Can you pass this challenge? 1,000 simulated equity paths run against the firm's actual rules — drawdown type, daily loss limit, min days, time cap. Honest edge in → honest probability out.
Static drawdown — floor never moves. Two phases: Phase 1 target is 10%, Phase 2 is 5%, same risk rules. Fee refunded on first payout. No time limit on real accounts — we cap at 60 days for simulation realism.
Use conservative numbers. Backtested and demo stats typically overstate live edge by 3–5 points of win rate and 0.25–0.5 of R:R under real drawdown pressure.
Seeded from firm preset. Override to model alternative account variants, promos, or rule changes.
Your current 1.0% is near the empirical optimum. Full Kelly for this edge is 32.5% — way higher than the drawdown-aware optimum, which is why full Kelly blows out challenge accounts.
The model is exact; your edge inputs are not. The simulation applies firm rules tick-by-tick — drawdown floors, daily loss limits, min and max days, and two-phase structure for 2-step firms are all modelled faithfully. What the simulation cannot check is whether the win rate and R:R you entered are actually your edge. If your 55% win rate is based on backtesting or demo trading, it is almost certainly an overstatement of what you'll produce under real drawdown pressure. Drop 3–5 points and re-run as a sanity check.
Industry pass rates are a statement about traders, not strategies. Public data shows 7–14% of prop challenges pass. This calculator often shows 80–99% pass rates for reasonable-looking inputs. Both are correct. The industry figure averages over a population where most buyers do not have a real edge; the calculator asks what happens if you do. Your job is to decide whether you're in the population that actually has the edge you entered.
Drawdown type dominates everything else. At identical stated drawdown amounts, intraday trailing, EOD trailing, and static are three very different challenges. Intraday trailing punishes unrealized peaks — every winning trade that pulls back before you close it tightens your floor permanently. EOD trailing ignores intraday movement but ratchets up on good closes. Static never moves. The fan chart shape tells you which regime dominates your outcome: wide P10–P90 bands on trailing accounts reflect the floor-movement penalty. Narrow bands on static accounts reflect how much more forgiving the rules are.
Risk per trade is a Goldilocks problem. Too low, and you run out of days without reaching the target. Too high, and variance breaches the drawdown before your edge can compound. The empirical optimum is usually well below classic Kelly because Kelly ignores hard drawdown constraints. At your current edge, the tool's sweep suggests 1.2% per trade maximizes pass rate; classic full Kelly for the same edge would recommend 32.5%, which a drawdown-aware simulation shows is almost always catastrophic.
Failure mode breakdown is where the real signal lives. A 40% pass rate could mean 60% drawdown hits (risk too high), 60% timeouts (risk too low), or a mix. Each has a different fix. The stat row above the chart shows you which failure mode dominates so you can adjust the right lever — lower risk to avoid drawdown breaches, higher risk or more trades per day to avoid timeouts.
What this tool does NOT model: correlated losing streaks (trades are assumed independent), slippage and commissions, consistency rules that block payouts AFTER passing, news-event restrictions, weekend gap risk, the tendency of real traders to tilt after losses, or the possibility that your edge changes over time. Use this as an upper-bound estimate. If a challenge doesn't look viable here, it definitely isn't viable in practice.
Pass probability is one piece of the purchase decision. The EV Calculator turns this pass rate into a dollar EV figure. The True Cost Calculator sharpens the fee side. The Trailing Drawdown Visualizer lets you see how a specific trade sequence would have been treated under each firm's DD mechanics. The Break-Even Calculator tells you how many months of funded payouts it takes to recoup the full cost once you've passed.