How the prop firm calculator works
Every funded account challenge comes down to two numbers racing each other: the profit target and the loss limits. This calculator shows how many losing trades your risk per trade allows before you breach, and how many winning trades it takes to reach the target.
Using your win rate, it also estimates your edge per trade and roughly how many trades the challenge will take on average.
Worked example: a 100k challenge
A typical phase one has an 8% target, a 5% daily loss limit and a 10% maximum loss. Risking 1% per trade at 2R:
- You fail the daily limit on your 5th loss in a day, so you can take 4.
- You fail the overall limit on your 10th loss, so you can take 9.
- Each win makes 2%, so you need 4 winning trades to pass.
- At a 45% win rate your edge is +0.35% per trade, which means around 23 trades to reach 8% on average.
Push risk up to 2% and you only need 2 wins, but four losses in a row would end the challenge. That trade-off is why most traders who pass keep risk at or below 1%.
What risk per trade should you use on a challenge?
Work backwards from the losing streak you need to survive. Even a strategy that wins half the time will see 6 or more losses in a row fairly often over a few hundred trades. If you want to survive 9 straight losses on a 10% limit, your risk cannot be higher than about 1.1% per trade.
Lower risk feels slow, but many firms no longer put a time limit on challenges. Running out of drawdown is the thing that ends it, not running out of days.
Static vs trailing drawdown
This calculator assumes a static limit, measured from your starting balance. Some firms use a trailing drawdown that moves up as your account grows, or measure daily loss from your highest equity that day including open trades. Both are stricter than the numbers here, so check your firm's rules and leave yourself extra room.