Prop Firm Drawdown Rules: Trailing vs Static vs EOD

Every prop firm sets a drawdown limit, the floor your account can't fall below, and almost every firm calculates it differently. Those differences decide whether you keep a funded account or lose it on a rule you skimmed past at checkout. This page collects the drawdown rules for 16 major futures and CFD firms in one table, pulled from our own rule guides rather than any firm's marketing or affiliate page, so you can compare them side by side.

Below the table, the rest of this guide explains what each column means: static versus trailing, the intraday-versus-EOD split that ends the most accounts, where the trail stops, and how the daily loss limit fits in.

Every Firm's Drawdown Type, Compared

First, the vocabulary for the table. Two different limits get called "drawdown." The maximum drawdown (a firm may call it the maximum loss limit, MLL, or trailing threshold) is the floor your balance can't touch; reach it and the account is closed. The daily loss limit caps how much you can lose in one session, and on most futures firms it only pauses you until the next day. The maximum drawdown is either static, a fixed floor that never moves, or trailing, a floor that rises as you profit. Trailing splits into two forms: intraday, which follows your live equity including open profit, and EOD, which updates only on your closing balance. These are the columns below.

A note on the columns. "Floor moves on" tells you whether unrealized profit ratchets your floor (intraday), only the closing balance does (EOD), or it doesn't move at all (static). Where a firm's type changes by phase, the cell shows the path. Representative sizing is a $2,000 maximum drawdown on a $50K futures account; on the CFD side it's a percentage of the starting balance, usually 6 to 10 percent.

Static, Trailing, and Hybrid Drawdown

Static drawdown is the simplest. Your floor is set once, as a fixed dollar amount or a percentage of your starting balance, and it never moves. On a $100,000 account with a 10% static max loss, your equity simply cannot drop below $90,000, whether you're up $500 or up $50,000. Static is the norm on CFD and forex evaluations (FTMO's 2-Step, most of FundingPips, The5ers, Alpha Capital, and FundedNext's main Stellar plans all use it) and on most funded futures live accounts.

Trailing drawdown moves. The floor starts a fixed distance below your balance and ratchets upward as you make money, and it never moves back down on losing days. Trailing is the standard on the futures side, where nearly every evaluation and simulated-funded account uses some version of it. The catch is that "trailing" hides a second, more important question: does the floor follow your closing balance or your live equity, including open profit? That is the intraday-versus-EOD split, and it's the single most expensive thing traders misunderstand.

Hybrid isn't a separate calculation but a lifecycle: the drawdown type changes as you move through an account's stages. Take Profit Trader is the cleanest example: its evaluation uses EOD trailing, the funded PRO account switches to intraday trailing, and the live PRO+ account reverts to EOD. My Funded Futures shifts from EOD trailing in the evaluation to intraday trailing on a Rapid funded account, then to a static or EOD live account depending on the plan. And a few firms, including Apex, Earn2Trade, and Bulenox, let you choose your trail type at checkout. The lesson: don't assume the drawdown you passed under is the one you'll be funded under.

Intraday vs EOD Trailing Drawdown

This is where most accounts die, and where most explainers get it wrong.

Intraday and EOD trailing share the same idea: a floor that sits a fixed distance below your high-water mark and ratchets up as you grow. The difference is what counts as a new high.

Intraday trailing follows your peak balance in real time, including unrealized profit on open trades. The instant an open position prints a new high, your floor jumps up to match, whether or not you ever close the trade.

EOD (end-of-day) trailing recalculates only once per session, at the close, based on your closing balance. Intraday spikes don't move it. If your equity swings up $1,000 midday and you close flat, the floor doesn't budge.

Here's the worked example that makes it concrete. Take a $50,000 account with a $2,000 trailing drawdown, so the floor starts at $48,000. Most trailing accounts cap the floor once it reaches $100 above your starting balance, at $50,100, which it reaches when your high-water mark hits $52,100. (Exactly where each firm locks, and whether that cap applies in the evaluation or only once you're funded, is the next section.)

