The shape of the problem
A challenge gives you one thing to maximise and two things not to touch:
- Objective: reach the profit target.
- Constraint 1: never lose more than the daily limit in a day.
- Constraint 2: never let equity fall below the drawdown floor.
- Plus: trade on at least N qualifying days, within the deadline if there is one.
Written that way, one thing becomes obvious that the marketing obscures: the fastest route to the target is the most likely to hit a constraint. Position sizes that reach 10% in a week are position sizes where two bad trades reach the daily limit. The two rules are not independent challenges; they are in direct tension, and the size you choose is the single decision that resolves it.
What counts toward the target
Almost always closed balance, not equity. Unrealised profit does not pass a challenge — you have to close to book it.
Our engine supports both bases because a minority of firms count equity, but the default is closed balance because that is the overwhelming convention. The difference matters at exactly one moment, and it is a moment traders reach often: holding a winner that would put you over the line.
At that instant:
- The target says you have not passed. It sees only closed trades.
- The drawdown floor has already counted the open profit — and if the floor is an intraday-trailing type, that unrealised gain may have already raised the floor, meaning giving it back moves you toward a limit that the profit itself created.
So the position is simultaneously not yet a pass and already a risk. Recognising that this is a rule interaction rather than bad luck is most of the value of understanding the arithmetic.
Cash movements never count. A deposit does not advance you and a withdrawal does not set you back, on the target — though a withdrawal does move you closer to the floor, for the reasons in equity versus balance.
Minimum trading days, and the pace they impose
The minimum-days requirement exists to stop a single lucky trade passing a challenge. Its practical effect is a floor on how long you take, and its details decide how firm that floor is — the three qualifiers are set out in what a rulebook contains.
The interaction worth planning around: if your firm counts only profitable days toward the minimum, then a losing day costs you twice — the money, and a day of the calendar that did not count. On a rule of ten qualifying days with a win rate near half, the realistic number of calendar days is closer to twenty.
Working out the pace
If there is a deadline, the arithmetic is:
required per remaining day = (target − progress) ÷ days remaining
Our tracker reports this figure, and it is most useful read as a warning rather than a plan. When the required daily gain exceeds what your account has historically produced in a day, the deadline is no longer reachable at your normal size — and the response that ends accounts is to increase size until the arithmetic works.
The honest alternative when the number goes out of reach: accept the reset. A failed challenge costs the fee. A challenge failed by oversizing costs the fee and reinforces the habit that will fail the next one too.
Where there is no deadline, this figure does not exist and should not be invented. An account with unlimited time has no required pace, and the correct behaviour is the opposite of urgency — trade the setups you would trade anyway, and let the minimum-days requirement be the only clock.
Why your own expectancy is the input that matters
None of this says whether you can pass, and no rulebook can. That comes from your own record: your expectancy per trade, how much it varies, and how many trades you take in a day.
Those three numbers turn the challenge into a question with an answer — how likely this size is to reach the target before it touches a constraint. It is the same calculation as risk of ruin with the floor set at the drawdown limit instead of at zero, and it is worth running before paying for a challenge rather than after failing one.
If your own history does not contain enough trades to estimate those numbers, that is itself the answer: the challenge is a bet on an edge that has not been measured yet.