To add to this, I don't think these programs should be treated as a regular accounts. The goal is to play their game and get to multiple funded accounts as soon as possible and use copy trading. I use Apex and only picked up my eval accounts when they were on 90% discount. This is about $17/month. 20 accounts, which is the max Apex allow, cost $340. Pushing your luck a little with higher risk, $150 a day is achievable during the eval which get you to $3000 on a 50K account in a month. Really pushing your luck, you can do that in 1 - 3 days, but should be prepared to blow up a few accounts doing that.



Even if you pay for 40 accounts to blow up 20 to eventually get to the 20 funded ones, your cost will be $680. If you pick up the accounts at 80% discount which is almost all the time, your cost for 40 accounts will be $1360. After that, you have to pay the lifetime fee of $150 once you qualified for the funded account. That's 20 x 150 = $3000. So, you can be funded on 20 accounts for $4360 after a month. Then, you can go back to conservative trading with $50 average / day realistic and achievable, without hitting the $2500 drawdown. Also keep in mind that the trailing drawdown stop once your account go above $50,2600 on a 50K account. The trailing drawdown stop at $50,100 and you just need to keep your account above that. If you are more conservative, you can trade really small and only withdraw anything above $55K for example, leaving you a $5K drawdown buffer. Of course, this will take longer to get to the point where you can make withdrawals.



After 3 to 4 months, you can start making withdrawals and if you average $50 a day, this is about $1000 a month, but since you are doing it over 20 accounts, this is $20,000 a month. Heck, if you average $25 a day, this is $10K a month. You can spread your risk by using 4 account groups for example and trade 5 accounts at a time so that a couple of bad trades or copy trading fiasco don't wipe out all 20 accounts. If you rotate amongst them trade after trade and risk $100 per trade then after 4 losing trades in a row, you are down $100 per account, instead of $400 on one account which is a lot easier to recover from.



I don't think there are many other ways that you can use $4360 and turn it into $20K monthly returns in 4 - 6 months.



Of course, this only work if you already have an edge and can be relative consistent with small average gains per day without large down swings. The issue comes when people are not consistent, have no trading plan nor methodology and swing for the fences during the eval to get qualified and continue to do so and keep blowing up accounts. But then, this is better and cheaper than opening a $2,500 account with a broker and blow it up in a month because you are still learning, or really have no plan other than swinging for the fences. With an eval account, you will only be out ~$33 in this case.

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Pushing your luck a little with higher risk, $150 a day is achievable during the eval which get you to $3000 on a 50K account in a month. Really pushing your luck, you can do that in 1 - 3 days, but should be prepared to blow up a few accounts doing that.

Even if you pay for 40 accounts to blow up 20 to eventually get to the 20 funded ones, your cost will be $680. If you pick up the accounts at 80% discount which is almost all the time, your cost for 40 accounts will be $1360. After that, you have to pay the lifetime fee of $150 once you qualified for the funded account. That's 20 x 150 = $3000. So, you can be funded on 20 accounts for $4360 after a month. Then, you can go back to conservative trading with $50 average / day realistic and achievable, without hitting the $2500 drawdown.

Is that what you are doing or is this wishful calculating?

In your example you get $2500 to use/lose from the funded firm, and you can generate $50 per day on average with that. That is 2% per day...

$50 is about 3 NQ points after commissions and about 5 ticks in the ES after commissions. If you think $50 is too high, how about $25? This is 1.5 NQ points after commissions. If you do not think this is possible to make 1.5 to 3 NQ points or around 5 ES ticks average per day on a risk of $2,500 then for sure Funded Programs are not the best option for you and you should continue to do what works for you.

This is about $17/month.