Trailing drawdown, explained with numbers you'll actually see
A trailing drawdown is a loss limit that follows your best balance up and never comes back down. Start a 50K account with a $2,000 trailing drawdown and your floor is $48,000; close a day at $51,000 and the floor is now $49,000, even if you lose that $1,000 tomorrow.
The idea in one sentence
Your floor is always your best balance minus the drawdown, until it locks.
That's the whole rule. Everything else is about which balance counts as "best" and when it gets measured.
A day-by-day example
A 50K account with a $2,000 trailing drawdown, measured at the end of each day:
| Day | Result | Closing balance | Best close so far | Floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start | $50,000 | $50,000 | $48,000 | |
| 1 | +$1,000 | $51,000 | $51,000 | $49,000 |
| 2 | -$700 | $50,300 | $51,000 | $49,000 |
| 3 | +$400 | $50,700 | $51,000 | $49,000 |
| 4 | +$900 | $51,600 | $51,600 | $49,600 |
| 5 | -$1,700 | $49,900 | $51,600 | $49,600 |
Look at day 5. The balance is $49,900, just $100 under where you started, but the floor is $49,600. You're $300 from the end of the account after a week that's almost flat. That's the trailing drawdown doing its job: your week's best day raised the bar, and a normal bad day nearly finished you.
End of day vs intraday
The table above uses end-of-day measurement: only the closing balance counts. On an intraday trailing account, the best balance is your highest point during the session, open profit included at many firms. A trade that runs up $1,200 and closes at breakeven moves the floor $1,200 on an intraday account and $0 on an end-of-day one.
More on that in end-of-day vs intraday drawdown.
Where it stops
Most futures firms stop the trail once it reaches a fixed level:
- Topstep Trading Combine: locks at your starting balance.
- Apex PA, Lucid, Tradeify and MyFundedFutures funded accounts: lock at the starting balance plus $100.
- Evaluations: many don't lock at all during the eval, because you pass before it would.
Once it locks, the floor is fixed and every dollar above it is real room.
The three mistakes that blow accounts
- Sizing up after a good day. The good day already raised your floor. Bigger size on the next trade means the same room is now worth fewer stops.
- Watching balance instead of distance. "I'm up $1,600" sounds safe. "I'm $2,000 from the floor" is the number that matters, and after a few good days it can be much smaller than it feels.
- Holding a loser to get back to green. An open loss counts against the floor in real time at most firms. The close you're waiting for may never come.
Practice reading the floor
The simulator shows the threshold next to your balance and updates it after every trade and every session close. Trade a week on an Apex or Topstep account and check your distance to the floor at the end of each day. Once you can say that number without looking, you're reading drawdown the right way.
Questions people actually ask
Does the trailing drawdown ever stop moving?
On most futures prop accounts, yes. Topstep's Trading Combine locks it at your starting balance. Apex, Lucid, Tradeify and MyFundedFutures lock it at the starting balance plus $100 on funded or PA accounts. Until it locks, every new high moves it up.
Does a losing day move the trailing drawdown down?
No. It only moves up. A losing day just eats into the room between your balance and the floor.
Do open trades count against the trailing drawdown?
At most firms, yes. Even on end-of-day accounts the floor is usually enforced in real time against your balance including open P&L, so an open loss can end the account before you close it.
Blow it here, not on a paid eval
Run the same rules on your own trades in the simulator. Free, no card, and a blown account costs you nothing but pride.
Start practicing