How Many Evaluations Should You Run at Once?
3 min read · also published as a field note
This is the first question every would-be farmer asks and the one with the least satisfying honest answer: fewer than you think, and the number comes from your records, not from your ambition.
Start from attempts per pass
If you have run evaluations before, you know — or can reconstruct from your ledger — how many attempts your process needs, on average, to produce one funded account. That number is the exchange rate between fees and seats. It is the only number that matters for this question, and if you don't have it, the honest answer is *one* until you do.
Then fee exposure
Running N evaluations at once means N fees at risk in the same window — and because they copy the same leader, they tend to fail together. A bad week on the leader is a bad week on every evaluation in the tree. So the exposure is not N chances; it is one chance, N times the fee. Size N so that losing every one of them in the same week is a line in the ledger, not an emergency. Breach can't flow uphill is why the evaluations are in their own tree in the first place.
Then the buffer
Evaluations fail more often than they pass, resets cost money, and passes take longer than planned. The buffer is the money set aside so that none of those events shrinks the field. A useful test: if every evaluation currently running failed tomorrow, would the buffer fund the next round without touching income? If not, N is too high.
Then the cap and the calendar
The per-trader cap at each firm bounds N on that firm. The calendar bounds it in time — evaluations bought on the same day fail on the same day, so a farm spreads its seeds. The eval calendar is that discipline.
What this is not
It is not a profit calculation. We deliberately never compute "N evaluations × expected payout," because that number is a fantasy built on a pass rate you haven't measured and a payout you haven't received. The farm is built on fee arithmetic and survival, and grows when the loop turns — not when a spreadsheet says it should.
A shape, not a number
For most people the honest progression is: one evaluation until the process is repeatable; a small handful once attempts-per-pass is a real measurement; more only as landed payouts fund them. The field grows from the harvest. It does not grow from the seed budget, and it never grows from hope.
Kingdom Portfolios is an independent education company. We're not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any prop firm, broker, or platform named here, and we don't use affiliate links. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to join any firm or trade any product. Funded-account evaluations cost real money and most participants never pass or get paid — learn first, and trade your own risk. Rules and fees change often; verify current details on each company's own site. Education only.
Common Questions
Is it cheaper to buy several evaluations at once?
Firms often discount bulk purchases, but a discount on seeds that fail together is not a saving. Price the decision on attempts-per-pass and correlated failure, not on the per-account fee.
Should I run evaluations at more than one firm at the same time?
Eventually a farm spans firms by design, because of caps and rule risk. But mixing firms in one evaluation tree means trading to the strictest rule among them — so the practical answer is one firm per tree until the rules are known cold.