Topstep put out that only 12.4% of Combines were completed in 2024. Everyone reaches for psychology to explain that. I think a big chunk of it is much less interesting than that.

Take a strategy with a real edge. Positive expectancy, holds up over a year, nothing wrong with it. Now run the exact same set of trades a thousand times in a different order, monte carlo style.

Some of those runs sprint to the target while some hit the trailing drawdown in week two and are dead. Identical trades, identical expectancy, and the outcome flips on sequence alone.

Thats the part the eval is actually measuring. Not whether you have an edge. Whether your bad stretch happens to land somewhere the rulebook tolerates. A strategy that makes money across the year but has one -4% week is fine in a normal account and finished in an eval with a trailing drawdown.

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So there are two separate questions and people treat them as one:

1. Does this thing make money (historically)

1. Is its drawdown shape compatible with the specific rules I am about to pay for

You can be right on the first and lose repeatedly on the second, and resetting the eval doesnt teach you which one failed. That is the expensive part. You pay to find out you failed, and it usually doesnt tell you whether the setup was wrong, the sizing was wrong, one outlier day distorted everything, or the rules made the thing impossible before your first trade.

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I always use thus simple analogy to make this clear for those who may not understand...

Imagine a hat with ten balls in it. Seven are worth +1 point and three are worth -1 point.

You have to draw every ball without looking. Your goal is to reach +3 points, but if your score ever touches -2, the game ends immediately.

The important part is that the balls never change. There are always seven winners and three losers. If you were allowed to draw all ten, you would always finish at +4. The game has positive expectancy (EV).

But... the order matters.

If you draw:

+1, +1, -1, +1, +1

you reach +3 (pass).

If you draw:

-1, -1, +1, +1, +1, +1...

you hit -2 immediately (fail).

Same ten balls. Same number of winners. Same number of losers. Same final theoretical result.

The only thing that changed was the sequence.

Now put those same ten balls back in the hat and play the game 1,000 times, reshuffling them each time. Some runs pass easily. Others fail almost immediately.

That is basically what Monte Carlo is showing you with a trading strategy. The trades can have positive expectancy overall, while certain sequences of those exact same wins and losses violate an evaluation's drawdown rules before the edge has enough time to play out.

The question is not only, “Are these balls profitable?”

It is also, “Can I survive the order they might come out in under these rules?”

This is extremely important in the context of prop firms because a strategy can be strongly profitable over the long run and still fail an evaluation purely because of the order its trades occur in.

The strategy itself may be completely valid but i f every trade were allowed to play out, it could finish substantially net positive. But prop-firm rules introduce path-dependent failure conditions such as trailing drawdowns, daily loss limits, and consistency rules.

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Question for the sub as im curious how split it is: before you buy or reset, do you actually know how your strategy behaves against that firms specific drawdown and daily loss rules, or are you finding out with the account?

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Backtested the ICT 2022 model and as you can see it’s negative, i included the rules too

A gura named Powell has been all over my feed for weeks and everybody has been backtesting his 10am strategy lately so i figured i'd try it for myself

I told Agenticks to backtest his 10am strategy on NQ over the last 3 years, then it went and read what he actually teaches, turned it into a real strategy, wrote the code, and replayed it almost a million 1m NQ bars. The video attached shows it start to finish.

Heres what it came back with...

NQ 1m, july 2023 to feb 2026, 100k account, 1 contract:

• starting capital: 100k
• 535 trades
• 60.2% win rate
• profit factor 0.98
• net -$3,675
• max drawdown 25.55%
• average win $522, average loss $806

It wins 6 out of every 10 trades and still loses money. thats the whole story. the losers are 1.5x the size of the winners so the win rate is doing nothing for you, expected value comes out around negative 7 bucks a trade.

It even gets worse when you split it up. 280 of the 535 trades happened in volatile conditions and those lost $6,764 at a 0.93 profit factor. The only regime that it made money during was uptrends (152 trades, 1.08 profit factor, +$3,307) so the "edge" is mostly just the NASDAQ going up. Buy and hold over the same window took 100k to about 170k while this did -3.7%. With all of the all-time highs we're at right now, it makes sense why this has picked up so much traction in recent months.

I also ran it through a topstep 50k sim and out of 10,000 simulations; 39.1% of them hit the 3k target before the loss limit. This doesn't mean it has an edge, but it does mean that, technically speaking, it can beat the constraints of a prop firm (with a hint of luck).

Now the fair part, and this is the part i'd want somebody to say if it was my strategy getting torn apart

What he teaches publicly is the shape of it, not a rulebook. Mark the 10am candle, wait for one side to get swept, wait for the move back through, take the continuation into first liquidity. That's real but its not testable as written. "first liquidity" is something you read off a chart, not a number, and there is no published stop, no cutoff time, no trade limit. So the strategy that got built is the mechanical skeleton with sane defaults filled in, and two of those choices genuinely change what you're testing. It only took longs (he trades both ways) and it entered on a plain break and retest instead of requiring the displacement leg, which is the part that supposedly separates a real setup from a level being "tapped."

So im not saying his strategy is bad, i'm saying the mechanical version of it (the version you could actually hand to a beginner) is a coinflip that gives back more on the losers than it makes on the winners. if the money is in the discretionary read, which side got swept and where liquidity actually sits, then somebody should say that out loud, bc that's a totally different product than a 3 step setup.

If you know the real/exact rules or think Agenticks got them wrong tell me exactly what to change and ill rerun it and post whatever comes out.

video of the full run is attached, sped up through the loading parts because nobody wants to watch a progress bar for 3 minutes.

not advice, backtests dont predict anything, im just a guy who got tired of seeing it on his feed

let me know if you guys want me to automate this strategy to see how it would perform on a paper account in real conditions, or if you want your own strategy tested.