Prop Firm Evaluation Statistics

• Trailing drawdown is checked once a day, on the closing balance. Apex's real threshold moves intraday, so the Apex numbers here are optimistic, not conservative.
• Consistency and minimum-day rules are not simulated. Topstep's 10-day minimum and five-winning-day requirement make the real Topstep figure worse than shown.
• Trades are independent. No regime, no streaks, no correlation between bad days — real losing runs cluster, which pushes real pass rates below these.
• One trader, one attempt. Nothing here models tilt, revenge trading or rule changes mid-evaluation.

Every limitation above pushes the same direction: treat these as a ceiling.

No futures prop firm publishes evaluation outcomes, and none is required to. Specific percentages circulating online are almost always either unsourced, taken from forex CFD firms with different rules, or marketing.

Even a real number would be hard to use: it would blend one-attempt traders with people running twenty accounts at once, and firms that let you reset cheaply with firms that do not.

• Per-firm published pass rates — they do not exist.
• Average trader profitability — not something we can observe.
• Payout statistics — firms publish totals paid, never the denominator.

No futures prop firm publishes its pass rate, so any specific percentage you see quoted is almost certainly unsourced. What can be established is the shape of the problem: simulating the published rules of a $50k Apex account at a realistic profile gives a pass rate near 35% per attempt, or roughly 2.88 accounts per funded account. Treat that as a modelled estimate, not a measured industry figure.

It depends entirely on how much you risk per day, and it flips. At modest per-day risk the trailing drawdown ends almost every failed evaluation - 95% of Topstep failures in our simulation at 4 trades a day risking $150. Raise that to 8 trades at $600 and the daily loss limit takes over at 99%. Apex has no daily loss limit on evaluations at all, so trailing drawdown is effectively the only way to fail other than running out of time.

Not by itself. Profit targets and drawdown limits both scale with account size, so if you scale your position size in the same proportion the odds barely move - our simulation gives 35% on a $25k account and 34% on a $150k account with risk scaled. What does hurt is trading a big account at small-account size: the same $150 per trade on a $150k account drops the modelled pass rate to 0.6%, because the target is three times further away and the drawdown has three times as long to catch you.

Yes, and this is the single most misunderstood thing about evaluations. Simulated at exactly zero expected value per trade, a $50k Apex evaluation still passes between 18% and 33% of the time depending on the win rate and payoff ratio chosen. A fixed profit target with a trailing drawdown is a bounded bet, and bounded bets have a real chance of finishing on the right side even with no edge. It also means a single passed evaluation is not evidence that a strategy works.

In our simulation of a $50k Apex account at a realistic profile, the median successful evaluation finishes in 43 trading days, but the spread is wide - the slowest tenth of passes take 76 days or more. Minimum-trading-day rules set a floor regardless: Topstep requires 10 trading days and five winning days of at least $200, so a Topstep evaluation cannot finish faster than that no matter how quickly you reach the target.