A Prop Firm Challenge Returns: Beat the Beast After Dark

• Beat the Beast: After Dark ran a second time on August 19, 2026, from 6 PM to 6 AM Eastern, ETF's overnight evaluation challenge built for international traders and U.S. night owls.
• This run opened eligibility wider than July's After Dark: Diamond Hands and 1-Step evaluations qualified alongside EOD and Static, the only two plan types the July edition allowed.
• 64% of traders who entered walked away with at least one funded account, the honest number once you count traders instead of accounts (some winners hold more than one qualifying account).
• 63% of winners stopped within $100 of the $1,000 target: hit the number, and walk, exactly the behavior a hard-target format is designed to produce.
• An auto-pass still isn't the finish line. Winning accounts have 48 hours to activate into Elite Sim-Funded or the pass reverts and standard evaluation requirements kick back in.

Secure $1,000 in realized profit within the time window and your evaluation gets an automatic pass, no extra submission, no waiting on a review queue. Beat the Beast: After Dark is the overnight, international edition of ETF's prop firm challenge, built for traders chasing uncapped Live Elite payouts. After Dark exists for the traders New York hours miss: international traders active while Asia and London are open, and U.S.-based night owls whose best hours line up with those sessions instead.

We ran an After Dark edition back in July on a 9 PM to 10 AM Eastern clock; this run kept the same overnight format at 6 PM to 6 AM Eastern instead, and opened the door to more traders than that July run did. The idea behind every Beat the Beast is the same regardless of the hours: a straight evaluation grind over days or weeks isn't the only way to prove you can trade. Sometimes the fastest test is the most honest one. Land the number inside the window, or you don't, and there's nowhere to hide the attempt either way.

We've run Beat the Beast many times. One day-session edition and an After Dark run are covered on the blog, both from July; this run builds on the same idea. Each run has changed something, hours, eligible plan types, or both, while keeping the one part that actually matters fixed: hit the target inside the window, and the evaluation is done.

Three things had to line up for an account to qualify.

1. A new eligible evaluation, purchased with code GLOBEX. Diamond Hands, End of Day, 1-Step, and Static evaluations all qualified this run, purchased and traded inside the window. Code GLOBEX carried a cascading discount: 90% off month one, 80% off month two, and 70% off month three and every month after, for the life of the subscription. Fast Track and DTF were not part of this challenge.
2. $1,000 or more in realized profit, earned inside the window. Same standard as every Beat the Beast: realized, not floating, and banked specifically between 6 PM Eastern on August 19 and 6 AM Eastern on August 20. The rule people miss most often: trading outside that window doesn't just fail to count, it disqualifies the account from the challenge entirely, regardless of what happened during the window itself or how much profit the account made overall.
3. No submission required. If an account met the requirement, it was marked passed automatically after market close on the trading day the window fell within. No form, no ticket needed.

The 48-hour catch carries over unchanged: an account marked passed from Beat the Beast has to be activated into Elite Sim-Funded within 48 hours, or the status reverts to Active and the auto-pass voids, standard evaluation requirements back in force.

July's After Dark drew a line at plan type: EOD or Static, nothing else, 1-Step specifically excluded. That made sense for a run built around plans whose drawdown mechanics traders could reason about clearly overnight. This run erased that line for two more plan types, and each one brings a different approach to the same overnight target.

• End of Day measures drawdown against your balance at the close of each trading day rather than intraday, giving overnight positions more room to breathe through normal after-hours moves.
• Static Drawdown locks your drawdown floor at a fixed dollar level from day one, no trailing calculation to track while you're watching the Asia open.
• Diamond Hands is built for traders who hold positions longer, structured around swing-style trades rather than same-session scalps. See how the Diamond Hands plan works on the help center.
• 1-Step is ETF's single-phase evaluation, one target, one set of rules, no second phase to clear before funding.

Diamond Hands and 1-Step both got the same shot at the same $1,000 target this run, trading the same window as EOD and Static. That's not a small tweak. It means a trader whose whole strategy is built around a 1-Step account, one who might have sat out July's run entirely, had a real overnight path to an auto-pass this time. Four plan types, one clock, one number to clear.

The window itself shifted slightly too: 6 PM to 6 AM Eastern this time, a clean 12-hour overnight block, instead of July's 9 PM to 10 AM stretch. Same idea, same overnight discipline test, a different slice of the night.

It's worth being clear about what Beat the Beast replaces, because it isn't a different set of trading rules, it's a different clock. A standard ETF evaluation gives you no time limit and a minimum number of trading days to demonstrate consistency alongside your profit target. That format rewards patience: you can take a red day, regroup, and come back at it next week without the challenge itself working against you.

Beat the Beast compresses all of that into a single window. The profit target doesn't change, and the account's underlying drawdown rules don't change either, only the clock does. You either land the number inside the window or the challenge ends without it, and the account reverts to trading under its standard evaluation rules from there. Nothing is lost by trying: an account that doesn't hit the target during the window simply continues as a normal evaluation, chasing the same target on the standard timeline it would have had anyway.

