Every evaluation is sold with the same implicit promise: pass this and the capital is yours. The published pass rate, where one exists at all, is a number about strangers. The three questions that actually determine whether the next account is a good purchase are all answerable from records you already have, and most traders have never put them side by side.
1. What have the attempts cost so far?
Not the price of one evaluation — the total. Fees, resets, activation charges, and the monthly subscriptions on accounts that were running while you were failing others. Traders reliably underestimate this, for the ordinary reason that the payments were small and spread out and the failures were forgettable.
Put the number against the payouts on the other side. That single subtraction has ended more prop-firm careers, sensibly, than any argument about strategy.
2. What is your own pass rate?
Yours, not the firm's. If you have taken six evaluations and passed one, your pass rate is 17% and your expected cost per funded account is six evaluation fees, not one. That is the arithmetic that decides whether the model works for you.
It is worth doing per firm as well as overall. Rules differ in ways that suit different traders: a trailing drawdown that follows your intraday high punishes a trader who gives back open profit, and barely touches one who scales out early.
Three attempts that died in the first week is a different problem from three that died at 80% of target. The first suggests the plan is wrong for your variance; the second suggests something happens to your trading when the finish line is in sight. Both are common. Treating either as bad luck is what makes people buy the next account.
3. Would your trading actually pass this plan?
This is the one that can be estimated properly, and almost nobody does it.
Take your own logged trading and group it into a series of daily results. That series — its average, its spread, how often a day is green — is the empirical shape of how you trade. Then simulate an attempt: draw days at random from your own history, accumulate a running balance, and stop when you either reach the profit target or breach the drawdown floor. Do it several hundred times.
The proportion of simulated attempts that reach the target is an estimate of your chance, built from how you have actually traded rather than from how the plan is advertised. It is a bootstrap Monte-Carlo, it needs no assumptions about a bell curve, and it can be run against every plan on the market to rank them by how well they suit you specifically.
It models the target against the drawdown floor. It does not model consistency rules, minimum trading days, news restrictions or payout minimums, any of which can fail an account that cleared the target. It also assumes your future days look like your past ones, which is exactly the assumption every trader is tempted to make and every trader should hold loosely. Treat the output as a ranking, not a promise.
Bigger is not safer
The instinct when an evaluation fails is to buy a larger one, because the drawdown allowance is larger. But the profit target scales with it, and usually the daily loss limit scales too — so the same trading meets the same walls in the same order, at a higher price. A simulation across account sizes frequently shows a smaller account with a better chance for the same trader, which is close to the opposite of the industry's marketing.
The uncomfortable version of the question
If your own daily results, drawn at random for sixty days, rarely reach the target before hitting the floor, then the honest conclusion is not that you need a different firm. It is that the edge is not currently large enough to clear that bar, and the money spent on attempts is buying lottery tickets on your own variance.
That is a genuinely useful thing to find out, and it is much cheaper to find out by simulation than by purchase.
What Choptick shows you
The Prop Firms page keeps every account you have ever taken, and the Analysis tab turns them into the three answers above.
- Cost by firm and monthly spend — evaluations, resets, activation fees and subscriptions, against payouts received.
- Pass rate by firm, from your own attempts, and firm outcomes across all of them.
- Failure patterns — where your accounts actually died, so three first-week failures do not read as three unrelated pieces of bad luck.
- Plan EV — a bootstrap Monte-Carlo of your real daily P&L against each catalogued plan’s target and drawdown floor, ranking plans by how well they fit your trading rather than by how they are advertised.
- Rules tracked per account — trailing or static drawdown, daily loss limit, consistency percentage, minimum winning days — computed on the trading day that rolls at 17:00 Chicago, the way the firm counts it.
- Every figure net of commission, because a target reached gross and missed net is the expensive kind of surprise.
Figures in the examples are invented and illustrative. Simulation output is an estimate from your own past results, not a prediction. Nothing here is financial advice.