Risk guard for funded account traders
You didn't fail because you were wrong.
Around four out of five blown evaluations have nothing to do with picking the wrong direction. They end on a size that was too big, a stop with nowhere to go, or one more trade after a bad morning. Upwick checks a trade against your actual limits before you take it — and tells you no when the arithmetic says no.
Free. No account. Nothing leaves your browser.
The actual causes
Almost nobody fails on strategy.
Published pass rates sit around 5–10%, and traders spend $200–600 reaching a funded account. Here's what actually ends those attempts.
Daily loss limit breached
Usually revenge trading after a loss — bigger size, less patience, minutes apart.
Upwick refuses these outrightTrailing drawdown violated
Traders confuse static and trailing rules. On a trailing account, profit raises the level that kills you.
Upwick shows the floor movingConsistency rule broken
One outsized day exceeds the cap, and the whole evaluation is void even in profit.
Upwick caps the sizeRan out of time
The only one on this list that is genuinely about the market.
Not much anyone can doAdd the first three together and roughly 80% of failures are arithmetic, not analysis. Arithmetic is preventable.
What it checks
Four ways a trade is doomed before you take it.
None of these require knowing where price is going. Every one is decidable from numbers you already have.
The fees exceed the target
A stop 0.1% away against a 0.5% round trip is a guaranteed loser. It doesn't matter how good the setup looks — the trade has to travel further than it's aiming just to break even.
The stop sits inside normal noise
Compared against live volatility. Under 0.75× ATR and you'll be taken
out by ordinary movement rather than by being wrong. That's not a bad call, it's a
badly placed one.
The size can't survive being wrong
Measured against what's left before your daily limit and your drawdown floor, whichever bites first. If one loss ends the evaluation, you're told the size that doesn't.
The reward doesn't cover the risk
A target closer than the stop needs a win rate almost nobody has. Reward-to-risk under 1 loses money over any real number of trades.
The difference
Your open position counts. Most tools ignore it.
Closed trades only
A drawdown calculator works off your realised balance. A journal tells you what went wrong last week. Both leave the same hole: a position that's currently down can breach your daily limit while every tool you own still shows you in the clear.
Realised plus open
Every number here counts the trade you're still in. If your open long is 900 down, that 900 is already spent against your limit — so it's already subtracted before you're told what you can risk next.
What it learns
Everyone has one habit that keeps ending it.
Connect your history and Upwick runs statistical tests across your own trades to find the pattern costing you most. Not generic advice — your specific one, with the number attached.
You size up after losses
119 trades opened within 30 minutes of a loss, at 2.2× your calm size, averaged −0.51R — against +0.15R for everything else. That's 0.66R lost per trade, every time.
You move your stops
30 of 99 losing trades lost more than 1.4R, averaging −1.89R. A stop that holds cannot do that. Moving stops is the most common way an evaluation ends.
Your busy days lose money
Days with 5+ trades averaged −1.80R. Quieter days averaged +0.40R. Trading more is costing you 2.2R a day.
It stays quiet unless the evidence is real. Every pattern has to clear a significance test before you're told about it — not just look bad. Tested against twenty disciplined traders it reported nothing at all, which is the whole point. A tool that finds a problem in everyone is a horoscope.
What it won't do
It will never tell you what price is about to do.
We tested that first, and it didn't work. Ten entry strategies, five years of data, both BTC and ETH. Nine were statistically indistinguishable from picking bars at random. The one that survived out-of-sample testing was too weak to cover retail trading fees.
So Upwick doesn't sell predictions. Every number it shows is arithmetic on your own account — your limits, your fees, your volatility, your size. Those stay true no matter what the market does.
It can't make you profitable. If your strategy loses money, this makes you lose it more slowly and with fewer blown evaluations. That's the honest claim, and it's the one we can actually stand behind.
Every finding was scored against 200 random-entry runs before being believed. Most things that look like an edge don't survive that.
Check a trade before you take it.
Enter your firm, your balance, and the trade you're considering. Takes about thirty seconds and runs entirely in your browser.
What it costs
One saved attempt pays for a year.
Traders spend $200–600 reaching a funded account, and most of that goes on attempts that ended on a rule breach rather than a bad market read. Stopping one of those is the entire value here.
The check — when you remember to run it.
- Pre-trade check against your firm's rules
- Position sizing from your real buffer
- Fee and volatility arithmetic
- Trade log, and the name of the habit costing you
- One account, entered by hand
The catch, honestly
Free only helps you when you open it. Tilted, three trades deep and angry about a loss, nobody opens a calculator — and that is the moment accounts actually die. Free will name your habit. It will not stand in the doorway.
Open the guardThe one that catches you when you don't.
Working now
- The habit that's costing you, with the numbers. Reads your own trade history: “10 trades opened within 30 minutes of a loss, at 3× your calm size, averaged −1.35R against −0.20R for everything else.” Five checks, each needing real evidence before it says a word.
- A cooldown you have to argue with. When the conditions that precede your worst trades are live, the verdict goes to LOCKED even if the arithmetic is perfect. You can override — but against the number it has cost you, and it gets recorded.
- Every account at once. Two challenges, or a funded account and an evaluation, tracked together.
- What it caught. Counted, not claimed — how many trades it refused and what they were about to risk.
Being built
- An alert before you breach, sent the moment it's true — not when you think to check.
- Your numbers without typing them, pulled from the account itself.
- “At this pace you fail on day 9.” Breach forecast from your real sizing, not a snapshot.
The maths, plainly. A $100K evaluation costs somewhere around $300 to attempt, and roughly 9 in 10 people fail — most of them on a rule, not a read. A year of Pro costs about the same as one attempt. It only has to stop one breach to have paid for itself. And the difference that matters isn't the feature list — it's that nobody tilted, three trades deep and angry, opens a calculator. That's the moment accounts die, and it's the moment Pro is watching and Free isn't.
Questions
The things people actually ask.
Does this place trades for me?
No. It has no connection to your broker, no API keys, and no ability to move your money. You enter a trade you're considering and it tells you whether the numbers work. What you do next is yours.
Which firms does it support?
FTMO, FundedNext, The5%ers, Topstep and Apex have presets, plus a custom option for anything else. Rules vary by plan, account size and region, and firms change them — check the presets against your own dashboard before relying on them.
Where does my data go?
Nowhere. Everything runs in your browser and your inputs are saved locally on your own device. There's no account and no server holding your balances.
Will it help me pass?
It removes one category of failure — the arithmetic one, which is roughly 80% of them. It cannot help with the other 20%, and it can't fix a strategy that doesn't work. Anyone promising more than that is guessing.
Why should I trust the numbers?
Because you can check every one of them. Stop distance, fee cost, break-even move, reward-to-risk, room before your limit — it's all shown, not hidden behind a score. If a number looks wrong, work it out yourself and tell us.
What does it cost?
The check is free and stays free. Pro is $29/month after 7 days free — alerts before you breach, automatic account tracking, cooldown enforcement, and analysis of your own failure patterns. A year of Pro costs about what one evaluation attempt does.
Read this part
Upwick is a risk calculation tool, not financial advice. It does not predict prices, recommend trades, or promise outcomes. Every decision to place, size or close a trade is yours, and so is every result.
Firm rules are supplied as a starting point. They vary by plan, account size and region, and firms change them without notice. Always confirm against your own account dashboard. We are not affiliated with any prop firm.
Trading carries real risk of losing money, including all of it. Leverage increases that risk. Passing an evaluation is not guaranteed by any tool, including this one. Never trade money you cannot afford to lose.