That's why the format keeps coming back. It gives traders who already know their setup a fast, no-cost shot at skipping the wait, without changing the underlying bar they have to clear either way.

Think of it this way: two traders buy the same 50K EOD evaluation on the same day. One buys it Tuesday afternoon and trades on the standard timeline, taking whatever number of sessions it takes to hit the target while meeting the minimum trading days along the way. The other buys it Tuesday evening, inside the After Dark window, and hits $1,000 in realized profit before sunrise Wednesday. Both traders clear the exact same profit target under the exact same drawdown rules. One just did it in a single overnight session instead of spread across however many days it would otherwise take. Beat the Beast doesn't lower the bar. It changes how much time you're given to clear it, and only for the traders who choose to take that shot.

Here's what happened across everyone who stepped into the arena, based on the traders and accounts that actually took part, not a number computed after the fact from whoever happened to still be active by the time results were tallied.

• 64% of participating traders walked away funded. That's the number that matters most: some winners hold more than one qualifying account, so counting accounts instead of traders overstates how many people actually won.
• 63% of winners stopped within $100 of the $1,000 target. Hit the number, and walk. That's the format working exactly as designed: a hard target rewards traders who know when they're done, not traders who keep pushing size after they've already cleared the bar.
• 45% of every account ever purchased for this run passed. Counted against accounts still active at window close instead, the rate was 63%, the gap is accounts that had already failed before the challenge window even opened. Both numbers describe the same night from a different angle.

Measured consistently (accounts still active at the relevant cutoff), this run's 63% actually topped both day-session runs on record: August 12 at 52% and July 15 at 58%. July's own After Dark run posted 45% by the same measure. Broader eligibility, four plan types instead of two, and a shorter, earlier window didn't just avoid diluting the result. They coincided with the strongest showing of the four.

The traders who passed weren't guessing at unfamiliar hours. They came in with a plan built for exactly this kind of session: instruments they already know trade actively overnight, a size they were comfortable holding through a thinner book, and a number in their head before the window opened.

That's the same pattern behind the traits that separate traders who make it: discipline that doesn't bend under pressure, and the willingness to walk away the moment the target clears instead of forcing more out of a session that's already given you what you came for. Stopping within $100 of the target, which most winners did, isn't leaving money on the table. It's the discipline the format is built to reward.

The traders who came up short overnight likely made the opposite bet: sizing into a setup that wasn't confirmed yet, or trading hours they don't normally watch without a plan built specifically for that book. An overnight window doesn't create bad habits. It just puts them under a spotlight faster than a normal evaluation timeline would.

If your account got marked passed, the 48-hour activation clock is already running. Log into your dashboard and activate into Elite Sim-Funded before it closes, or you'll be back to the standard evaluation requirements for your plan: the full profit target and minimum trading days, no shortcut this time.

Once you're activated, you're on the same path every funded ETF trader walks: Elite Sim-Funded first, with sim profits split up to 100%, and a potential opportunity at Live Elite from there. Live Elite pays daily, Monday through Friday, with an 80/20 split and no payout cap. Full payout cycle mechanics, including what it takes to advance between cycles, are on the help center: How Do Payouts Work? Our breakdown of how prop firm payouts actually work walks through sim versus live versus what other firms mean by "guaranteed."

Full detail on what happens right after you clear any evaluation, After Dark or otherwise, is on the help center: Reached Evaluation Objectives, What's Next.

A structured trading challenge is any test a firm uses to decide whether a trader gets funded, and Beat the Beast compresses that test into a single session instead of stretching it across weeks. Opening this run to Diamond Hands and 1-Step evaluations, not just EOD and Static, meant more traders got a shot at the same fast, honest answer: land the number, or you don't.

It also means more of ETF's community got to test themselves on their own plan type's terms rather than switching strategies just to enter. A 1-Step trader shouldn't have to trade like an EOD account to get a shot at an overnight auto-pass, and this run's broader eligibility reflects that.

We'll run more of these. How to Pass a Prop Firm Evaluation: 7 Rules That Work covers the fundamentals that hold up whether your session is six hours or thirty days.

• Beat the Beast: After Dark (the original overnight edition)
• Prop Firm Challenge Pass Rate: Beat the Beast Results
• The Three Traits I See in Every Trader Who Makes It
• How Prop Firm Payouts Work: Sim vs Live vs Guaranteed

Missed this one? Beat the Beast will run again. Stack up points between challenges with our reward points program, browse available evaluations to get in position for the next one, and see real trader results. If you've got a network of traders, ETF's affiliate program pays you for sending them our way. Or check out our Competitions for a shot at extra prizes.

Ready to test yourself against the next one? Start a 1-Step evaluation and see where you land.

Pricing, promotions, and product details referenced in this article reflect information available at the time of publication and may have changed. Visit our Evaluations page for current pricing.