How to pass a futures prop firm evaluation

When a student fails an eval, we go through the trades together. It's almost never the strategy. It's nearly always the same thing. A normal loss early in the day, then a trade taken too fast to make it back, then more size on the next one, and they're at the drawdown limit before lunch. Two good weeks gone in under an hour.

That's good news, because mistakes are a lot easier to fix than a strategy. Passing mostly comes down to three things. Trade small. Know exactly how your firm measures losses. And have a system with rules that are stricter than the firm's, so you know when you're making a mistake.

This is the one most people skip. Before you buy an eval, trade a small live account with one micro. Real money, an amount you can afford to lose.

Evals are cheap to reset. That's the problem. When blowing an account costs a reset fee, you start treating it like nothing, and after a few resets blowing accounts is just something you do. That habit comes with you into the funded account, and that's where it gets expensive.

A small live account doesn't let you do that. Losses are real, so you take them seriously. If you can follow your rules and keep that account alive for a month or two, you're ready for an eval. If you can't, an eval won't fix it. It'll just cost you resets.

Here's how a $50K account looks at both firms in September 2026.

Firms change their rules all the time, so read Topstep's rules or Apex's help center before you buy. If something here is out of date, email me at hello@actal.io and I'll update it.

The contract limit is not a target. Most people who fail were allowed to trade far more than they should have, and they did.

Work backwards from the daily limit. Stop yourself for the day at about a quarter of it. Make sure four losing trades in a row fit inside that. Divide, and that's your risk per trade.

Look at the last two rows. A single mini gives you a stop that normal movement takes out in seconds. Minis don't belong in a $50K eval. Start with 1 micro. Go to 2 only once you're well above the drawdown floor and you've been following your rules.

It feels too small. That's the point. At this size one bad trade can't end the eval, and neither can a bad morning.

A $3,000 target in a week means $600 days. That needs size your drawdown can't take. Over a month it's about $150 a day, which is one good trade at the size above. Over two months it's $75 a day. That's the plan I want students on. There's no prize for passing fast, and the slow plan is the one that passes.

Trading small also takes care of the consistency rule. It only bites people who pass with one huge day. With Topstep's 55%, a $2,000 best day means your total profit has to reach $3,637 before you pass. If your best day is $300, it never comes up.

• Before the open, write your plan. A, B and C scenarios for what you trade, each with a trigger, where you get in and where you're wrong. If none of them set up, you don't trade.
• Write your numbers on a sticky note. Risk per trade, your daily stop, max trades, and how far you are above the trailing floor.
• Two losers in a row and you're done for the day. Not three. The third trade after two losses is where evals die.
• After any loss, wait fifteen minutes before the next trade. Get up from the desk. This alone stops most revenge trades.
• Don't add to losers, and don't move your stop further away. With a trailing drawdown you're just borrowing from tomorrow.
• When you hit your goal for the day, stop. On intraday trailing, giving it back moves the floor up too.
• After the close, grade every trade A to F on how well you followed your system, tag any mistakes, and write one line about tomorrow.

• Buying evals before you can follow your rules on a small live account
• Trading minis, or the max micros, because the firm allows it
• Revenge trading after the first loss of the day
• Sizing up after a green day because the account feels safe
• Holding a loser and hoping while the trailing floor gets closer
• Trading right before big news with no plan for it
• Trying to pass in a week
• Buying a reset the same afternoon without looking at why you failed

Every one of these shows up in your trades before it shows up in the account. That's why I want students journaling the eval too, not just the funded account.

• Don't reset the same day. Export your trades first.
• Find the day that ended it and grade every trade from that day honestly. Usually the first trade was fine and the ones after it weren't.
• Tag the mistake and add up what it cost over the whole eval, not just that day. It's usually more than the drawdown that failed you.
• Turn your most expensive mistake into one rule. Like two losses and done, or fifteen minutes after a loss.
• Go back to your small live account with that rule for a few weeks. When you're keeping it, buy the next eval.

You can't make fewer mistakes if you don't know what a mistake is. A mistake is breaking your own system. So the first job is writing the system down. Which setups you trade and what makes an A. Your risk per trade, your daily stop, max trades, and what you do after a loss.

That's what Actal is built around. You add your setups with what makes an A, and your rules: daily loss limit, max trades, max contracts, a cooldown after a loss, stop after a number of losses in a row, and the hours you trade. Every trade you import is checked against them. Then you grade each trade on how well you followed the system and tag the mistake if there was one.

Every mistake gets a running dollar cost, so you can see which one is actually hurting you. The most expensive one becomes your focus for the week, and you can watch it go down. Your small live account and each eval are separate accounts with the same system, so you can see if a habit follows you from one to the other.

You import from whatever your firm uses. Tradovate for Apex and most Tradovate firms, Rithmic for Apex, MFF and Bulenox on Rithmic, and TopstepX for Topstep. It doesn't track the firm's trailing drawdown yet, so keep an eye on that in the firm's dashboard. If you'd rather start with a spreadsheet, the free template has the grade, mistake and plan columns.

I'm Joakim. I trade index futures full time and coach traders one-on-one at Jusell Trading Academy, and a lot of them are working toward prop firm accounts. Everything above is what I tell them. The firm rules on this page are from September 2026. Actal is my product.