Under intraday trailing, you open a trade and it runs to $52,100 in unrealized profit. Your floor ratchets up in real time, on profit you haven't booked, and locks at $50,100. The trade reverses. The moment your balance touches $50,100, you're liquidated. You never closed a winner, you're still $100 above where you started, and the account is gone. The open-profit spike tightened the noose before you could bank a cent.

Under EOD trailing on that same account, the run to $52,100 does nothing to your floor. Because the spike was unrealized and you closed the day flat, the floor stays at $48,000. You could give the entire open gain back during the session and keep trading; at that moment the EOD account has a full $2,100 more room than the intraday one. The floor only steps up if you close the day at a new high.

That's the whole distinction, and it cuts one way. EOD is materially more forgiving for anyone who holds through intraday volatility, while intraday punishes giving back open profit and is usually the cheaper option a firm offers for exactly that reason.

One clarification trips people up: "EOD" does not mean the floor is ignored during the day. Nearly every firm enforces the existing floor in real time, so an open loss that touches it will liquidate you mid-session; Topstep, Tradeify, My Funded Futures, and Alpha Futures all state this explicitly. What EOD changes is only the upward ratchet. Your unrealized profit doesn't tighten the floor; only your closing balance does.

Where the Trail Locks

A trailing floor doesn't chase you forever. At a defined point it stops moving and becomes fixed for the life of the account, which is the moment your accumulated profit turns into a permanent cushion.

Two patterns dominate the futures side. The larger group locks at the starting balance plus $100: once the trailing floor would reach $100 above where you began, it freezes there. Apex Performance Accounts, My Funded Futures, Lucid (all plans), Tradeify funded accounts, and Bulenox Master accounts all work this way, so on a $50,000 account the floor settles at $50,100. The second group locks at the starting balance itself: Topstep's Combine, Take Profit Trader, Alpha Futures, Earn2Trade, and FundedNext Futures freeze the floor at your original balance once it has trailed up that far.

When the cap takes effect matters as much as where it sits, and firms split here. At Apex and Tradeify it's a funded-account feature only: the evaluation floor keeps trailing and never locks at $50,100, and Apex evaluations on the Tradovate platform trail with no stop at all. Lucid is the opposite, locking at start plus $100 in both the evaluation and the funded account. The rest generally lock whenever the trail reaches that level, which on a strong evaluation can happen before you hit your profit target. So don't assume your evaluation floor has frozen at $50,100 unless the firm says it has.

Topstep's Express Funded Account is the notable outlier. Its floor locks at $0 after your first payout, meaning from that point your balance simply cannot go negative.

Once funded, every firm here locks somewhere. The table above shows where.

The Daily Loss Limit, and the Firms With None

The daily loss limit is a separate rule from your maximum drawdown, and it behaves very differently depending on which market you're in.

On the futures side, the DLL is almost always a soft limit. Hit it and your positions are flattened and you're locked out for the rest of the session, but the account survives and resumes the next day. It's a speed bump. Your maximum drawdown is the cliff.

On the CFD and forex side, the daily loss limit is usually a hard breach: hit it and the account is closed, full stop. FTMO, FundingPips, Alpha Capital, and FundedNext's CFD plans all end the account on a daily breach. The5ers even varies within its own lineup: a 3% daily loss merely pauses you on Hyper Growth but terminates the account on Pro Growth. If you're coming to CFDs from futures, this is the most dangerous assumption to carry over.

Then there are the firms with no daily loss limit at all, where the trailing or static floor is your only loss-side rule. On the futures side that includes Take Profit Trader, Apex's intraday evaluation, MFF's non-Builder plans, Tradeify's Select Flex, Alpha Futures' Advanced, LucidPro's 25K and all of LucidFlex, and the Rapid and Legacy programs at FundedNext Futures. On the CFD side, the instant-funded products (FundedNext's Stellar Instant and PipFarm's Instant) drop the daily limit too. No DLL means more freedom and one less thing to track, but nothing stops you from losing your entire drawdown in a single session.

