Funding evaluations are priced to be retried, not passed. The firm's revenue model depends on repeat attempts — which means the incentive on their side is to sell you a shortcut, not a skill. Passing once proves you survived one variance draw. It doesn't prove you have a repeatable edge, and it's why so many traders pass an eval and then never see a payout: the eval and the job of trading for 30 days straight are not the same test. Protocol doesn't skip that gap — it's built around it, and it's included in the Protocol Pass plan at no extra cost. Before you spend a dollar on a funding firm's evaluation, you trade monitored inside Sierra Chart's Trading Evaluator, in simulation, within the Protocol framework, on a rolling 30 trading day basis. It's not a single 30-day exam you either pass or fail once — drawdowns and inconsistent returns are normal while you're still internalizing the framework, so the window rolls forward with you until your most recent 30 trading days hold up on their own. You're not left to interpret your own results. The period opens with an initial goal-setting session to define what "solidified" looks like for your specific edge, followed by regular feedback on your logged trades against the gamma framework — so you can see, with a second set of eyes, whether your edge is actually converging or just having a good stretch, rather than guessing alone. Once it holds up on a rolling basis, it's a process. Until then, you're refining it on sim — which is exactly what an eval fee doesn't let you do.