Your firm has one of four drawdown rules, and they are not variations of each other
By Axelrod
Two traders take the identical trades on the identical day. One passes. One breaches. Neither of them traded badly, and nothing in the market explains the difference.
They were trading under different drawdown rules.
Most challenge pages give you a percentage and move on, as though the percentage were the rule. It is the least interesting part of it. What decides your day is how the floor underneath the account behaves while you trade: whether it sits still, follows you up in real time, follows you up only after the close, or follows you up and then stops forever.
Those are the four in wide use right now, and they are not variations of each other.
The four
Static. The floor is set in dollars on day one and never moves. Every dollar of profit widens the gap between you and it. A $100,000 account with a 10% overall loss limit breaches at $90,000, whether you are up eight percent or flat on the year. FundedNext’s programs work this way, as does FTMO’s overall loss limit.
Trailing, intraday. The floor follows your highest point in real time, including a high you never closed. Go up $1,200 at 10:14 and the floor has already moved with you. Give it back before lunch and the floor stays where the spike put it. Apex works this way until the floor reaches a fixed safety net, and so does Take Profit Trader’s funded account.
Trailing, end of day. The floor still follows you up, but once, after the session closes, and only off closed equity. That same $1,200 spike, given back before the bell, never touches it. Topstep, Lucid, Tradeify and Blue Guardian all update at the close.
Trailing, then locked. The floor follows you up to a set point, usually your starting balance plus a buffer, then stops for good and behaves like a static floor from then on. FTMO’s one-step challenge locks that way, and Alpha Capital’s Alpha One trails to six percent of profit and then stops permanently.
The same day, two floors
Take a $50,000 account with $2,000 of trailing drawdown. The floor starts at $48,000.
You are up $900 by half past ten. It comes off during the middle of the session and you close the day up $150.
Under an intraday trailing floor, your peak of $50,900 has already moved the floor to $48,900. You close at $50,150, so you start tomorrow with $1,250 of room.
Under an end-of-day floor, nothing moved until the close. The floor updates off $50,150 to $48,150, and you start tomorrow with $2,000 of room.
Same trades. Same day. One of those traders has sixty percent more room than the other, and the only difference is a sentence on a rules page.
The trap worth knowing about
One firm changes the type between stages. Take Profit Trader runs an end-of-day floor through the evaluation and an intraday trailing floor once you are funded, on its PRO account. Review coverage has been calling that a disadvantage for a while, and the reason is not the rule itself. It is that you spend the whole evaluation building a feel for how much room a spike costs you, and that feel becomes wrong on the first day the money is real.
If a firm changes drawdown type between stages, the account you passed is not the account you are now trading.
Finding out which one you have
It takes about a minute, and the answer is rarely on the front page of the offer.
- Does my floor move with closed equity, or with intraday highs?
- When does it update, in real time or at the session close?
- Does it ever stop moving, and at what level?
If support cannot answer the third one plainly, treat the floor as trailing until you see it in writing.
What to log
Most journals track your balance. The balance is not what fails you. The distance between your equity and the floor is what fails you, and on three of these four rules that distance changes without you placing a trade.
One column at the end of each day: how much room is left. After two weeks it tells you something your P&L cannot, which is whether your good days are actually buying you space or just moving the floor up behind you.
Your strategy has no idea which of the four you are trading under. You do. Write the type at the top of the page where your own rules live, and every sizing decision after that has a real number to answer to.
Rules as published by each firm and checked on 31 August 2026. Firms change them, sometimes between an evaluation and a funded account. Confirm the type against your own firm’s current terms before you size anything on it.