Resetting an Evaluation: The Math of a Reset vs a New Account, and When It's Tilt
Every breach ends on the same screen: a reset button and a price. The decision has two parts and traders usually get the order wrong. First the arithmetic, which ignores how close you were; then the diagnosis, which decides whether you should be buying anything today at all.
The dashboard is honest about it. The account is breached, the button says Reset, and next to the button is a number. Everything a prop firm reset is comes down to that number and to the state you are in when you read it. The evaluation itself is covered in the pillar; this is about the moment after it ends.
A reset is a purchase that returns the evaluation account to day one: starting balance, original drawdown floor, trading-day count at zero, trade history wiped. Same account number, same platform login. It exists only for evaluations. A breached funded account cannot be reset at any firm I know of; it is replaced by a new evaluation, which is one reason the drawdown on the funded side deserves more respect than the one on the test.
Three things about resets are easy to get wrong, and the first one is the one traders feel most strongly about.
Progress is not a variable
A reset and a new account both start from zero. Whether the old account breached at 8% of the target or at 80% changes nothing about what either restart costs or where it begins. The profit that was on the screen yesterday is gone on both routes. Being close is an argument about the strategy, and a real one; it is not an argument about which button to press.
That leaves one comparison: the fixed reset fee in the dashboard against the price you would actually pay for a new account, promotions included. Whichever is lower wins. When they are within a few percent of each other, the new account's fresh timeline breaks the tie, because a reset has to be bought within a window: at Lucid, at the time of writing, a breached evaluation is deleted after 30 days if it has not been reset.
The arithmetic
Lucid's prices for its Flex evaluation, list versus reset, as shown on lucidtrading.com in September 2026:
| LucidFlex size | New account, list | Reset | Reset as share of list |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25K | $89 | $50 | 56% |
| 50K | $146 | $90 | 62% |
| 100K | $293 | $170 | 58% |
At list price the reset wins at every size, costing between 56% and 62% of a new account. The complication is that Lucid runs discount codes on new accounts more or less permanently and not on resets. With a 30% code the new Flex 50K is $102.20 against the $90 reset and the reset still wins; with 40% it is $87.60, a tie; with 50% the reset loses. So the rule that survives is not "reset is cheaper" but "check the checkout total against the reset fee, every time".
The second piece of arithmetic is the one that matters over a year. If your pass rate on a given evaluation is p, the expected cost of reaching a funded account is the first purchase plus (1 ÷ p − 1) restarts at whatever the cheaper restart costs. At a 33% pass rate on a Flex 50K that is $146 + 2 × $90 = $326; at 20% it is $506. The restart price is a small lever. The pass rate is the big one, and the reset button does nothing to it.
Other firms price the same decision differently. Topstep charges by account size and path ($49 to $229 at the time of writing), banks a reset credit with each monthly rebill, and lets a promo code apply to a reset as well as to a new Combine. Apex's current evaluation plans have no resets at all: a one-time fee buys 30 calendar days of access, and a breach or an expired clock both mean buying a new evaluation, with no balance carried over. Instant-funded accounts such as LucidDirect have no evaluation to restart, so a breach there is a full-price replacement. Read the firm's own fee page before you count on any of these.
When the button is tilt
Tilt, in Jared Tendler's sense, is anger or frustration driving decisions the calm version of you would not make. A reset is a decision, and it is the one most often made on tilt, because it is available within seconds of the breach and it feels like undoing. The review of The Mental Game of Trading covers the framework; these are the signs as they show up on this specific screen.
- The reset happens inside the hour. The breach was at 10:40 and the new account is live at 10:55. Nothing about the strategy was reviewed in those fifteen minutes.
- The first trade on the new account is larger. Sizing up to "get it back" turns a $90 reset into a second breach by lunch.
- The cause has not been written down. If you cannot state in one sentence what ended the account, the reset is buying a second attempt at the same mistake.
- It is the third reset with the same tag. One breach is variance, two can be, three with the same error tag in the journal is a pattern, and a pattern needs a change of rules, not a change of account.
- The promotion is doing the deciding. "40% off today only" is a reason to buy an account you had already decided to buy. It is not a reason to decide.
- You are trading outside your plan window to "use" the new account. A reset bought at 15:00 CEST that gets its first trade at 15:35 in a session you never trade is not a restart, it is a way to keep playing.
The fix for all six is the same and it is boring: wait until the next day, write the cause in one sentence, and change one concrete thing before the account goes live again. A stop that is now placed by the setup instead of by the dollar amount. A hard daily limit set in the platform. One session instead of two. If nothing changes between the breach and the reset, the price of the reset is the price of finding out again.
What the decision looks like written down
Reset or new account is a two-line calculation: the checkout total against the dashboard fee, cheaper one wins, ties go to the fresh timeline. Reset or not today is a different question, answered by whether you can name the cause and the change. The first question takes two minutes and should be done with a calculator. The second takes a night, and the button will still be there in the morning.
I have never bought a reset and never breached an evaluation, and the reason is not talent but temperament: I trade conservatively, with a stop set by the setup and a size set by the drawdown, inside one window, and I stop when the day's plan is done. That is also why I take the tilt list seriously. The people I have watched lose an account twice in a week were not worse traders than me; they were pressing the button in a state I try never to trade from. The two rules above, no restart on the day the account ends and a journal entry before the purchase, are the ones I would set for myself if the button ever became relevant.