How to Pass Apex Evaluation: The Rules That Decide the Run

Almost every guide to how to pass Apex evaluation opens with a number. A target, a threshold, a contract cap, quoted as though one rulebook covered every product and never moved. If you have already lost an evaluation you know how that ends. The account rarely dies because the strategy stopped working. It dies because a rule behaved differently from the version in your head.

Apex Trader Funding sells futures evaluations, and the parameters attached to them differ by account type and get revised. The only version of the rules that counts is the one on apextraderfunding.com and in your dashboard on the day you start. Copy the current figures into your journal with the date beside them, and trade against that note, not against this article.

What follows is structural: which rule families exist on an evaluation of this type, and which actually end runs. If the first account is already gone, decide how you restart before paying for anything, because [a reset hands you back the same rulebook](/blog/reset-vs-new-challenge-prop-firm) that just beat you.

Ask a trader what failed the account and you get a story about a trade. The dashboard says something narrower: equity touched the threshold. On futures programs of this type the disqualification level is commonly a trailing threshold rather than a fixed floor under the starting balance. It ratchets upward behind the account as new highs are made, and never comes back down.

Two details decide how sharp that is, and both are account specific, so confirm the current behaviour for your product on Apex's own site. The first is what the line follows: intraday peak equity with unrealised profit included, or end of day closed balance. Under an intraday design, a trade that never closed green can still lift the line. The second is how far below the peak it sits.

A worked example with hypothetical numbers, invented for the arithmetic and not taken from Apex or from any real account. An account starts at 60,000 with the threshold 2,000 below it, at 58,000. Equity peaks at 61,100, so a trailing line follows to 59,100. The gains come back and equity returns to 60,000: nothing lost against the opening balance, and yet the room before disqualification has shrunk from 2,000 to 900. The peak spent it.

The budget you size from is therefore the live distance to the current line, recalculated every session, never the balance printed on the account. If the mechanic is new, [trailing drawdown explained](/blog/trailing-drawdown-explained) covers the designs in use.

Thresholds of this type are commonly structured to stop trailing at some point rather than follow forever. The usual shape: once the account has built a defined buffer, the line freezes and behaves like a static floor. Where it freezes, and whether that level sits at, above or below your starting balance, is the fact worth settling before anything else about the account. Take it from the firm's own current documentation, and expect the evaluation and funded stages to differ.

It matters because it sets the pacing. Before the lock, every new high tightens the leash: profit is progress and it also lifts the floor you can fall onto. After the lock, profit accumulates above a fixed line and the account has slack. So run the pre lock phase deliberately small: the goal is not profit, it is reaching a state where an ordinary losing day is survivable.

The matching mistake ends most second attempts: making the loss back faster, taking a large day early, and buying nothing except a higher floor.

Futures sizing is discrete: the dollar value of a tick is fixed by the exchange, and you are in one contract or you are not. Evaluations in this market commonly cap how many contracts you may hold at once, scaled by account size, and caps can differ between the evaluation and funded stages. Trading above the allowance is generally treated as a violation even when the trade wins, so the cap is an input, not a guideline.

Hypothetical arithmetic with invented figures, not a real contract specification: at 4 dollars per tick and a 200 dollar risk budget, one contract buys a 50 tick stop and two contracts buy 25, which may sit inside the instrument's ordinary noise. Scaling in does not add a little risk in futures, it multiplies the dollars per tick across the whole position.

The second structural rule is the session boundary. Futures evaluations commonly require positions closed and working orders cancelled before the daily close, and holiday sessions can close earlier than usual. Verify the current cutoff and whether it differs by account type, then set an alarm for it. Forex traders tend to underestimate contracts, cutoffs and trailing floors all at once, the subject of [the futures rules forex traders miss](/blog/pass-topstep-combine-futures).

Before the first session, get these answered from Apex's own material, and note the date.

A consistency requirement does not ask how much you made. It asks how you made it, comparing your largest single day against total profit and objecting when one session dominates the balance. In this market that check is most commonly applied at the payout stage rather than inside the evaluation, but the profile you build during the run carries forward. The calculation and the stage it applies to get revised, so read the current version on Apex's own site.

The consequence is counter intuitive. An outsized winning day raises the number you are measured against, which can push a withdrawal further away rather than closer, leaving you trading longer to dilute your own best session. The defence is a daily profit cap, set before the session and obeyed on the days that are going well. The mechanics across firms are in [how the consistency rule works](/blog/prop-firm-consistency-rule-explained).

Minimum trading days behave like a second currency. A selective plan that stands aside on days that do not fit is behaving correctly and accumulating nothing on the calendar, which can gate the next stage. Know the count before you start, and never take a trade purely to add one. Firms define a day differently: [prop firm minimum trading days](/blog/prop-firm-minimum-trading-days).

Be blunt about what an evaluation buys. Reaching a target proves you can cover a distance without touching a line. It does not prove the account will send you money, because the funded stage commonly runs its own rulebook: different threshold behaviour, different contract allowances, tighter news restrictions, plus eligibility conditions that do not exist while there is nothing to withdraw.

That gap is where most funded accounts are lost. Across this industry only 1 to 3 percent of funded traders keep the account long term, and repeat challenge fees can add up to 2,400 dollars or more a year, which is the real price of treating the target as the finish line. The funded side is covered in [the Apex payout rules](/blog/apex-trader-funding-payout-rules).

If the first attempt failed on discipline, the obvious thought is to hand the discipline to software. Stop at that thought, because this is the one item on the list where being wrong is not a bad day, it is the account. Apex publishes its position on automated trading in its own help center, and that page is the only version that counts. What is described in this category is restrictive rather than permissive, and the stated consequence is closure of the account rather than a warning. We have not read the current wording ourselves, so do not take our summary of it: read it at the source before you go any further.

Two things make this unlike the forex prop market most trading automation is written for. First, do not reason by analogy: a permission that exists on a MetaTrader forex challenge tells you nothing about a futures evaluation, and a tool being ordinary elsewhere is not evidence it is allowed here. Second, the outcome described in this area is loss of the account and of the balance in it, so the cost of guessing is the entire run.

The working default is therefore the conservative one: nothing automated goes near an Apex account unless Apex's own current policy plainly permits it for the exact product you hold. If the policy prohibits it, that is the end of the question, and no edge is worth an account closed over a rule you did not read. If anything is unclear, the party to ask is Apex support in writing, never a vendor and never a forum thread. Firms also revise this kind of policy without much ceremony, a pattern described in [when prop firms change the rules](/blog/when-prop-firms-change-the-rules).

One disclosure, because it should change how you read the paragraphs above. PraxAI publishes this blog and sells trading automation, which makes us an interested party and the wrong source for what Apex permits. Nothing here is a recommendation to run our software, or anyone else's, on an Apex account. The only answer with any standing comes from Apex.

The useful question after a failed evaluation is not what to trade differently. It is which rule ended the account, and what has changed in your routine since. Most repeat failures are the same ending twice, paid for twice.

Write this down before the account is live, and grade each session on the rules you followed, not on the profit and loss.