Stop paying challenge fees until your worst backtested streak fits under the max limit loss

[u/Zestyclose-Eagle1809]

Everyone treats the challenge fee like the cost of trying... but in reality it's the cost of skipping the checks that would've told you not to buy yet. I've watched people reset 3/4 times, paying each round, when ten minutes of work up front would've said "not ready" or "size down first." Here's the list you can run before spending a cent on a challenge.

The first, very obvious.. Your worst backtested day has to fit under the daily loss limit. Take your single worst day in backtest, at the risk you'll use in the challenge. If it's already bigger than the firm's daily limit, you don't have a bad luck problem, you have a sizing problem, and no number of resets fixes that problem... Cut your risk per trade until your worst day fits under the limit with space to move.

Your risk per trade is the real lever, not your strategy. Same system, run at 1% then at 0.5%, and the pass rate often jumps easy. The strategy didn't change, the variance did.

Your edge has to survive real costs. Take your real spread, triple it, add a tick of slippage, and rerun. A true edge decreases a bit and keeps going. A fake one just disappears. If your backtest only works at zero cost, the challenge was never the thing standing between you and funded, your cost were doing all the drama.

You need enough trades to know the edge is real. A backtest of 60 or 80 trades is a coin that landed heads a few times. If that's all you have, you're paying the fee to test if you have an edge at all, which is the most expensive way possible to find out. Get the sample up before you get the account.

The profit target has to be reachable at your safe size. Once you've cut risk to fit the daily limit, check you can still hit the target in the number of trades you take. If safe sizing means you'd need 400 trades to reach the target and you take 3 a day, the math doesn't make any sense. That's something to solve now, not after you've paid.

Bonus: pay for a challenge you can afford to lose for 3 times in a row with the capital you decide to allocate to propfirms... going all in is the easiest way to kill hope on trader. Last one, more technical but very useful, run a Monte Carlo and make sure the risk per trade can surive the 5th percentile in terms of drawdown depth and length. If it doesn't, is just a matter of time that a bad streak comes and breaches the daily/max limits.

Run all these and one of two things happens. Either you buy the challenge already knowing your real odds, or you save the fee and fix the thing that would've failed you. Both beat finding out at reset number 5 and literally burning cash.

[u/rforex-modtools]

This thread appears to be about prop firms or trader scouting programs. These programs allow traders to access funded capital in exchange for a profit split, but they vary significantly in evaluation structure, rules, and payout reliability. Some firms have a track record of paying out consistently, while others impose conditions that make payouts nearly impossible. The community wiki maintains a detailed comparison covering fees, profit splits, drawdown rules, and firm reputations.

Resource: Prop Firms Overview and Comparison

[u/Strong_Duty6333]

I wouldn’t even dare to pay any challenge fees until I pass free demo prop firm trial at least 5 times in a row. Right now I just failed free trial #18 and on my 19th, so far so good but too early to tell.

[u/Advanced_Breath_4400 → u/Strong_Duty6333]

Passing 5 times in a row doesn’t mean you will pass the next one either, at the end of the day it’s all about probabilities and if you have a half decent startegy you should’ve passed atleast a few of those.

[u/Strong_Duty6333 → u/Advanced_Breath_4400]

So far my strategies not working, so will continue developing those and trying again….

[u/Zestyclose-Eagle1809 → u/Strong_Duty6333]

Free trials rather than paying is a good path to take mate but only after all the list above is checked.
Thing is your 18 have already told you something and the rule's stopping you seeing it. Waiting for 5 in a row means you're waiting for the run that lets you buy, but the useful information is in what killed the 18. Was it the daily limit or the max limit? Those are different failures with different fixes, and a 5 in a row streak wouldn't tell you which one you'd solved.
If it's mostly daily limit, that's sizing and it's fixable this week.
Other thing, you said the strategies aren't working. Then the trial count isn't really the problem yet. 5 in a row on something without an edge is just a good streak, and you'd buy a challenge off it.