Reading Your Prop Firm Audit Verdict
This page explains the verdicts the CleaRank Prop Firm Auditor returns: Passed, Failed, Incomplete, and No trades supplied. It also covers the summary cards, the per-rule results, and why the auditor models static, trailing, and end-of-day trailing drawdown as three separate rules, since the same set of trades can pass one and fail another.
The verdict states
The banner at the top of the results is one of five states. They are not degrees of the same thing, and treating Incomplete as a soft fail is the most common misreading.
- Passed. Every rule that applied to this phase passed, and at least one rule actually ran.
- Failed. At least one hard rule was breached. The hard rules are max drawdown, daily drawdown, maximum trading days, consistency and weekend holding. A hard fail always wins the banner: an account that both breached drawdown and never reached the profit target reads Failed, not Incomplete.
- Incomplete. Nothing was breached, but the challenge is not finished. Only two rules can produce this state: the profit target has not been reached yet, or the minimum number of trading days has not been met yet. Read it as “still in progress and still alive”, not as a near miss.
- No trades supplied. The audit received zero trades, so it stopped before any rule ran. This is an input problem, not a result, and it is deliberately kept separate from Incomplete.
- No data. Rules ran but produced no results, which happens when the phase you selected has no rule fields set. Switch phase or fill in the Custom Rules form.
The four summary cards
NET P&L
Your cumulative closed profit and loss across the imported set, with fees deducted from the equity curve. Read it against the profit target, which is the account size multiplied by the target percentage: an 8 percent target on a 100,000 account is 8,000. If NET P&L is comfortably above the target and the verdict still reads Failed, a drawdown or consistency rule is what stopped you, not profitability.
MAX DD
The worst drawdown your equity curve reached against the model being applied. Compare it with the limit in the rule set, which for most evaluations sits between 4 and 10 percent of account size. What good looks like: finishing under half the limit. If your worst drawdown reached 4.2 percent against a 5 percent cap, you did not pass by trading well, you passed by 0.8 percent, and the next run of the same strategy is a coin flip. Halving position size is the direct fix, since drawdown scales with size.
WORST DAY
Your largest single-day loss. Compare it with the daily limit, typically 4 to 5 percent of the day’s starting balance. On a 100,000 account with a 5 percent daily rule, the limit is 5,000, so a worst day of 4,200 leaves 800 of headroom, and one ordinary bad session ends the account. If your worst day is more than about half the daily limit, the daily rule, not the overall drawdown, is the one that will end your challenge.
TRADING DAYS
The number of distinct calendar dates on which you closed at least one trade. This feeds both the minimum and maximum trading day rules. Note that days are counted in UTC, not in the firm’s local trading day. If you trade the New York session late, some of your trades will fall on the next UTC date, which can flatter your day count.
The three drawdown models
This is the section worth reading twice. A firm’s drawdown type changes the verdict on identical trades more than almost any other rule, and it is the detail most people only discover after they have paid.
Static
The floor is fixed at account size minus the limit and stays there forever, anchored to the starting balance. Any equity point below it is a breach. Profits give you permanent extra room, so a good early run genuinely buys you safety.
Trailing, with the breakeven lock
The floor is your running peak equity minus the limit, so it follows you up as you make money. It locks at breakeven: once your peak reaches the starting balance plus the limit, the floor stops at the starting balance and never rises again. Before that lock, every dollar you make also raises the level at which you fail.
End-of-day trailing
The floor ratchets once per calendar day, using that day’s closing equity rather than the intraday high, is capped at the starting balance, and never retreats. Intraday spikes do not move it, which makes it noticeably more forgiving than a continuous trailing rule for anyone who gives back profit within the same session.
The same trades, three verdicts
Take a 100,000 account with a 5,000 maximum drawdown. You run the balance up to 106,000 intraday, close that day at 102,000, and later drift down to 99,500.
- Static: the floor is 95,000 the entire time. 99,500 is comfortably above it. Pass.
- Trailing: the peak of 106,000 would put the floor at 101,000, but the breakeven lock caps it at the 100,000 starting balance. 99,500 is below 100,000. Fail.
- End-of-day trailing: the floor ratchets off the 102,000 close, giving 97,000. 99,500 is above it. Pass.
The per-rule breakdown
Below the banner, every rule that applied is listed with its own result and the worst breach quantified, so you can see the size of the problem rather than just its existence. Rules the phase does not define are skipped rather than shown as passes.
- Profit target. Target equals account size multiplied by the target percentage; your actual is final equity minus account size. Missing it produces Incomplete, not Failed.
- Max drawdown. Evaluated against the model above. A breach is a hard Failed.
