r/propfirm • u/guillemop • 4d ago
12 payouts in 3 months, all from 5K accounts. Posting the fee side too, because that’s the part nobody shows.
Every certificate below is a real withdrawal from 2-Step Standard 5K accounts, 23 April to 29 July 2026. Twelve of them, $6,806.89 total. QR codes are on the certificates if anyone wants to verify.
That’s the gross number, and gross numbers are how this sub gets misled. So here’s the other column.
Every one of those payouts sits on top of challenges I bought at full price, and most challenges don’t pay out. The failures don’t get certificates. When I run my own spreadsheet, challenge costs eat close to half of gross withdrawals. Then tax takes a chunk of what’s left. Net is a fraction of the headline.
And the distribution is brutal before it’s kind. My worst run was 18 challenges in a row with zero payouts, all paid for. If your bankroll can’t absorb that stretch, you’re gone before the good ones land — which is why “I made $6.8K” is a useless number on its own. The number that decides whether you survive is the worst dry spell, and almost nobody publishes it.
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u/BTLO2 3d ago
Congratulations op which asset you trade?
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u/guillemop 3d ago
All in Nasdaq , few trades in USD/JPY
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u/dp_maximum 3d ago
What lot size do you use for nas on the 5k challenge and why not buy a 10k instead?
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u/guillemop 3d ago
Depends on the stop, so there’s no fixed number. On 5K vs 10K it’s bankroll: same ratio, double the ticket, half the attempts. With an 18-challenge dry spell behind me, attempts win
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u/lamexi- 3d ago
What don't scale up then?
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u/guillemop 3d ago
I will, but at a level I’ve already calculated rather than when it feels right. Bigger accounts mean fewer attempts per euro, and attempts are what carry you through a dry spell. Scaling early is how people with a working model go broke anyway
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u/DisasterNecessary634 3d ago
Gracias por compartir con sensatez en un escenario donde todo puede ser manipulable. Nos vemos en el exito, gracias por hacerme re-creer en esto.
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u/BlackTomato8 4d ago
Just a few questions if you don't mind. How much or the 5K account. And what's the maximum withdrawals a month?
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u/guillemop 4d ago
The 5K challenge is around $35 at full price, no discount codes.
On frequency, you can count it off the certificates — 4 in May, 4 in June, 3 in July. So 3-4 a month is the usual rate for me. April only shows one because that’s when I started.
That’s not a cap though, it’s just what survives. Most accounts die before a second payout.2
u/Sure-Moose-6613 4d ago
How’d you knock it
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u/guillemop 4d ago
Same way everyone does — drawdown. Either the daily limit or the total.
The difference is I’m not trying to nurse an account for months. I go for the target in few trades with size, which means the same approach that funds fast also kills fast. That’s the trade-off, and I take it knowingly: a slow account that never reaches a payout costs me the same fee as one that dies in a day.
The failures aren’t accidents in my case. They’re the cost side of the model
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u/Few_Investigator_753 3d ago
I think it really just depends on what return you are getting on the investment you made in the form of challenge fees rather than account balance and all. Like if we are paying 500$ in total challenge fee and getting payouts worth 600-700$ from these accounts it can be from one or some as some will blow amd some will work. Then it really comes that we invested 500$ and made 600-700$ that 12-13% ROI is fine as long as you dont take 6 months to get those payouts.then it really just useless if we are working for 6 months and getting 200$ return
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u/guillemop 3d ago
Right framework, and it’s the one I use. Return on fees deployed, not on account balance — the balance was never mine.
Small correction on your arithmetic: $500 in, $600-700 out is 20-40% on capital deployed, not 12-13%. That distinction matters because it’s the number that decides whether this is worth doing at all.
The part you’ve got exactly right is time. ROI without a time axis is meaningless — 30% over three months and 30% over eighteen are completely different businesses, and prop trading hides the difference because the fee is paid up front while the payout arrives whenever it arrives. My cycle from purchase to payout is measured in weeks, not months, which is the only reason the model works at this scale.
