The target is the easy number. The drawdown decides.

You pass a prop firm evaluation by treating the drawdown as the main rule. The target is the result. Build every number from the drawdown first.

Aiming at the target does the opposite. You see 3,000 to make and a deadline, so a trade that could make 600 looks attractive. That trade also risks a large slice of the room you have. Two of those in a bad week and the account is gone.

The drawdown is the only rule with no second chance. A slow week costs you time. A consistency problem can usually be fixed with more ordinary days. A breach of the maximum drawdown ends the attempt. So it gets to set your size, your daily stop and your pace. The examples below use made-up rules. Swap in your firm's current terms.

Decide how many losses in a row you must be able to survive, then divide. Say the maximum drawdown is 2,500.

If you want to survive 10 straight losses, each trade may risk at most 250. If you want room for 20, the risk is 125. Long losing streaks do turn up over a few hundred trades. The smaller figure is the safer start.

Then fix your reward to risk. At two to one, you break even with a win rate of one in three, or 33 percent. That's the bar your setups have to clear before any of the later arithmetic means anything. If your journal says you win 30 percent at two to one, the evaluation won't fix that. Work on the setups first.

Treat the firm's daily loss limit as a wall you never touch. Set your own stop well inside it.

With 125 risk per trade, a stop of three losses is 375 for the day. Against a 2,500 drawdown, that allows six full stop-out days before the seventh would breach. That's six maximum-loss days with no green day in between to refill the room.

If your firm's drawdown trails your peak balance, watch the give-backs too. Say you're up 900 by noon and finish up 300. The floor may have risen with the 900, so you've lost 600 of room on a green day. Check how your firm measures the trail. Then add a second rule: once a good day gives back half its gain, you're done.

Some firms also cap how much of your total profit one day may contribute. Turn that into a ceiling before you start.

Say the target is 3,000 and the cap is 40 percent. Multiply them and you get 1,200. No single day may finish above that. When a day reaches it, flatten and stop, however good the tape feels.

This feels backwards on a strong day. It isn't. A 2,000 day under a 40 percent cap means you now need 5,000 in total, not 3,000. One great session just added 2,000 of required work. The ceiling keeps your best day from moving the finish line. If your firm has no such cap, skip this step and keep the rest. If it does, write the ceiling on a sticky note beside your screen. You'll want it on the day you least feel like stopping.

Now work out the pace from your own numbers. You need your real win rate and the size of your average winner and loser.

Say you win 45 percent of trades, risking 125 to make 250. Each trade is worth 0.45 times 250, minus 0.55 times 125. That's 112.50 minus 68.75, or 43.75 per trade on average. At three trades a day, that's about 131 a day. Divide 3,000 by 131.25 and you need about 23 trading days.

That's an average, and real paths are bumpier. Compare it with any time limit or minimum-day rule your firm sets. If the arithmetic says 23 days and the window is shorter, the fix is a longer window. It is never bigger size.

Fill these in on paper before the first trade of the evaluation.