbers change with the programme you buy, so a figure picked up in a forum about "the 5% daily" can be perfectly accurate and still not apply to you. These are the ones FTMO published on 08/09/2026, with the programme beside each.

The programmeWhat its rulebook publishes

FTMO Challenge: 1-StepOne phase

Profit target: 10% of initial capital
Daily loss: 3%, recalculated daily
Overall loss: 10%, end-of-day trailing
Best day: max. 50% of positive days’ profit
Minimum days: not part of this programme

The overall limit rises with your best midnight balance and never comes back down. It is the row that quietly removes the most room of the five.

FTMO Challenge: 2-StepTwo phases

Profit target: 10% in phase one, 5% in phase two
Daily loss: 5%, recalculated daily
Overall loss: 10%, static on initial capital
Best day: not part of this programme
Minimum days: 4 days with at least one opening

Here the floor stays where it started, and in exchange you have to prove the same thing twice and across a minimum number of days.

Every percentage is calculated on the initial simulated capital, never on the balance of the day. And one difference the table does not show: on the account that follows the evaluation the profit target disappears, while both loss limits stay in force, because what is required there is continuous compliance.

If some of these words read like a foreign language, the whole vocabulary — what a challenge is, a drawdown, a profit split, a consistency rule — is explained from scratch in what a prop firm is and how one works. This page takes those definitions as read and goes straight to the arithmetic.

Why nearly every rule is a loss limit

Because a loss can be measured in real time and can close an account on its own, and accuracy cannot. The rulebook is not measuring your skill: it is bounding the exposure of whoever wrote it.

The question usually gets asked the wrong way round — "what are they hoping I prove?" — which is why it never finds an answer. The question to ask is what can be automated. A loss rule is evaluated on every tick, with nobody involved, and its consequence executes itself. A rule about the quality of a trade would need somebody making a judgement, and a firm evaluating a great many people at once has no such somebody and does not want one.

FTMO puts it at the head of its objectives in one short sentence that carries more than it looks: all applicable objectives must be satisfied concurrently, and on the account that follows the evaluation what is required is "continuous compliance" at all times. This is not a test you pass and file away; it is a condition that keeps being checked for as long as the account exists.

That is where the one rule on the list that is neither a loss limit nor a measure of accuracy fits: the Best Day Rule, which requires that your best day does not represent more than 50% of the sum of your positive days. It does not measure whether you were right, it measures whether the result rests on a single day. It is the operational translation of "this cannot have come out of one bet", and it is the rule that most unsettles anyone arriving from trading their own account, because it penalises what anywhere else would be the best week of the year.

And there is a structural reason underneath all of it worth keeping in view: the result being measured does not happen in the market. FTMO carries a notice in the footer of its pages saying that all the accounts it provides to clients are demo accounts with fictitious funds and that all trading takes place in a simulated environment only. What each firm writes about its own environment, one by one, is in whether prop firms use real money.

The six rules that catch people out

None of the six gives any warning. Five sit in the objectives rulebook and the sixth in the forbidden practices page, and all of them can be read without paying anything.

The daily limit is measured on equity but calculated from balance
Two different quantities inside one rule. The limit is recalculated each day at 00:00 CE(S)T by subtracting the daily percentage from the balance recorded at that hour, and it is then considered violated if equity — balance plus the profit and loss of open positions, plus or minus swaps and less commissions — drops below it. The effect is asymmetric: a profit that is still floating does not lift the floor for the day, while a loss that is still floating can reach it. Anyone watching the balance believes they have room they do not have.
On the one-phase programme the overall floor rises with you and never falls
The rulebook calls it an end-of-day trailing limit: it is recalculated at midnight by subtracting 10% of the initial capital from the highest balance reached at that hour on any preceding trading day, and it states plainly that the limit can only increase and never decrease. The document's own example makes it concrete: if the midnight balance drops from one day to the next, the limit stays where the higher day put it. Every good run narrows the corridor underneath, precisely when the account looks most comfortable.
The best day rule does not disqualify, but it can strand you in profit
This is the strangest of the six and the one fewest people see coming. The rulebook says that going over the best day limit is not treated as a breach; what it says next is that you have to keep trading until that day represents 50% or less of the profit of your positive days. So the account is not closed: it is left unpassed, with profit inside it and no date attached. And on the account that follows the evaluation, that same rule is a condition of being eligible for a reward at all.
The minimum days rule counts openings, not days with a position alive
A trading day is, in the published definition, any day from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 CE(S)T on which at least one position is opened. Holding does not count. The rulebook's example finishes the thought: four positions spread across the calendar add up to only three trading days, and so the minimum is not met. It is a rule with nothing to do with risk that fails people who had already reached the profit target.
Some prohibitions are not in the objectives at all, but in another document
The objectives are one page and the forbidden practices are another, and hardly anyone opens the second. That is where FTMO bans gap trading — opening when major news, macro events or earnings are scheduled, and also two hours or less before a relevant market closes for at least two hours — along with simulated trades entered for manipulative purposes and strategies that artificially spread profit across several days to get around the best day rule. The consequences it lists escalate as far as disqualification, forfeiture of any potential rewards and termination of every agreement you hold with them.
An automated program can breach a rule you never touched
The same list bans a robot or EA leaving the account hyperactive above 2,000 server requests in a day, counting positions and pending orders being opened, modified or closed. That is not a rule about your judgement: it is a rule about a program's behaviour, and it gets broken while the account holder is looking at something else. The full breakdown of what FTMO allows and bans for an expert advisor, source by source, is in the page on FTMO and expert advisors.

