First, do not buy anything this week
The reset offer arrives while the loss is fresh, often with a discount and a countdown. That is not a coincidence, and it is not necessarily cynical either — it converts at that moment, which is precisely why it appears then.
A failed evaluation costs one fee. A failed evaluation followed by an immediate reset with the same plan costs two fees and produces the same information. Give it a week. The rules will not change, the discount will return, and the version of you making the decision will be better at it.
Use the week for the post-mortem below. It takes about an hour, and it is the difference between the first fee being tuition and being a donation.
The three causes
Every failed evaluation is one of three things, and they need completely different responses. Working out which one you are looking at is the whole exercise.
| Cause | What it looks like in the log | Correct response |
|---|---|---|
| No edge | Expectancy near or below zero across the whole sample; losses not clustered; no single decision explains it | Stop buying evaluations. Rebuild the method on a demo or a small personal account. |
| Wrong size | The method was profitable in aggregate but one streak or one day exceeded the limit | Same method, half the size, smaller account. This is the cheapest failure to fix. |
| Misread rules | Breached on a mechanic you did not expect — reset time, equity basis, day counter, news window | Rebuy quickly, at the same firm, with the mechanic written down. |
Traders overwhelmingly self-diagnose as the third and are usually the second. The log settles it, which is why the log matters more than any of the advice that follows.
The five questions
Answer each with a number from your own records, not an impression.
- What was the expectancy across every trade? Total net result divided by number of trades. If it is negative over more than about eighty trades, the method is the problem and nothing else on this list matters.
- What was the largest single day, and the longest losing streak? Compare both against the daily limit and the drawdown. If either exceeded the limit while the overall expectancy was positive, this was a sizing failure.
- At what point did risk per trade change? Look for the trade where size increased. In most failed evaluations there is one, it is late, and it is within a few days of the end.
- Which specific rule ended it? Name the clause, not "I blew it". Daily limit or maximum drawdown, equity or closed balance, and at what time of day.
- Were you following the written plan on the final five trades? If there was no written plan, you have found something more useful than any of the other four answers.
If you cannot answer these because you did not record enough, the correct next purchase is not an evaluation. It is a fortnight of journaling on a demo, because the next attempt will end in the same unanswerable position.
If it was the method
This is the hardest verdict and the cheapest one to accept early. A prop account multiplies whatever a strategy already does, so an evaluation is a very expensive place to discover that expectancy is negative.
Go back to a demo or a small personal account, and set an exit condition in advance: a measured positive expectancy over at least a couple of hundred trades before another fee is paid. That is months rather than weeks, which is exactly why most people skip it and why most people pay repeatedly for the same information.
If it was the size
The good news is that this is the common case and the easy fix. The method works; it was asked to work through a streak it could not survive at the size it was taking.
Recompute risk per trade from the fail level rather than the account balance: buffer divided by the losing streak you must survive, floored at eight losses. On a 10% drawdown that is 1% per trade at eight losses and 0.5% at twenty. Then take the smaller of that and whatever your own daily stop allows. Position sizing against a drawdown is the full method; risk per trade for a 10% target is the short version with the arithmetic worked through.
Then buy one size down. A trader who failed a $100,000 account on sizing and passes a $50,000 account has bought proof for half the price, and the scaling plan will return them to the larger size for free.
If it was the rules
The cheapest failure of the three, and the only one where rebuying immediately is correct — provided you write the mechanic down first.
The recurring culprits are the reset time and its time zone, whether the daily limit is measured on equity or closed balance, whether the drawdown trails intraday peaks, and whether a trade must both open and close for the day to count. Each of those has ended thousands of evaluations, and each takes one line in a note to prevent twice.
Read what counts as a breach and daily loss limits and reset times once with your own firm's terms open beside them. Then rebuy, at the same firm, because the familiarity you have just paid for is worth more than any discount elsewhere.
Reset, new account, or smaller
| Situation | Best purchase | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Rule mechanic, method sound | Reset, same firm | Cheapest, and the knowledge is firm-specific |
| Sizing failure | New account, one size down | Often similar price to a reset, and the smaller account proves the fix |
| Method unproven | Neither | Nothing purchasable fixes this |
| Failed twice the same way | Neither | The pattern is the finding; a third fee will confirm what you know |
Resets: worth it or not goes through the pricing comparison in more detail.
The pattern worth watching in yourself
Failing, rebuying within a day, sizing up to recover the fee, and failing faster is a recognisable sequence, and it has nothing to do with trading skill. It is the same mechanism that makes a losing trader add to a losing position, applied one level up: the account is now the position, and the fee is the unrealised loss.
The defence is a rule made in advance, in writing — a maximum number of attempts per quarter, or a fixed budget for the year, decided while nothing is at stake. Traders who set that number and hold to it do not have this problem. Traders who intend to be sensible about it usually do.
A fortnight that is worth more than the reset
- Days 1-2: export the trade history and answer the five questions with numbers.
- Days 3-5: write the failure into one sentence — the cause, the rule, the trade where it turned.
- Days 6-10: trade the method on a demo at the corrected size, specifically to see whether the streak that ended you is survivable now.
- Days 11-14: rewrite the plan with the sizing formula and the daily stop as numbers, and note the four rule mechanics for the firm you will use.
- Then buy, once, at a size where three attempts would be affordable.
Failing an evaluation is ordinary — most funded traders failed at least one and often several. What separates the ones who eventually get paid is not that they failed less; it is that each failure cost them one fee and bought one answer.