Prop Firm Profit Target Calculator

How the simulation works

win: equity × (1 + risk × RR)  ·  loss: equity × (1 − risk)
pass: equity ≥ 1 + target  ·  breach: equity ≤ 1 − maxDD

The 2,000 simulations are traded through each of their respective runs. The size for each trade is determined by a fixed fraction (i.e., you have said how much to put into each trade). Every trade is won as per your specified win rate; if so, it also pays according to your stated reward-to-risk. After a run, it will end immediately upon reaching its profit goal (or pass), upon touching the bottom of the drawdown (and thus the run is terminated), or after all of the allowed trades are used and neither profit nor loss has been reached (as would be the case in an actual challenge where there were no limits on trading time — i.e., still grinding).

A worked example

The default inputs describe a solid retail strategy: 50% win rate at 1.5R, an expectancy of +0.25R per trade, risking 1% into an 8% target with a 10% static drawdown. That trader passes roughly 97% of attempts, and still, about 1 in 35 runs dies on an early losing streak despite a positive edge and sensible sizing. Now load the harsher example preset, a 10% target over a 5% drawdown, the target twice the distance of the floor. The same trader's pass rate drops to roughly 84%, and here is the trap: chasing the further target by raising risk makes it worse, not better. At 2% risk the pass rate falls to about 66%, at 3% to about 58%, because the nearby floor punishes big bets far faster than the distant target rewards them. Nothing about the trader changed; the geometry did, and evaluations are priced and marketed on exactly that geometry.

Which firm, and how long it takes

The simulator can be used with any brokerage. Input your firm's target and drawdown requirements for the evaluation (FTMO, Apex, TopStep, MyFundedFutures, Funding Pips etc.) as well as whether it is one-step or two-step, futures or forex. One-step evaluations generally have a target ranging from 6% to 10% with a corresponding drawdown of 5% to 10%. However, the specific values, including if the floor trails, will be defined by your firm. Thus, use the specifics contained within your firm's rulebook rather than relying on general rules of thumb. A "median-trades-to-pass" value will provide an answer to the "how long?" question directly. To convert this to a total number of days you would trade before passing a test, simply multiply the result by the average number of trades taken per trading session. Finally, keep in mind that the slowest quarter of runs in any simulation will typically take much longer than the median run.

Reading the numbers like a business decision

Multiply expected attempts by the evaluation fee and you have the real cost of getting funded with your strategy, before any payout. That number belongs next to the profit split calculator's breakeven figure: together they answer "what will funding cost me, and how much gross profit must I then produce before I am net positive?" If the honest answer is unattractive, better to learn it from a simulation than from a sequence of fees. The drawdown calculator covers the survival arithmetic once you are funded, and the risk-of-ruin simulator runs the same engine without the evaluation's barriers for your own account.

One honest caveat to the input parameters for this method is that nearly all active traders are going to over-estimate their actual win percentage (the percent of time you actually "win" in trading) and under estimate the spread of how much money they can expect to make when they do win (reward), compared to the amount of money they could lose if they don't (risk). As such, we recommend that if your data comes from less than a couple hundred real-time trades, that you run the simulation again, but this time use a win percentage that is at least 5% less than your current number and then take the difference between those two values as your uncertainty. Then, act on any pass probability that survives that cut. Fail to act on any pass probabilities that fail that test.