What you will not find here

Three things this page will not give you, and the reason for each. All three are easy to find elsewhere, and that is exactly the problem.

No strategy, and not a single parameter
Not because it is a secret, but because telling you how to trade is investment advice and this site does not provide it: it sells software and gives technical support for that software. Any page telling you how much to risk without knowing your situation is handing you precisely what it claims not to be handing you. The mechanism ends here and your decision begins.
No pass rate
It was looked for, and it does not exist in any verifiable public source. The numbers doing the rounds come from third-party estimates or from the firms themselves, unaudited and without saying what population they were calculated on. Publishing one with a vague attribution would be inventing the source, and a figure that does not hold up subtracts more than it adds on a page about checking things.
No timeframe, and no promise of a result
No configuration guarantees that an evaluation stage will be passed, and no page on this site claims otherwise. Nor is any duration declared: the objectives read for this page include no deadline among the rules, but that is a statement about one document on one date, not about the sector. Which protections reach you and which do not when something goes wrong is set out in whether prop firm accounts are legitimate.

What is left, and it is not nothing, is a set of checks you can run with the rulebook open and without paying: what each limit is calculated on, at what hour it is recalculated, whether the overall one is static or trailing, whether there is a minimum number of days, whether there is a cap on the best day, and which separate document holds the forbidden practices. Six questions with a written answer, or without one — which is itself the answer.

And if the evaluation is passed, the question moves: it stops being what disqualifies you and becomes what has to happen for the money to arrive. That one is in whether prop firms actually pay.

Sources · read on 08/09/2026

Frequently asked questions

Can you fail a challenge without losing any money?

Yes, and it is the part nobody expects. Among the objectives FTMO publishes there is a minimum number of trading days and a Best Day Rule requiring that your best day does not represent more than 50% of the sum of your positive days, and neither of them is about losses. Going over the best day limit is not treated as a breach — the rulebook says so — but until that proportion comes down the evaluation is not complete, so an account in profit can sit there indefinitely. The minimum days rule works the same way: without them there is no pass, however good the result.

Is the daily loss limit measured on balance or on open positions too?

On open positions too. FTMO sets the limit against equity, which it describes as balance plus the profit and loss of open positions, plus or minus swaps and less commissions, and says the rule is considered violated if equity drops below it. The detail that catches people out is that the limit is recalculated each day at 00:00 CE(S)T from the balance at that moment rather than from equity: a profit that is still floating does not lift the floor for the day, while a loss that is still floating can reach it. Two different quantities inside one rule, and mixing them up is the most common mistake in an evaluation.

When is the overall loss limit recalculated?

On FTMO's one-step programme, once a day and only upwards. The rulebook describes it as an end-of-day trailing limit: it is recalculated at 00:00 CE(S)T by subtracting 10% of the initial simulated capital from the highest account balance reached at that hour on any preceding trading day, and it adds that the limit can only increase and never decrease. In practice every good run raises the floor and leaves you less room underneath exactly when it looks like you have plenty. On the two-step programme that limit is static and always measured against the initial capital.

How many trading days are required, and what counts as one?

On FTMO's two-step evaluation it is at least four trading days, and the definition matters more than the number: a trading day is any day, measured from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 CE(S)T, on which at least one position is opened. Opening is not holding, so a position opened on a Monday and closed on a Thursday counts as one day, not four. The rulebook's own example shows four positions adding up to only three trading days. On the funded account that follows there is no minimum.

Is there a deadline for passing a challenge?

In the objectives FTMO published on 8 September 2026, the day they were read for this page, no deadline appears among the rules of the evaluation. That is a statement about one document on one date, not about the sector: other firms do set deadlines, and any firm can change its conditions whenever it likes. What you can check before paying is what the current rulebook of the firm you are signing up with says, rather than what somebody remembers from an earlier version.

Does a bot make an evaluation easier to pass?

No configuration guarantees that an evaluation stage will be passed, and no page on this site claims otherwise. A program is held to exactly the same rules as a person: the loss limits, the minimum days and the best day rule apply to it identically, and the account holder is the one answerable for meeting them. It also adds risks a manual trader does not carry: FTMO lists among its forbidden practices an EA leaving the account hyperactive above 2,000 server requests in a day, and warns that an EA bought from a third party may be running the same strategy across many accounts at once.

Before you automate, compatibility

No configuration guarantees that an evaluation stage will be passed, and a program is held to exactly the rules you have just read. What can be set out step by step is how one is installed on top of an account without breaking its rulebook, and compatibility is confirmed before anything is charged.

See how the installation works

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Three more guides on this, or on what sits next to it.