38 articles, calculators and tests, grouped by topic. Everything uses our own data or official sources, with the method explained.
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- 12 questions to ask your strategy before buying a prop firm evaluation
Our lab's method as a checklist: costs, sample size, control group, plateau, Monte Carlo, platform parity and forward test. Mark your answers and see if you're ready. - Futures prop firm glossary: trailing drawdown, consistency, daily loss limit and more
45 prop firm terms explained in one or two sentences: intraday and end-of-day trailing drawdown, consistency rule, daily loss limit, time limit, activation, reset, payout, costs and how to measure a strategy. - How to pass a prop firm evaluation: what the data says
Nine things we measured in our lab: edge after costs, time limit, position size, trailing drawdown, daily loss limit, consistency, popular strategies, each firm's hidden rules and how to simulate it with your own numbers.
Calculators and tests
- How many contracts to trade in a prop firm account
The 10-typical-losses rule raised pass rates from 64% to 91% in our simulations, without touching the strategy. With a calculator. - How many trades do you need to know if your strategy works? Calculator
Enter your win rate, average win and loss and your costs: it tells you your real edge per trade, how many trades you need to tell it apart from chance and what your trades so far actually prove. - Losing streak calculator: is yours normal?
Enter your win rate and how many trades you take: it tells you the worst losing streak that is normal and the chance of each one. Exact math, free. - Test: what is sabotaging your trading?
36 statements and 3 minutes to find your top three self-sabotage patterns (revenge trading, moving the stop, FOMO, euphoria…) and what to do about each one. Free, no sign-up. - What win rate do you need to break even in futures trading?
With an 8-tick target and stop on MNQ and real costs, 77.5%. The formula, the tables and a calculator with your target, stop and costs.
Prop firm rules
- APEX vs Lucid: which prop firm passes more traders (2026)
APEX or Lucid? 50K evaluation rules side by side and 3,000 simulated evaluations for five types of trader: who passes more, who blows up more and which account suits you. - APEX vs Topstep: which prop firm passes more traders (2026)
APEX or Topstep? 50K evaluation rules side by side and 3,000 simulated evaluations for five types of trader: who passes more, who blows up more and which account suits you. - APEX vs Tradeify: which prop firm passes more traders (2026)
APEX or Tradeify? 50K evaluation rules side by side and 3,000 simulated evaluations for five types of trader: who passes more, who blows up more and which account suits you. - How to choose a prop firm: the time limit matters more than the discount
The same trader passes 98% with no time limit and 17% with 30 days. Five traders, four 50K accounts and the cost per passed account. - The consistency rule at prop firms: who it stops and who it doesn't
We simulated 20,000 evaluations per case: at normal size, a 40-50% consistency rule changes nothing; with big size it cuts pass rates and makes passing slower. With a real-target calculator. - Daily loss limit at prop firms: when it ends your day and when it blows the account
We simulated 10,000 evaluations per case: at normal size you never hit it; if it blows the account and you size up, pass rates collapse. With a calculator of how many losses you can take in a day. - Futures prop firm rules (October 2026)
Time limit, trailing drawdown, daily loss limit, consistency, news and bots at APEX, Lucid, Tradeify, Topstep and MyFundedFutures, with date and source. - Lucid vs Tradeify: which prop firm passes more traders (2026)
Lucid or Tradeify? 50K evaluation rules side by side and 3,000 simulated evaluations for five types of trader: who passes more, who blows up more and which account suits you. - Trading news and using bots in prop firm accounts: what each firm allows
CPI, payrolls and FOMC, straddles, bots and trade copiers: the rules at APEX, Lucid, Tradeify, Bulenox, MyFundedFutures and Earn2Trade, read in their help centers. - Order flow versus chance: aggression bubbles and effort boxes with 308 million ticks
Do they work as an entry signal? We measured them with real Nasdaq ticks and chance controls: the boxes win as often as, or less than, a random direction. - Futures prop firm comparisons: APEX, Lucid, Topstep, Tradeify and MyFundedFutures
APEX vs Lucid, APEX vs Topstep, Lucid vs Tradeify… 50K rules side by side and 3,000 simulated evaluations per trader. - Topstep vs MyFundedFutures: which prop firm passes more traders (2026)
Topstep or MyFundedFutures? 50K evaluation rules side by side and 3,000 simulated evaluations for five types of trader: who passes more, who blows up more and which account suits you. - The ones who get paid: what traders who withdraw from prop firm accounts have in common
Out of every 100 traders who buy an evaluation, about 7 get paid. What they do differently, how much they really get paid and payout trivia from the firms, with data. - Trailing drawdown explained: why winning also brings you closer to blowing the account
With the same trades, an intraday trailing account gets blown while in profit and an end-of-day one survives. We measured it across 4,000 evaluations.
