Max Profit Per Event, explained
One rule decides who finishes an evaluation and who does not. It caps each event at half a percent of account size, and it aggregates across every market inside that event.
Most people reading an evaluation rulebook stop at the drawdown numbers. They are the ones that end runs, so they get the attention.
The rule that decides whether you finish is a different one, and it is quieter.
The rule
Max Profit Per Event is half a percent of account size. That is the most a single event can contribute to your result, regardless of how right you were or how much you committed.
| Account | Equity Growth Target | Ceiling per event |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $500 | $25 |
| 10,000 | $1,000 | $50 |
| 25,000 | $2,500 | $125 |
| 50,000 | $5,000 | $250 |
| 100,000 | $10,000 | $500 |
Divide one column by the other and you get the number that actually governs your evaluation: twenty.
Twenty is a floor, not an estimate
Twenty events, every one of them resolving in your favour, every one of them taken to the full ceiling, inside thirty days. That is the arithmetic minimum. It assumes a hit rate of 100 percent.
Nobody has a hit rate of 100 percent. Working backwards from realistic ones, with entries around the middle of the price range:
| Hit rate | Events needed |
|---|---|
| 70% | roughly 50 |
| 60% | roughly 100 |
| 55% | roughly 200 |
| 50% | not reachable |
That last row is not rhetorical. At an even hit rate with symmetric sizing, the capped winners cannot outrun the uncapped losers. The ceiling applies to gains. It does not apply to losses.
This is the single most important thing to understand before starting, and it is why you should be suspicious of anyone describing this kind of evaluation as quick.
It aggregates across the event, not the market
Here is the part that surprises people, and it is worth being precise about because it changes strategy.
An “event” is not a single contract. A presidential election is one event containing a separate market for each candidate. The ceiling applies to the event, summed across every position you hold inside it.
You can watch this happen. An order submitted into a multi-candidate election was rejected with the platform reporting potential event profit of $1,448.16 against a $250 limit. The new order on its own carried $1,362.98 of potential profit. An already-open position on a different candidate in the same election carried $85.19. Added together: $1,448.17.
Two different markets, one event, one shared ceiling.
So the obvious workaround — spread across several candidates to multiply the capped upside — does not exist. The twenty-event floor is real and it cannot be engineered around by splitting positions within an event.
Enforcement happens at submission
The check runs when you click, not while you are building the order. You can construct a position well over the ceiling, watch the ticket display a large settlement figure, and get a rejection only once you commit.
Nothing warns you on the way in. Until that changes, the discipline has to come from you: work out your ceiling before you size, not after you are refused.
The calculation is not hard. At entry price p, the outlay that produces exactly your ceiling C is:
outlay = C × p ÷ (1 − p)
On a 50,000 account at 40 cents: 250 × 0.4 ÷ 0.6 = $166.67. Anything above
that is capital committed to profit you are not permitted to keep — and it is
capital fully exposed to the loss if the contract resolves against you.
That asymmetry is the whole point. Oversizing a capped event does not increase your upside. It only increases your downside.
What this means in practice
Three things follow, and they are not the conventional advice.
Event count is the resource, not capital. You are not trying to make a lot from a few good positions. You are trying to find a large number of separately resolving events where you have a defensible edge, and to take the ceiling from as many as possible.
Resolution speed matters as much as accuracy. An event resolving in three days and an event resolving in fifty contribute the same maximum. Within a thirty-day window, the slow one is worth far less. Eligible markets have to resolve within sixty days; inside an evaluation, much sooner is better.
Sizing above the ceiling is a pure error. Not a judgement call. There is no version of the position where the extra exposure can pay you.
Understanding this rule properly is most of what separates people who finish from people who do not — and it is why the extended evaluation window is a genuine change in difficulty rather than a marketing add-on.
Evaluations are conducted on simulated accounts. Not financial advice.