TL;DR: In our Propr backtests, Fast plans pass about 60% of starts with a median of roughly 20 days, while Conservative plans pass 90–100% with medians of 193–222 days. The slow numbers look better and are the least trustworthy: they rest on short histories and were chosen in-sample. Plan on 40–55% for the slow tier, about 25–34% for typical picks, and decide using cost per pass and time, not the headline rate.
What is the speed vs pass rate trade-off?
A prop challenge is a race between two barriers: the profit target above and the loss limits below. Position size sets how fast you move toward both. Trade large and you reach one of them quickly. Trade small and you wander for longer before touching either.
What size does not change, if you have no edge, is which barrier you are likely to hit first. With a random walk, the chance of hitting the target first is drawdown ÷ (target + drawdown), regardless of size: about 37.5% on a Propr Classic 1-Step. This is the gambler's ruin result. Size only changes how long it takes. Size starts to change the odds when the strategy has an edge, because small size lets a real edge accumulate before noise ends the attempt. It also changes them when a second barrier comes into play: at large sizes, the 3% daily limit starts ending attempts that the total drawdown would have survived. Our odds math post covers the derivation.
So the trade-off has three sides: speed, odds and how much you can trust the odds.
What do our plans show?
Trigr's house plans on Discover › Propr come in three tiers per challenge. Each was backtested by starting a fresh challenge on every UTC day since 2023-07-24 (2024-04-02 for Conservative), up to 365 days each, under Propr's exact rules.
| Challenge | Fast: pass / median days | Balanced: pass / median days | Conservative: pass / median days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classic 1-Step | 60% / 20 | 87% / 53 | 100% / 193 |
| Turbo 1-Step | 59% / 19 | 73% / 44 | 90% / 222 |
| Pro 1-Step | 58% / 18 | 76% / 44 | 93% / 210 |
| Classic 2-Step | 63% / 20 | 87% / 49 | 100% / 193 |
The tiers differ mainly in size and number of strategies. Fast plans mix three or four strategies (4-hour return-direction on PEPE and WLD, an ETH volatility breakout, AVAX intraday momentum) at 1.4–2x their recipe size. Balanced plans run one or two strategies at 0.5–1x. Conservative plans run an ENA swing-momentum strategy and an OP volatility-breakout strategy at 0.7–1x.
How the Fast plans fail tells you what speed costs. On the Classic 1-Step, 36% of Fast starts failed on the daily loss limit and only 4% on drawdown. Moving to Balanced cut daily-loss failures to 2%. Larger size does not just move you faster; it exposes you to the daily limit, a barrier the slow tiers almost never touch. The daily loss limit post explains why.
Why are the slow tiers' numbers the least trustworthy?
It is tempting to read the Conservative column and conclude that patience solves challenges. Three things argue against that.
Short histories. The Conservative plans' strategies have shorter records, so their backtests start on 2024-04-02: 545 daily starts against 798 for the others. They only have results for 2024 and 2025 start years.
Few independent windows. A start that takes around 193 days to pass shares almost all of its path with the starts around it. Divide 545 days of starts by a 193-day median and you get fewer than three non-overlapping windows of that length. A 100% pass rate measured on three or so independent paths is a thin result, and the block-bootstrap intervals in our tables, while they try to account for overlap, still understate the uncertainty.
In-sample selection. All of these plans were chosen with 2025 data visible. Picking the best of many candidates on the same data you then score them on builds luck into the result, as covered in selection bias in backtests.
The fast tiers suffer from the same selection problem, but each of their attempts resolves in about three weeks, so their 798 starts contain many more independent outcomes.
What should you plan for instead?
Our team ran an out-of-sample study in September 2026: candidates picked only on 2020–2023 starts, scored on 2025–26 starts.
| Setting | Out-of-sample pass rate |
|---|---|
| Typical picks, 180-day window | about 25–34% (median ~30%), even when the backtest said 40–80% |
| One-year window, small size, two bands passing in about 2–5 weeks | ~34% and ~45% |
| One-year window, small size, passing in 5–12 weeks | ~54% |
Two things stand out. Out of sample, slower and smaller did better up to the 5–12 week band (about 54%), but the slowest picks fell back to about 42%, with a wide range. But the gap between tiers was far narrower than in-sample suggests. A realistic planning figure for the slowest, smallest-size tier is 40–55%, not 90–100%. The out-of-sample testing guide explains why this kind of split is the only honest way to read a backtest.
What about the lottery options?
At the other extreme are attempts built to finish in a day or two. Two held up out of sample, at low rates:
- About 7% pass in under a day, from aggressive sizing on a SOL breakout strategy.
- About 22–25% pass in 1–2 days, from a daily SMA50 trend on BTC and ETH at high size.
These are honest long shots. Paired with a cheap challenge they can make economic sense: on a $10k Turbo 1-Step ($50 fee), our planning estimate is about $200–220 per pass at roughly 23–25% odds, against about $390 per pass for a $10k Classic 1-Step. The cost is variance. You might buy several attempts before one passes, and each failure arrives quickly.
How do fee, time and odds combine?
A useful way to frame the choice is cost per pass and time per pass.
- Cost per pass is the fee divided by your planning pass rate. A low fee and a low pass rate can beat a high fee and a high pass rate.
- Time per pass is how long each attempt runs, multiplied by how many attempts you expect. A Conservative plan with a median near 200 days might take most of a year for a single attempt, and if it fails late you have lost the time as well as the fee.
- What happens after the pass. Funded accounts keep the same loss limits. A fast plan's aggressive sizing that squeaked through the challenge is likely to keep running into the daily limit on a funded account. A strategy with no edge keeps gambling after it passes.
There is no universally right answer. A trader who values a quick verdict and has a cheap challenge available may rationally choose a long shot. A trader with a strategy that has a demonstrated, out-of-sample edge should usually size small and give it time, because that is when patience raises the odds.
How Trigr fits in
On Trigr you can compare all three tiers for every Propr challenge on Discover › Propr, each with its backtest pass rate, start-year range, days to pass, failure breakdown and live record. Forward challenges started on 2026-09-30; as of 2026-10-05 each plan has 6 running and none has breached or finished. If you build your own strategy, the rules check replays it from every start day and Optimize sizing can shrink it to fit with a 0.5% buffer; the position sizing guide shows how to pick a size deliberately. Read Propr's rules for your account first. Whichever speed you choose, these are historical estimates, not promises.