You can be too small to get paid

Tradeify's payout rule sets a minimum trade size, and a locked account traded below it is worth about $100.

At $25 a trade, a funded Tradeify account almost never dies. It's also worth about $100, because it almost never pays. In my simulator, fewer than 1 in 10 runs at that size reached even one payout in three years of trading days.

The reason is one rule. As of August 2026, a Tradeify 50K Growth funded account needs five qualifying days before each payout, and a qualifying day is a day that makes more than $150. (The balance also has to sit at least +$3,000 above the start, and no single day can be more than 35% of the profit since the last payout.) Re-checked November 7, 2026: all three numbers read the same on Tradeify's payout page, which also caps each request, $1,500 on the first and $3,000 from the fourth; my simulator applies those caps.

$150 sounds easy. It gets hard when I size trades small to keep an account safe.

One win has to clear the bar

Risk is the dollars I lose if my stop gets hit. In my simulator a winning trade pays about 2.4 times the risk on average. Some pay half that and some pay half again more, so a winner lands anywhere from 1.2 to 3.6 times the risk. Every dollar figure in this post comes from my simulator, built on assumed win rates and payoffs (the A++, A and everything-else grades are working assumptions, and winners pay 1.2 to 3.6 times the risk), not from my journal.

At $40 of risk, the best possible winner is $144. No single win, however good, makes a qualifying day.

Below that line, a qualifying day needs two wins in the same session. On a locked account I only take my best setups (A++, more on grades in Being picky is a dial, not a rule). They show up about once every three days, and my model never gives me two in one day.

So the two things that feel safest, small size and a strict filter, work against each other.

What it does to the account's value

The next chart puts that in dollars. It shows what a funded account is worth once it has closed at +$2,100 (the lock, from A prop account isn't one thing), depending on how much I risk per trade.

At $50 a trade, the same account that was worth $100 at $25 is worth about $6,100.

A blown account gets your attention. An account that never pays slips by for months, and at $25 a trade that's the one I'd have.

The size that clears it

On the 50K, three risk levels matter.

How I size a locked account

• "Protect the account" means the smallest size where one average win still makes a qualifying day. It never means the smallest size I can place.
• When I get pickier about setups, I check that my size still clears the bar on one win. If it doesn't, the filter and the size are fighting each other.
• On any other account size, I look up its qualifying day before I trade it and redo this math.

Next: The $100 line that changes everything