Would your strategy pass the challenge?
Most traders check whether their edge is positive. The challenge asks something harder: whether the path to the target survives the drawdown rule.
- Trades to target
- —
- Avg. worst drawdown
- —
- Failed runs died after
- —
Why profitable strategies still fail challenges
Three things decide it, and only one of them is your edge.
Order matters more than average
A strategy can have a positive expectancy and still lose a challenge, because results do not arrive sorted. Four losses in a row early on can breach the limit before the edge has had enough trades to show up. Run the simulation twice with the same numbers and watch how many paths die in the first twenty trades.
Trailing turns your own profit against you
A fixed drawdown is a floor you can walk away from. A trailing one follows every new high — so an early run-up pulls the failure line up behind you and leaves you less room than you had on day one. Switch between the two and watch the floor in the chart climb. At 1% risk the two rules are almost the same; push the risk to 4% and the gap opens to double digits, because bigger swings drag the floor further up behind you.
Your journal knows better than this slider
Most traders overestimate their win rate and underestimate their drawdowns. The tool is only worth what you feed it, and the honest numbers are in your trade history: the win rate you actually have, the R:R you actually realise, the risk you actually took.
Questions
What pass rate is good?
There is no official number, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What the tool is good for is comparison: keep the edge fixed, halve the risk per trade, and read how much the pass rate moves. If a change in position size moves it more than a change in win rate, you have learned where your real problem is.
Why does lower risk raise the pass rate?
Because the drawdown rule is a floor, not a cost. Smaller positions make every losing streak shallower, so fewer paths touch the floor before the edge carries them to the target. It takes more trades to get there, which the "trades to target" figure shows.
What exactly is simulated?
Each run draws trades one at a time: with probability "win rate" the trade returns your reward-to-risk multiple, otherwise it loses one unit of risk. Risk is a percentage of the current balance, so position size moves with the account. After every trade the run is checked against the drawdown rule and the profit target, and it stops at whichever comes first. 250 runs, up to 250 trades each.
Why do I get the same result every time?
On purpose, and it goes further than that: the 250 runs always draw the same sequence of random numbers, whatever you set. Only the rules applied to them change. That is what makes the comparison honest — switch between fixed and trailing and the difference you see is the rule, not a fresh roll of the dice. A tool that reshuffles on every change could never tell you whether something helped.
What does the model leave out?
Plenty, and it matters. Every trade here risks the same percentage and has the same odds — real trading has slippage, spread, commissions, news gaps, daily loss limits, minimum trading days, and the very human habit of sizing up after a loss. Treat the number as a comparison between settings, never as a forecast.
Educational tool This simulator exists to help you weigh risk. It is not financial advice, not investment advice and not a prediction of any prop firm result. Trading carries the risk of losing your capital.