The Withdrawal Trap Most Traders Miss

Drawdown and payouts are linked in a way that catches funded traders off guard, which is why this is worth reading alongside our prop firm payouts guide.

A withdrawal lowers your balance. If your floor is still trailing or sitting close beneath you, pulling money out can drop your balance straight onto it. Alpha Futures spells this out: it does not block a withdrawal that would breach your drawdown, and your floor does not reset after a payout. Grow a $50,000 account to $55,000 with the floor locked at $50,000, withdraw the full $5,000, and you're back to $50,000, which is a breach.

FundedNext Futures builds the same trap into its mechanics: withdrawing 100% of your profit in a single request triggers a hard breach, because your balance would land exactly on the floor. On its Rapid and Legacy programs the floor resets to your initial balance after the first withdrawal, which changes the math on every payout after that.

Lucid's Flex plan does something different again. Requesting a payout automatically snaps your max loss limit to its locked level ($50,100 on a $50K account), so the withdrawal itself tightens your floor.

The lesson isn't "don't withdraw." It's that you need to know where your floor is, whether it resets, and how much of your buffer a payout consumes before you request one.

Which Drawdown Type Fits Your Trading

There's no best drawdown type, only the one that matches how you trade, and each carries an honest trade-off.

Static drawdown is the most trader-friendly in one specific sense: your room never shrinks. A winning streak doesn't tighten your floor, you always know where the line is, and it's the standard on CFD accounts. The trade-off is that static floors sit a larger percentage from your start, and on the futures side you mostly only get one once you reach a live account.

EOD trailing is the sweet spot for most futures traders who hold positions through pullbacks. Because only your closing balance ratchets the floor, you get full intraday room to let a trade work without your own unrealized profit turning against you. If you scalp in and out you may never notice the difference; if you hold intraday, it's the more forgiving choice.

Intraday trailing is the most aggressive, and firms know it. It's typically the cheaper option a firm offers, precisely because it's harder to keep. Every tick of open profit raises your floor, so a winner that runs and then retraces can liquidate you on profit you never booked. It rewards quick profit-taking and punishes letting winners give it back.

If you want to pressure-test how a setup survives each model before buying a challenge, Tanto's free prop firm simulator runs a Monte Carlo of your pass odds and lets you toggle trailing versus static drawdown with a daily loss limit. It treats trailing as a single setting rather than splitting intraday from EOD, so read a trailing result as the more conservative case.

Reviewing Your Own Drawdown Exposure

Knowing the rules is one thing; knowing how close you habitually trade to your floor is another, and that only shows up after the fact, in your own data.

The cleanest read is your maximum adverse excursion (MAE): how far each trade moved against you before you closed it. A trade can finish green and still have dug deep into your buffer along the way, and a pattern of high-MAE trades is a quiet warning that you're skating closer to the floor than your win rate suggests.

A journal like Tanto auto-syncs your fills, rolls multiple prop accounts into one view, and surfaces MAE and MFE on every trade, so the pattern is visible without a spreadsheet. It won't manage your drawdown for you in real time; that's on you and your stops. But it makes the post-session review honest, which is where most traders find the leaks costing them accounts.

Bottom Line

Drawdown is the rule that ends accounts, and firms that look alike on a pricing page often aren't. Before you buy a challenge, get three things straight: whether your floor is static or trailing, whether a trailing floor follows your closing balance (EOD) or your live equity (intraday), and whether the daily loss limit pauses you or kills the account. Then check what changes when you get funded, because for many firms it does. Drawdown mechanics get restructured often, so confirm the specifics against each firm's current rules before your first trade; our individual guides and the futures prop firm comparison are kept current.

By Team Tanto · Last updated: June 7, 2026