In evals, risk doesn't cost money. It buys time.
The first version of this site's calculator had a bug that was really a philosophy error. Asked for the best eval risk, it recommended $75 per trade — the expected-value maximum — which passes the eval in a median of 157 days. Five months of grinding to protect a ticket that costs $95 to replace. The optimizer was right about EV and wrong about everything that matters, and the fix taught us the cleanest lesson in the whole build.
Why EV can't tell risk levels apart here
Tradeify's Growth eval is a one-time $145 purchase. No monthly clock. Blow it and a reset is $95. So the cost side of the EV equation is nearly flat in risk — every failure is a two-digit number, while a pass wins a funded account worth thousands. Sweep risk per trade and watch how little the ticket's expected value cares:
EV of one eval ticket, by risk per trade
Now look at what risk actually buys
Median trading days to pass, by risk per trade
Same sweep, same simulations. The EV chart is a gentle slope; the time chart is a cliff. That asymmetry is the whole argument: in the eval stage, the scarce input isn't account equity — it's calendar. Every week not funded is a week the funded account isn't paying, and the funded account is where all the value lives. The calculator now recommends the risk that maximizes ticket EV per day-to-funded, which lands at the 4-contract cap for a normal stop distance.
The boundary of the argument
- It holds because failure is cheap and capped. The moment you're trading a funded account — where dying forfeits thousands of continuation value — the same logic runs in reverse, and the optimizer rightly turns conservative. One principle, two opposite conclusions, depending on what's at stake.
- It also assumes you can actually re-buy: tickets are cheap in dollars but not free in psychology. The engine doesn't model tilt. You do.
- The firm caps the trade anyway: 4 MNQ contracts at a 25-point stop is $200 of risk, whatever the math prefers.