Trailing drawdown, explained without the fine print
Intraday, end of day, static: the same number on the sales page, three very different accounts. How each one moves, with the firms that use it.
Two evaluations can both say "2,000 dollar max drawdown" on the sales page and be completely different accounts. The number is the same. What moves it is not. Before the price, the split or the payout speed, this is the rule to understand. It decides how much room you really have on a bad day, and on a good one.
Three ways the floor moves
Every evaluation has a floor: an account value you must never touch. The drawdown type decides when that floor moves.
- Static: the floor is set once, below your starting balance, and never moves. Simple and rare.
- End of day (EOD): the floor trails your balance, but it is only recalculated at the close of the session. What happens inside the day does not move it.
- Intraday trailing: the floor follows your highest equity in real time, open profit included. An unrealised gain that comes back has already raised the floor.
The same day, three accounts
Take a 50K account with a 2,000 dollar drawdown. The floor starts at 48,000. You open a trade that runs to +1,500 unrealised, then gives most of it back. You close it at +200.
| Floor after the day | Room left | |
|---|---|---|
| Static | 48,000 | 2,200 |
| End of day | 48,200 | 2,000 |
| Intraday trailing | 49,500 | 700 |
With intraday trailing, a trade that ended green cost you two thirds of your room. That is the trap: not the losers, the winners you do not take.
Which firms use which
From the live board (a firm appears on several lines when it sells several account types):
| Drawdown | Prop firms |
|---|---|
| Intraday trailing | Apex Trader Funding, Elite Trader Funding, Goat Funded Futures, TradeDay |
| End of day | Alpha Futures, Apex Trader Funding, Earn2Trade, Elite Trader Funding, FTMO Futures, Goat Funded Futures, Lucid Trading, My Funded Futures, Phidias Propfirm, Take Profit Trader, Topstep, TradeDay, Tradeify |
| Static | Elite Trader Funding, Phidias Propfirm |
How to trade each one
Intraday trailing rewards taking profit quickly and punishes letting winners breathe. Scale out, keep targets realistic, and size so that a full give-back does not eat more than a third of your room.
End of day lets you manage a trade normally inside the session. The risk moves to holding into the close, and to the daily loss limit if the firm has one.
Static is the most forgiving to trade and often the most expensive to buy. Compare the price of the account with the room it really gives you, not with the headline drawdown.
See end-of-day firms