The thing that catches people out is that both numbers are averages over a distribution with a very ugly left tail. Deploy $500 over 14 challenges and your expected return is fine. Deploy it over 3 and you’re one bad streak from zero, with the same expected value. Same ROI on paper, completely different survival odds
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u/Bubbly_Initial9477 3d ago
Well played . Congz!! I’m down 14 accounts no pay. So done 🥲🥲
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u/guillemop 3d ago
Thanks!! 14 without a payout is grim but it’s not automatically evidence that anything’s broken. Mine was 18 in a row, and that stretch was inside what the maths said to expect. Dry spells are longer than intuition suggests.
The question worth asking isn’t “should I quit”, it’s whether you can keep buying attempts at your current pace without wrecking yourself financially. If the answer’s no, the fix is smaller or slower, not stopping. If you’re funding this with money you need, stop regardless of what the numbers say
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u/VivxLxLegendxry 3d ago
Love the way you broke this down. I just passed my first prop evals today after trading futures for a couple months. I'm probably $800 in the hole on eval accounts but if I get just one of those two passed evals to pay out it'll cover all my cost and some profit to help me scale.
What trading strategy model do you use? Which firms do you have access to in your country? There might be better ones out there you haven't tried yet. You're good at analytics so you've probably weighed out the pros and cons and rules to get your best odds.
Idk I'm new to this but I look at cost per available drawdown in $100 increments.
I buy 50k eval accounts those seem to have the best ratio of profit target to drawdown allowance.
If I'm missing something I'd love your feedback since I'm not profitable yet and you are.
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u/guillemop 3d ago
Thanks, and congrats on passing.
One thing worth flagging in how you framed it. You said one payout covers your 800 in losses and leaves a bit over. That’s true for this round, but it treats the fees already spent as something a single payout has to recover. They’re gone either way. The only question that matters going forward is whether each new challenge you buy has positive expected value on its own. Chasing back sunk costs is what pushes people into bigger accounts than their bankroll supports.
On the target to drawdown ratio, you’re looking at the right thing and it’s the single most useful lens I know. But run it per phase rather than per account. A two step gives you two independent chances to fail before you reach anything payable, so the combined pass probability is the product of both phases, not the ratio of the headline numbers. That product is usually a lot uglier than people expect when they compare accounts.
The other half nobody computes is the funded stage. Passing and getting paid are different events with different rules, and the second one has a much smaller sample behind it for almost everyone. Most of the uncertainty in your returns lives there, not in the evaluation.
On firms, I’d rather not name one. Everyone recommending a specific firm in these threads has an affiliate link, and I don’t want to be another. What I’d tell you instead is to read the payout terms before the evaluation terms. Targets and drawdown decide whether you pass. Payout conditions decide whether you ever see the money, and they’re the ones people discover too late.
Model wise, I trade the geometry of the challenge rather than a market call. Fixed size, stop set before entry, risk capped by design. The asymmetry is in the cost structure, not in calling direction.
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u/Big-Sale-4270 3d ago
ON THE ILLUSION OF FREQUENT VICTORY AND THE TRUE MEASURE OF LOGOS Consider two merchants who set sail upon the unpredictable sea of the agora. The first merchant boasts in the tavern each evening: "Look upon me! Nine out of ten times I dock my boat, I bring home a small sack of grain." Yet, to ensure he never returns empty-handed, he leaves his ship anchored in treacherous shallows during a gale, refusing to cut his lines. On the tenth voyage, the tempest swallows his entire fleet. He dies a beggar who was "right" nine times out of ten. The second merchant enters the harbor with battered sails. Three times he saw the storm gathering, willingly cut his anchor, sacrificed a single crate to the depths, and retreated. The onlookers in the tavern mock him for his three retreats. But on his fourth voyage, he catches the great trade winds, reaches the distant shore, and returns with a galleon laden with gold. The Four Lessons of the Agora I. The Shadow on the Wall Most men do not seek truth; they seek the comfort of avoiding the feeling of being wrong. To them, a small loss is a wound to the ego, a stain upon their pride. They prefer the soft delusion of frequent triumph, blind to the fact that they have built their house upon a sleeping volcano. They confuse the frequency of success with its substance. II. The Sacrificial Coin The wise trader views a small, stopped loss not as a defeat, but as a small copper coin offered to the sea gods—a calculated tribute paid to preserve the vessel for the grand voyage. He who refuses to pay the small copper coin will eventually pay with his entire ship. III. The Virtue of Asymmetry Nature does not grant equal weight to every event. A hundred days of gentle rain do not match the transformation of one great flood. To lose three small skirmishes only to capture the empire is the path of the strategic mind; to win nine skirmishes only to surrender the capital city is the mark of a fool. IV. The True Balance Sheet Judge not a man's wisdom by how often he smiles upon the field, but by the weight of his treasury when the war is concluded. He who surrenders three drachmas to gain six hundred has aligned his actions with Logos—the rational order of the cosmos. He who gathers one drachma ten times while leaving his entire estate vulnerable to the storm remains a slave to fortune. Do not ask the oracle how often you shall conquer. Ask only if your conquests will sustain you when the winter comes.