- Daily drawdown. The limit is a percentage of that day’s starting balance. Depending on the firm, the anchor is either the start of the day, or the higher of the start of day and the intraday peak, which means an intraday run-up before a drop can count against you. A breach is a hard Failed.
- Minimum trading days. Not met produces Incomplete. Firms use this to stop people passing on a single lucky session.
- Maximum trading days. Exceeded is a hard Failed.
- Consistency. Explained below. A breach is a hard Failed.
- Weekend holding. Only evaluated when the firm forbids it. The audit walks each trade from entry to exit looking for Saturday or Sunday. A breach is a hard Failed.
How the consistency rule works
Consistency stops a trader passing on one enormous day. The audit measures it per calendar day, not per trade.
It adds up the profit from your profitable days only, with losing days counted as zero rather than as negatives. It then takes your single best day’s profit and expresses it as a percentage of that total. If that percentage exceeds the firm’s consistency limit, the rule fails.
What good looks like: with a 30 percent limit, your best day has to be no more than 30 percent of your total profitable-day profit, which in practice means you need at least four comparably profitable days before any single one stops dominating. Two rules of the road follow from that. Trading a larger number of normal days beats hunting one outsized day, and if you have already had a monster day early, the fix is to keep trading normally rather than to stop, because more profitable days shrink your best day’s share.
Two edge cases the audit handles explicitly: if you have no profitable days at all the rule passes and reports that it is not engaged, and on an account that finished at or below its starting point the rule auto-passes because there is no profit to distribute.
Data sources and their limits
- A trade journal. The audit reads your 2,000 most recent journal trades, ordered by entry date. If a journal holds more than that, the audit covers the most recent 2,000, so a long history is judged on its recent portion.
- A simulator account. The audit reads the last 200 closed trades from that account. Practice trading is the cleanest way to test a rule set before paying for anything.
- CSV or JSON upload and paste. Columns are mapped automatically where the headings are recognizable, and you can correct the mapping.
Two things that come from the preset rather than from your file: the starting balance is the preset’s account size, not the first balance in your data, and day boundaries are UTC rather than the firm’s local trading day. Firms whose day rolls over at 17:00 New York will bucket your trades differently from this audit. Use Custom Rules to override the account size when you are auditing a different size from the preset you picked.
Save, Export, Saved Audits and Browse Firms
Save stores the completed audit so you can come back to it. Saved Audits is where those runs live, and it is more useful than it looks: the point of the tool is comparison, so keeping the same trade set audited against three different firms, or the same firm audited across three months of your trading, is what turns a verdict into a decision.
Export produces a JSON file containing the rule set, the per-rule results and the equity curve. The Prop Firm Auditor does not export PDF or CSV. If you need a shareable document, export the underlying trades from the Trade Journal instead.
Browse Firms lists the built-in rule sets: 180 challenge presets across 31 firms, searchable by name. The number on the tab is counted from the presets themselves rather than typed in by hand, so it always matches what is actually available to you. Presets model published rules, and published rules change, so confirm the specifics with the firm before you pay.
Not the same as the simulator’s Challenge tab
The Challenge tab inside the Trading Simulator is a different feature with a different job. It tracks a live simulator account against a small set of preset rules while you trade, and it emits its own status words: Failed, Failed (Daily), Passing, Warning and In Progress, where Warning means you are within 80 percent of one of the drawdown limits. Those are progress states for an ongoing practice run. The Prop Firm Auditor’s Passed, Failed and Incomplete are verdicts on a completed history. Do not compare the two directly.
Frequently asked questions
My audit says Incomplete. Did I fail?
No. Incomplete means nothing was breached and the challenge simply is not finished: either the profit target has not been reached or the minimum trading days have not been met. Keep trading and re-run the audit.
Why does the same trade set pass at one firm and fail at another with the same drawdown percentage?
Almost always because of the drawdown type. A continuous trailing floor follows your equity peak up, while a static floor never moves and an end-of-day trailing floor only moves on daily closes. Check that field on both presets before comparing them.
What counts as a trading day?
Any UTC calendar date on which you closed at least one trade. Because the boundary is UTC rather than the firm’s local session, late New York trades can land on the following date.
Are fees included?
Yes. Commissions and fees present in your data are deducted from the equity curve, so the audit works from net figures rather than gross.
Can the audit fail me for news trading or using an automated strategy?
No. Those fields exist in the presets and the custom form but no rule evaluates them, so they never affect the verdict. Confirm them with the firm directly.
Try it yourself
Test a rule set against your own history before you pay a fee.
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CleaRank tools are for education and analysis. Nothing in this guide is financial advice.