After you lose an account

Most traders who stay in the game long enough lose an account at some point: a personal account drawn down to where it cannot be traded sensibly, or a prop evaluation or funded account that hits its limit. It is common enough that this course treats it as an event with a protocol rather than as the end of a story. What you do in the first two weeks afterwards matters more than what you do in the next year.

First: it happened, and it is not who you are

Read Module 4's lesson on identity again before doing anything else. A blown account is the single strongest identity threat trading can produce, and every defence it triggers (denial, blame, the immediate re-fund, the "I'll get it back" plan) is a tilt response on the longest timescale.

The account is gone. That is a fact about money and about a process. It is not a fact about your worth, your intelligence, or whether you can ever trade. The statement "I lost an account" is true. The statement "I am a loser" is not a fact; it is a feeling, and Module 2 explained where feelings sit in the decision hierarchy.

Say the first sentence out loud. Do not say the second.

The two-week protocol

Days one and two: nothing. No platform, no charts, no trading content, no forums, no new account. Delete the phone app if it is still there. Tell one person you trust what happened, in plain terms, without minimising and without dramatising. Sleep. The physiology of a blow-up is the physiology of a cascade, at full scale, and it needs days to clear.

Days three to seven: the reconstruction. With the platform still closed, open the log. Reconstruct the last month of the account trade by trade, with execution grades. Then answer three questions in writing:

What was the A-trade expectancy over the last full block? If it was positive, the strategy was not the problem.
What share of the losses came from D and F trades? For most blown accounts this is the majority, and often it is concentrated in a small number of days.
Which circuit breakers were missing, and which were present but broken? Be specific: "the daily limit existed on paper but was not enforced in software," "the consecutive-loss rule was broken on three days."

This is the most important step and the one most traders skip, because it hurts. Skip it and the next account will lose the same way.

Days eight to fourteen: the plan. Write the new plan, or rewrite the old one, with the specific fixes from step three built in as mechanical rules with software enforcement wherever possible. Redo the Module 3 friction audit and score ten out of ten before any new account is opened. Decide, on paper, what account size and what 1R you will use when you resume; the next lesson covers that.

Only after day fourteen is opening or funding a new account on the table. The waiting period is not punishment. It is the amount of time it takes for the decision to fund a new account to be made by the plan-following version of you rather than the one that just got hurt.

Key idea: A blown account is an event with a protocol: two days of nothing, five days of honest reconstruction with grades, a week of writing the fixes as mechanical rules, and no new account until all three are done.

Prop accounts specifically

Prop evaluations have made losing an account cheap and fast, which is both the appeal and the danger. A trader can fail an evaluation on Monday, buy another on Monday afternoon, and fail that by Friday. Each purchase is small enough not to feel like a decision. Over a year, the fees can exceed what a personal account would have lost, and the trader has learned nothing because there was never a pause to learn in.

Rules for prop traders, in addition to the protocol above:

Twenty-four hours minimum before purchasing another evaluation, written into the plan. Two weeks after a funded account is lost.
Count the fees. Total evaluation fees paid in the last twelve months, written at the top of the journal. That number is real money lost, and it belongs in the P&L.
One evaluation at a time. Running several simultaneously and hoping one passes is not a strategy; it is buying lottery tickets, and Kumar's research from Module 2 applies.
Treat a failed evaluation as a blown account. Same reconstruction, same three questions, same fixes. The fee was small; the information is not.

The people around you

If the money lost was money that mattered to a household, the people affected need to know, and they need to know from you, promptly and plainly. Hiding a blown account from a partner is a second, larger problem stacked on the first, and it is the pattern that gambling counsellors see most often. Telling them is the hardest step in this lesson and the one with the best return.

If the money lost was borrowed, or was money that should have gone elsewhere, the next lesson on sizing down and the last lesson on getting help are both written for you. Read them before doing anything else with a trading platform.

What recovery is not

Recovery is not getting the money back. That frame is the "get it back" cascade from Module 2 at the scale of a whole account, and it is how a first blown account becomes a second one. The lost money is a sunk cost, and Module 1 covered what sunk costs should do to decisions: nothing.

Recovery is a process that has the fixes built in, run at a size that cannot blow up, for long enough to prove that the fixes hold. The equity curve is a by-product of that. It might take a year. That is fine.

Try it: Whether or not you have lost an account, write the two-week protocol into your plan now, with the three reconstruction questions verbatim. If you have lost one, and you skipped the reconstruction at the time, do it now, with grades. Write the three answers at the top of your current journal.

Recap

A blown account is a fact about a process, not a verdict on a person; the identity defences it triggers are tilt on the longest timescale.
Two-week protocol: two days of nothing, days three to seven for a graded reconstruction answering three questions, days eight to fourteen for writing mechanical fixes; no new account before that.
The reconstruction usually shows a positive A-trade expectancy with most losses in D and F trades on a few days, and specific breakers missing or broken.
Prop traders: 24 hours minimum before another evaluation, count the fees as losses, one evaluation at a time, treat a failed evaluation as a blown account.
Tell the people affected, promptly; recovery is a process with fixes built in at a size that cannot blow up, not getting the money back.