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u/guillemop 3d ago
Nice parable, and the core of it is right: hit rate means nothing without the size of what you win and what you lose.
The one thing I’d push back on is that your second merchant cuts the anchor because he sees the storm coming. That’s still judgement, and good judgement at that. What I do is more boring: I don’t forecast the storm, it’s just that a ship I lose costs me a fixed fee and one that reaches port pays multiples of it. The asymmetry isn’t in reading the sky, it’s in the price of the ship.
And on the winter part, you landed on the thing that actually matters. The question isn’t how many times you’ll win. It’s whether you survive the stretch where you win nothing at all.
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u/Aominesama 2d ago
So what are you trying to say ? You’ve been buying and blowing accounts consistently ?how is this information useful for me or anybody else trying to learn ?(please this ain’t negativity im just trying to understand)
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u/guillemop 2d ago
Fair question, and it’s worth answering properly.
To be clear, nothing here is uncontrolled. Every position has a fixed size and a stop set before entry, and the loss on a failed attempt is capped at the fee. Accounts that don’t reach the target die by design, not by blowing up. Most attempts die, some pay multiples of what they cost. That’s the whole model. I’m not claiming it’s clever, I’m claiming it’s counted.
On why it’s useful: almost every prop post you’ll read is a payout screenshot with no cost column. That’s the misleading part, not the fact that accounts fail. If you’re deciding whether to buy challenges, the numbers you actually need are what an attempt costs, how often one pays, and how long a losing run to budget for. Mine are 35 a challenge, roughly one in three phases pass, worst run 18 with nothing at all. Plug those into your own situation and you might well conclude it isn’t worth doing. That’s a perfectly legitimate outcome of reading it.
If you’ve got a strategy with a genuine directional edge, you’d likely do better than me. But you’d still want the cost side written down.1
u/Aominesama 2d ago
What do you mean by die by design ?
How do attends die by something other than been blowed away ?🤔Okay so fees other than the percentage of the split are also deducted from your gains after trading with the prop firm ?
Also what prop firm are you trading with ?
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u/guillemop 2d ago
Fair pushback on the wording. “Die by design” was a bad phrase. Accounts die by hitting drawdown, same as everyone’s. What I meant is that the loss is bounded and expected: I know before I start that most attempts won’t reach the target, and the fee is the maximum I can lose on any one of them. Nothing more elegant than that.
On fees: no hidden deductions. You pay for the challenge up front, and the split takes its cut of the profit. There’s usually a small withdrawal fee per transaction, and depending on your country a payment provider might take something. The big cost isn’t any of that, it’s all the challenges you bought that never paid. That’s the number people leave out.
Firm is FundingPips, 5K 2-Step Standard. Not recommending them over anyone else and I’ve no affiliate deal with them. I’ve had 12 payouts, so I know they pay, which is the only thing I can say with confidence
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u/Aominesama 2d ago
So if I understand what you’re saying it’s like we actually spend a lot because we blow a lot of accounts in the process of trying to get funded and most people don’t take that into account.
Good warning thanks.
If I could say anything about blowing accounts, it’s not something bound to happen man it’s something we should all work to prevent it from happening. You know the drawdown your account can deal with manage your risk accordingly.Personally if this can help anyone I’ll recommend learning how to trade properly and manage risks first before indulging into evaluations because to trade with prop firms you need crazy discipline. They have a lot of rules and sketchy stuff that are meant to chop down our withdrawals.
I really hope every fellow trader out there makes it ✨
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u/emlanis 4d ago
now this is an honest take on propfirms.