Congratulations. On the figures the industry quotes, most people who start an evaluation never get here, and you should absolutely enjoy that for an evening.
Then read this, because the account you just won is the same account you just spent thirty days learning not to lose — minus the one rule that was keeping you patient.
What actually changes
That's the whole diff. The profit target goes away. A payout cycle arrives. Every floor that made the evaluation dangerous is still underneath you, usually with the consistency and news rules attached.
Which means the funded stage is structurally harder than the challenge, not easier. During the evaluation you had a goal that rewarded patience: reach a number, don't breach, take as long as you like within the window. Afterwards you have a goal that rewards reaching — a payout date, a profit split, and a very human urge to make the account justify the month you spent earning it.
The pressure didn't leave. It changed shape, and the new shape points at bigger positions.
The three things that end funded accounts
Sizing up because it's "real now." The single most common one, and the most self-defeating. The account was awarded on the evidence of how you traded during the evaluation. Trading differently the moment you're funded means the thing that earned the account is no longer the thing operating it — and the floors that caught people in week two are all still there in week six.
Trading to a payout date. A fixed cycle creates a deadline, and deadlines convert patience into urgency. The last few sessions before a payout window are where otherwise careful traders take the trade they'd have skipped a fortnight earlier.
Quietly dropping the rules. The sticky note with the floors on it comes down. The trade budget from lesson four stops being written down. Nothing dramatic happens for a week or two, which is precisely what makes it work — the habits decay silently and the account only reports it once.
The unglamorous conclusion
There's no lesson seven. The funded account doesn't require a new skill set, and anybody selling you one for this stage is selling you something.
What it requires is that the boring version of you — the one who wrote down a trade budget, sized to the floor rather than the balance, sat out the flat days, and read the rulebook before paying — keeps showing up after the reward has already arrived. That's genuinely harder than doing it for thirty days with a target in front of you. Most of the discipline in this course was purchased with the pressure of an evaluation, and you've just had that pressure removed while keeping every one of the consequences.
Our own version of this lesson cost us 22.2R and a bot we had to switch off. Yours can cost considerably less, as long as the account being funded doesn't quietly become permission to trade like someone who never read any of this.
The rules were never the obstacle. They were the description of what surviving looks like.
That's the course. The weekly Dossier is where we apply this to real trades every Friday — including the ones that went badly, which is the half most education leaves out.