A clock on your evaluation doesn’t make you a better trader — it makes you a more impatient one. The best thing a no-time-limit challenge does is remove a reason to take trades you’d otherwise skip.
Why time limits cause overtrading and needless breaches
A dated deadline turns a probability game into a scheduling problem. When you know the target has to be hit by Friday, three things happen, and none of them help:
- You size up to reach the target faster, pushing risk toward the drawdown ceiling.
- You take marginal setups because sitting on your hands feels like falling behind.
- You trade tired or off-plan near the deadline, when the account is most fragile.
Most challenge failures aren’t caused by a bad strategy. They’re caused by a good strategy applied badly under artificial urgency. Remove the deadline and a whole category of self-inflicted breaches disappears, because the only pressure left is the one that belongs there: don’t lose more than the rules allow.
Firms with unlimited-time challenges
Several established firms have moved to evaluations with no expiry, letting you take as long as you need as long as you keep the account within its rules. FTMO and The5ers are the names most associated with relaxed or unlimited timelines, and both have leaned into “pass at your own pace” as a selling point.
Because these terms get revised — a firm can add or drop a time limit with a single policy update — confirm the current evaluation window directly with the firm before you buy. Read the specific account type, not the marketing banner, and check whether “no time limit” applies to the challenge phase, the funded phase, or both.
No time limit vs minimum trading days — not the same thing
This trips up a lot of traders. “No time limit” means there’s no deadline to finish. A minimum trading days rule means you must be active on at least a set number of separate days before you can pass or withdraw. They pull in opposite directions:
- No time limit removes the ceiling — you can take as long as you like.
- Minimum trading days adds a floor — you can’t rush through in a single lucky session.
A firm can have both at once. The combination is actually healthy: it stops you from forcing the target early and stops one outsized day from carrying the whole evaluation. Just don’t read one as implying the other. Check both numbers, and confirm them with the firm.
How a relaxed timeline changes your position sizing
With no clock, the correct position size is almost always smaller than you’d instinctively trade. When there’s no deadline, you don’t need a big win rate on any given week; you need a positive expectancy applied over enough trades. That lets you size to the drawdown instead of to the target.
Work backward from the rules, not from the reward:
- Set per-trade risk so a normal losing streak stays comfortably inside the drawdown.
- Let the target arrive as a byproduct of consistent execution rather than a goal you sprint at.
- Use the prop firm challenge calculator to see how many trades, at your real win rate and R-multiple, it plausibly takes to reach the target. The answer is usually “more than a week, and that’s fine.”
Pace the profit target instead of forcing it in a week
Reframe the target as a distance, not a deadline. If your edge produces, say, a modest positive return per trade on average, then reaching the target is a matter of accumulating enough clean trades — not of any single heroic session. A no-time-limit account is the one environment where you can genuinely trade the way you’d trade your own money: wait for your setups, skip the junk, and stop when the day’s over.
This is also where honest record-keeping pays off. A tool like Shibiki auto-journals every trade as you place it, so across a long, unhurried evaluation you build a real sample instead of a vague memory of “I think I’m up.” Because there’s no clock, you have the luxury of letting that sample grow before drawing conclusions.
Let your edge play out over enough trades to be statistically real
The deepest reason no-time-limit challenges raise pass rates is statistical. A positive edge is only reliable over a sample large enough to trust; on ten trades, variance dominates and even a great strategy can look like a losing one. A deadline forces you to bet the account on a small sample. No deadline lets the expectancy of your system express itself over dozens of trades, where the math actually works in your favor.
Shibiki leans directly into this idea: it tracks live edge health per strategy with a Wilson confidence interval, so you’re not fooled by a hot ten-trade start or spooked by a cold one. You can see when your sample is genuinely large enough for the numbers to mean something — which, on a no-time-limit account, is exactly the patience the rules are rewarding you for.
Confirm the current terms with the firm, size to the drawdown, and let the edge do the slow work the clock used to interrupt.
Related: FTMO · The5ers · What trading expectancy really means