Market data
- Which day of the week do the Nasdaq, gold and crude move the most?
Range by weekday in Micro Nasdaq, Micro Gold and Micro Crude, with and without news days. Monday is the quietest and Thursday the busiest, but the calendar matters more. - What time do the Nasdaq, gold and crude move the most? Minute by minute across 4,916 sessions
The best time to trade Micro Nasdaq, Micro Gold and Micro Crude based on their real volatility, and what it means for your stop and position size in a prop firm account. - How realistic is a trading simulator? Our synthetic market against 4,916 real sessions
We compared 2,000 futures simulator sessions with real Micro Nasdaq, Micro Gold and Micro Crude sessions: daily range, trend days, range days and tails. What matches, what doesn't and what it's for. - Micro Nasdaq, Micro Gold or Micro Crude: how much each one moves in dollars and which fits your prop firm account
Daily range per contract, move per minute, costs and trend days for MNQ, MGC and MCL across 4,916 real sessions. Why - CPI, jobs and Fed days: how much more the Nasdaq moves (and when)
1,813 Micro Nasdaq sessions against official BLS and Fed release dates: daily range, first half hour and the 2:00 pm statement. What it means for your prop firm account. - Does the Nasdaq's first hour predict the rest of the day?
1,793 Micro Nasdaq sessions: a busy first hour means a busy afternoon; the 10:30 am direction is right a little more often, but doesn't pay after costs. What to do with your size and stops.
Strategies put to the test
- Bot portfolios: the trap of picking the combination that did best
When diversifying works (daily correlation) and why the best combinations of the past blew up between 13% and 32% of accounts in unseen years. - Overnight gold and other markets: what only works on the Nasdaq
88,128 systems on 9 markets with a chance control, three Nasdaq strategies on the S&P and why the overnight gold breakout is a bet on volatility. - What held up: six intraday strategy families that passed two tests
What the few intraday Nasdaq ideas that survived 2019-2026 and 2006-2019 have in common, what they're really worth and why the most robust one doesn't fit in a prop firm account. - A labeling bug built us a strategy with a 90% win rate
What happens when the stop and the target fall inside the same bar, how we found it with 34 million ticks and how to avoid it. - The Nasdaq opening range breakout, tested on 7 years of data
It made more than $22,000 in seven years... and blew up almost half of the 50K accounts. What the YouTube video doesn't show. - Scalping on small bars: costs eat the range
On 1-minute MNQ bars the cost takes 9.8% of the range; on 1-hour bars, 1.3%. What happened when we moved the same strategy to 15 seconds, and a calculator. - You optimized your strategy: how many tests did you run?
If you test 100 strategies with no edge, the best looks good 9 times out of 10. What bar to require depending on how much you test, with a calculator. - We tested the 13 most popular TradingView strategies on a Lucid 50K
The best one passes 11% of evaluations and blows 36%. Seven years of Nasdaq data, real rules and 123 attempts per strategy.
NinjaTrader and AI
- How to connect Claude (or any AI) to NinjaTrader 8 with no risk of it touching your orders
An AI that reads your accounts, history and strategies, with three layers that make trading impossible. Free and running on your PC. - Why your NinjaTrader bots stop overnight (and how to prevent it)
Windows Update, few-second disconnections, forced closes and restarts: what left our bots stopped (and duplicated), and how we fixed it.
Tools: the prop firm simulator and the futures simulator, free.
Educational content based on our own experience. Not investment advice. Firm rules change: check them on each firm's website. This article contains no affiliate links.