A proprietary trading firm's evaluation is a short list of limits applied to an account. The limits are simple to state and easy to misread, and one of them decides more outcomes than the rest put together. This page explains each as a measurement, in the terms the programmes themselves publish.
Sample figures. The same account, the same trades and the same stated percentage produce opposite verdicts, because the two rules are measuring from different places.
Triggon is not a proprietary trading firm. It does not fund traders, sell evaluations, run challenges or take a share of anyone's trading profits, and it is not affiliated with a firm that does.
This page exists because the rules below are a useful way to read any trading record, and because Prop Check measures a Strategy's recorded trades against a generic rulebook in this shape. If you are evaluating a real programme, what governs it is its own published terms, and nothing here replaces reading them.
These are the rules that end an evaluation. Each is a statement about the shape of the equity curve rather than about where it finished, which is why a profitable account can fail all the same.
The largest fall the account is permitted before it is closed. Commonly published somewhere between 5% and 12%. Everything about this rule depends on what the fall is measured from, which is the next section and the most important thing on this page.
How much the account may lose within one trading day, usually against that day's own opening equity, and typically in the 3% to 5% range. It is a separate test from the overall drawdown: an account can sit comfortably inside its total limit and still be closed for one bad session. Note that the day boundary is the firm's clock, not yours.
A ceiling on what any one position may cost, where a programme applies one. It is aimed at the trade that is sized to recover the last one, and it is the rule most often broken by a strategy that is otherwise well inside every other limit.
How much of the account may be committed at once, and how large open positions may be against the capital behind them. These usually apply after funding rather than during an evaluation, and they constrain the shape of a book rather than its result.
Two programmes can both advertise a 10% maximum drawdown and be asking genuinely different questions. This is the detail worth checking before any other.
The threshold is fixed where the account began and does not move. A 10% limit on a 100,000 account means the account is closed at 90,000, whatever happens in between. Profits make the rule easier to live with, because every gain is distance from a line that stays where it is.
The threshold sits a fixed distance below the account's own highest point, and it rises with every new high. It never falls back. Profits make this rule harder to live with, not easier: each new high moves the floor up behind you, so an account can be closed while it is still well above where it started.
The visual at the top of this page is the same account under both. It rises to 112, falls to 98, and recovers. Under a limit measured from the opening balance it has fallen 2% and is nowhere near trouble. Under a limit measured from the peak it has fallen 12.5% and the evaluation is over. Neither reading is wrong; they are different rules wearing the same number.
Some programmes use a trailing threshold that stops moving once the account reaches a certain profit, which is a third variant again. If the terms do not say which of the three applies, that is itself worth knowing before committing to one.
The remaining limits shape how a result must be reached, and they catch records that pass every risk test.
The gain required to clear a phase, commonly 8% to 10% for a first phase and often lower for a second. It is the only rule on this page that asks for something rather than forbidding it, and it is what makes the risk limits binding: without a target, every one of them could be satisfied by not trading.
A cap on how much of the total gain may come from a single day or a single trade. A record that made its target on one exceptional position is being told that the result is not evidence of a repeatable method, which is a judgement about sample size expressed as a rule.
A floor on how many separate days must carry qualifying activity. It exists for the same reason as the consistency rule and catches the same case from the other side: a target reached in two sessions has not demonstrated much, however large the number is.
Which markets may be traded, whether positions may be held over a weekend or through a scheduled news release, and whether certain strategies are permitted at all. These vary more than anything else between programmes and are the least portable part of any rulebook.
The rules are useful outside an evaluation. Applied to a trading record you already have, they ask better questions than a return figure does.
Return tells you where a record ended. These limits ask how it got there: how deep the worst fall was, how concentrated the gains were, whether one day did the work. Two records with identical returns can answer those questions completely differently.
A drawdown is peak to trough over the full equity path, a worst day needs every day, and a consistency figure needs the distribution. None of it can be recovered from a headline percentage, which is why a record compiled after the fact usually cannot be tested this way at all.
Where the underlying data cannot establish a figure, the honest answer is that it is not known. A drawdown computed only from closing prices is a floor on the real one: it can prove a breach and it can never prove compliance. Treating the gap as a pass is the most common way this kind of analysis misleads.
A record sitting inside a generic rulebook says something about how that strategy has behaved. It does not say that any firm would accept it, that an evaluation would be passed, or that the next stretch will resemble the last one. Trading carries risk and you can lose money.
On Triggon this is what Prop Check does to a Strategy's own recorded trades, against a published baseline whose every limit and weight is versioned. It reports compatibility and names what it could not measure.
Every Provider journal on Triggon carries a Prop Check on the trades behind it, scored against a published baseline rather than against a firm's terms.