What Happens If I Fail?
Understand the consequences of failing a phase, your options after failure, and how to avoid repeating mistakes.
What It Means
If your account breaches either the 3% daily trailing drawdown or the 7% static max drawdown during any phase, the challenge is failed immediately. The trading platform is restricted, and you cannot continue that challenge. Your challenge fee is non-refundable — you lose the full amount you paid.
Failure can also occur if you violate other rules: trading news events within the restricted window (5 minutes before or after major releases), holding positions over the weekend on a funded account, or engaging in prohibited strategies like copy trading on the funded account.
Why Failure Happens
Understanding why challenges fail is crucial to avoiding it next time. Based on industry data, the most common reasons are:
- Drawdown breach (80%+ of failures): Traders take positions that are too large relative to the 3% daily limit. One bad trade can end the challenge.
- News trading violation: Trading during the 5-minute restriction window before or after major news events, which causes immediate failure.
- Overtrading near the target: Getting impatient at 5.5% profit and taking excessive risk to reach 6%, which backfires.
- Not understanding trailing drawdown: Treating the daily drawdown as a fixed $ amount from the starting balance instead of a trailing amount from the previous day's close.
- Risk management breakdown: Increasing position sizes after a few wins (overconfidence) or after a few losses (revenge trading).
What Happens After Failure
When your challenge is failed, the following occurs:
- Account frozen: The challenge account is locked. You can no longer open new positions or modify existing ones.
- Fee is lost: The challenge fee is non-refundable and cannot be transferred to another challenge.
- No trading on that account: You cannot restart or continue the same challenge. It is permanently closed.
- You can buy a new challenge: There is no cooldown period or restriction on purchasing another challenge. You can buy again immediately.
- No account impact: Failing a challenge does not affect your ability to purchase future challenges or your status with the firm.
Options After Failure
You have several options after a failed challenge:
- Buy the same size again: Try again with the same account size, applying what you learned from the failure.
- Try a smaller size: If you failed on a $50K or $100K challenge, consider a $5K or $10K challenge. The lower fee ($49-$79) reduces financial pressure.
- Take a break: Step away from trading for a few days or weeks. Many failures are caused by emotional trading, and a break helps reset your mindset.
- Review and adapt: Analyze exactly why you failed. Was it position sizing? News trading? Not understanding a rule? Fix the specific issue before retrying.
- Practice on demo: If you failed due to strategy issues, practice on a demo account until you are confident before paying for another challenge.
Discounts and Reset Offers
Albatrix Funded occasionally offers discounts on challenge purchases. If you have an active promo code likeNEW2026 (40% off), you can use it on your next purchase. There is no automatic reset or free retry — each challenge is a separate purchase.
Some prop firms offer a free retry if you fail. Albatrix Funded does not currently offer this, so it is important to be prepared before purchasing. The challenge fee is your at-risk amount for the opportunity to trade funded capital.
Allowed Examples
You fail a $25K challenge because you did not understand the trailing drawdown. You spend a week studying the rule, buy another $25K challenge, and pass both phases.
You learned from the mistake, corrected your understanding, and succeeded on the second attempt. This is the right response to failure.
You fail three $10K challenges in a row. You decide to take a month off, practice on demo with strict drawdown rules, and then try a $5K challenge at a lower fee.
Recognizing a pattern of failure and stepping back to practice is smart. Scaling down the account size reduces financial risk while you rebuild confidence.
Violation Examples
You fail a $50K challenge and immediately buy another $50K challenge without reviewing what went wrong. You fail again in 3 days with the same mistake.
Buying the same challenge repeatedly without fixing the underlying issue wastes money. Analyze the failure first, then retry.
You fail because you traded a news event. The next challenge, you trade the same news event again, believing you got caught in volatility rather than checking the news calendar.
Ignoring the news trading restriction is a preventable rule violation. Check the economic calendar and avoid trading 5 minutes before and after major events.
Common Mistakes After Failing
- Immediately buying another challenge without diagnosing why you failed — this leads to repeated failures and wasted fees.
- Blaming the rules instead of your trading. The rules are clear and published. If you breached them, it is your responsibility to adapt.
- Increasing the account size after a failure (e.g., going from $10K to $100K) because you think "more capital means more room" — it scales proportionally and the pressure increases.
- Not using promo codes like NEW2026 on the next purchase and paying full price unnecessarily.
- Giving up entirely after one failure instead of viewing it as a learning opportunity. Most successful prop firm traders failed multiple challenges before passing.
- Trying to get around the rules by opening a new account with different personal details — account verification prevents this.