The four numbers that decide if you pass

Before you pay for any evaluation, write down four numbers for your strategy. Every major prop firm rule reads one of them — and none of them reads your discipline.

1. Win rate and payoff ratio

A consistency cap punishes profit concentrated in a few big days. High win rate with small, even wins passes a 30–50% best-day cap without trying. Low win rate with large winners breaches it structurally — even in a profitable month.

2. Signal frequency

Minimum trading days and evaluation windows are arithmetic, not judgment. A system that fires twice a week gets about eight chances inside a 30-day window. If your edge needs rare conditions, the clock can fail you before the market does.

3. Daily P&L spread

Take your last twelve months of daily results and ask: what share of any month’s profit came from its single best day? If the answer is regularly above 40%, most consistency rule sets are structurally against you, regardless of how the year ends.

4. Open-profit giveback

On a trailing drawdown account, the floor follows your peak — on intraday variants, including unrealized profit. A strategy that lets winners run and gives half back bleeds buffer that never shows up in closed results. Measure your typical giveback per trade; that number, plus your stop, is your real unit of risk.

Match these four numbers against a specific rule set and pass/fail stops being a lottery. The full mapping — which rule reads which number, with dated examples — is in the pillar: Which prop firm rules can a systematic strategy actually pass?. To run your own numbers, start with the consistency rule calculator and the trailing drawdown visualizer. It’s also the order we build in ourselves: rule set first, then strategies whose shape fits, published as ready-made portfolios per account size.

Not financial advice.