Pass, Keep, Collect: The Three Stages Most Prop Firm Plans Only Cover One Of

The email arrives and you passed. That is the last day the plan you used still works. For three weeks you had a number to reach. Tomorrow there is no number, only a floor to stay above, and nothing good happens for getting anywhere fast. Then a third thing turns up that has nothing to do with trading at all: a payout cycle with a date on it, and a list of conditions the account has to satisfy on that date. Pass, keep, collect. Three problems, arriving in that order.

The thirty second video above is the compressed version. This is the long one.

Almost every plan a trader brings to a prop firm is a stage one plan, built to reach a number. When the number is reached it has nothing left to say, and the trader walks into stage two carrying a target seeking habit into an account that has no target.

In the evaluation you are being screened. The firm wants to know whether you can produce a return without violating limits, and the fee you paid covers the cost of finding that out.

This stage has a deadline feel to it even when the time limit is generous, and that pressure produces the classic failure: size increases late in the attempt, when the target is still some distance away. The mechanics of that are covered in why most traders fail prop firm challenges.

What matters for the argument here is what the stage teaches. Three or four weeks of pushing toward a target trains a specific instinct, and that instinct is actively harmful in the stage that follows.

The day the account is funded, the objective inverts. There is no evaluation target left to chase, though most account types set a minimum profit before a payout can be requested. The account has a floor, and your job becomes holding above it while still satisfying every rule attached to the account that has nothing to do with losing money.

Traders who pass and then lose the account usually did not change anything about how they trade. That is the problem. The behaviour that cleared stage one, pressing when behind and sizing up to close a gap, has nothing to work on in stage two except an account that is now real. We wrote that failure out in why funded traders lose the account.

Stage two also introduces a rule that did not bite before: on many account types the drawdown limit trails your highest equity instead of sitting at a fixed number. A good week moves the floor up behind you, so the distance you have to work with does not grow with profit. Your room stays the same size while the level you must hold rises, and banked gains stop being a cushion you can give back. On many account types the trailing stops once the floor reaches your starting balance. Whether either applies to you is written in your own account agreement.

This is the stage the industry talks about least, and the one where funded accounts are most often lost.

A payout is not something that happens automatically when you are in profit. It happens when the firm's cycle comes around, if the account still satisfies every condition attached to it.

Those conditions vary by firm and by account type and they are rarely all in one place. They commonly include a minimum number of trading days, a request window instead of an on demand button, a profit split, and in some cases conditions about consistency across the period being paid out. None of that is trading skill. It is administration, and it costs more payout requests than most traders expect when they first get funded.

The practical consequence is that the account has to survive the calendar, not just the market. An account that is up but was opened three days before the cycle closes is in a different position than one that has been running for six weeks. How the mechanics generally work is mapped in how prop firm payouts work, and the conditions that most often cost people money are in prop firm payout rules that cost you money.

If the stages have different objectives, then the thing that has to stay constant across them is the limits. Your firm's daily loss number, its drawdown definition, its news policy and its trading day requirements apply from the first trade of the evaluation to the last trade before a payout request.

That is what the rulebook in the video refers to. The firm's limits are written into the configuration instead of remembered, and the same numbers govern the robot in stage one and stage three.

In the current build that work is divided between components with narrow jobs. An analyst answers questions from the account's own reported history and never from a guess. A trader executes setups sized to the limits in force. PraxAI GUARD is a hard coded firewall that stops the robot before a threshold is crossed, and it is fixed logic, not a model, which is the reason it can be relied on to behave the same way every time. A coach keeps the trader on the process, and the rulebook holds the limit set we maintain for each firm. That set is maintained by us and is not fed from the firm, so when a firm revises a limit the correct question to ask any vendor, including this one, is how fast the file changes and how you are told.

Attaching the robot and loading the setfile takes about five minutes. Getting it somewhere that stays on is a separate job and nobody films it: this is software that has to be running while your laptop is closed, so it lives on a VPS that you arrange. We ship a guide for that step. We do not ship the server, and a vendor who lets you assume otherwise is the same vendor who will be hard to reach in week two. The part worth valuing is not the speed of setup. It is that the score, calendar and journal you read afterwards are built from what the robot actually reported, which means the record you use to judge it is the same record it traded from.

Pass, keep, collect is not a slogan about ambition. It is the order in which the three problems arrive, and it is deliberately the opposite of how the category is usually sold.

Most products advertise stage one because stage one produces a screenshot. Stage three produces a bank transfer six weeks later, and nobody has worked out how to put that in a thumbnail. Stage three is slow and administrative and does not make a good advertisement. That marketing incentive is a large part of why so many traders arrive at a funded account with no plan for it.

If you want to see the software instead of the argument, the dashboard walkthrough is two minutes of screen recording with nobody talking over it. And if the three stage framing is the reason you are still reading, that is the whole reason PraxAI is sold as a licence and not as a challenge passing service: stage one is where the category stops, and stages two and three are where a funded account is actually won or lost. Our refund window is seven days and it has conditions attached, which are published in full on the refund policy page. Read them before you buy rather than after.