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 13 futures firms and 8 CFD firms in one place, pulled from our own rule guides rather than any firm's marketing page, so you can compare them side by side.

Below the tables, 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 tables. 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 main forms: intraday, which follows your live equity including open profit, and EOD, which updates only on your closing balance. A few firms use a third form that moves only when you close a winning trade. These are the columns below.

Representative sizing on the futures side is a $2,000 maximum drawdown on a $50K account. On the CFD side it's a percentage of the starting balance, usually 6 to 10 percent.

Futures firms

CFD and forex firms

A note on the columns. "Floor moves on" tells you whether unrealized profit ratchets your floor (intraday), only the closing balance does (EOD), only closed profit does (closed balance), or it doesn't move at all (static). Where a firm's type changes by phase, the cell shows the path.

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's Pro plans, BrightFunded's 2-Step plans, E8 Pro, and FundedNext's main Stellar plans all use it) and on several funded futures live accounts: Alpha Prime, Top One's live stage, MFF Pro live, and Topstep's Live Funded Account with its fixed $1,000 floor.

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 every evaluation and simulated-funded account in the table uses some version of it. The catch is that "trailing" hides a second, more important question: does the floor follow your closing balance, your live equity including open profit, or only the profit you've closed? 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. Lucid's LucidDaily lets you pick EOD or intraday for the evaluation, then puts every funded account on intraday. Top One and Alpha Futures trail on EOD through sim funded and switch to a static floor at the live stage. And several firms let you choose your trail type at checkout: Apex and Bulenox on the futures side, PipFarm's 1-Stage and Instant on the CFD side, and E8 One lets you pick the percentage. 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.

There is a third variant worth knowing on the CFD side. Closed-balance trailing moves the floor only when you close a profitable trade, so an open winner does nothing to it and a flat day at the close does nothing either. E8 One and PipFarm's 1-Stage trailing option both work this way. It's the most forgiving trailing form of the three, with one sting: an open loser can still breach you, because the breach is checked on equity even though the ratchet isn't.

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, Alpha Futures, FundedNext Futures, Earn2Trade, FTMO Futures, and E8 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 Intraday Performance Accounts, My Funded Futures, Lucid (all plans), Tradeify funded accounts, Bulenox Master accounts, and every Top One plan 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, FundedNext Futures, FTMO Futures, and E8 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 Tradeify it's a funded-account feature only: the evaluation floor keeps trailing and never locks. Apex states the lock only for Intraday Performance Accounts and doesn't state one for EOD accounts at all, so treat the EOD floor as trailing until the payout safety net tells you otherwise. E8 Zero never locks during the challenge and only locks on the Performance account, on your first payout or when your closed profit equals the drawdown. Lucid is the opposite, locking at start plus $100 in both the evaluation and the funded account. Top One locks either when your profit reaches the drawdown plus $100 or the moment you take your first payout, whichever comes first. 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 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.

The CFD trailing plans lock the same way the futures firms do, at the initial balance: Alpha One at +6%, BrightFunded's 1-Step at +6%, FundingPips Zero at +5%, and FundedNext's Stellar Instant when the trail reaches your start. E8 Pro is static but gets one move, up to the initial balance after your first payout. FTMO's 1-Step trails EOD with no stated lock point.

Once funded, nearly every firm here locks somewhere. The tables above show 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 usually 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. Two futures firms break the pattern: Earn2Trade's daily limit is a hard breach on every plan, and FTMO Futures Pro is a hard breach on both the evaluation and the funded account. FTMO Growth has no daily limit in the evaluation and a soft one once funded.

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, BrightFunded, PipFarm, FundedNext's CFD plans, and E8 One and E8 Pro 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. E8 Markets does the same across plans, with hard daily limits on One and Pro but only a soft 2% pause on Signature's funded stage. 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 Rapid plan, Tradeify's Select Flex, Alpha Futures' Premium and Advanced, LucidFlex, LucidPro's 25K, E8 Zero, and the Flex, Rapid, and Legacy programs at FundedNext Futures. Three firms let you decide: LucidDaily and Topstep make it an option at checkout, and MFF Flex sells it as a 50K add-on. On the CFD side, the instant-funded products (FundedNext's Stellar Instant and PipFarm's Instant) drop the daily limit, as does E8 Signature's challenge phase and The5ers' Bootcamp evaluation. 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.

FTMO Futures Pro, E8 Zero, and FundedNext Futures Rapid build the same trap into their mechanics: once the floor has locked at your starting balance, withdrawing 100% of your profit lands your balance exactly on it and breaches the account. All three articles flag this directly. On the CFD side, E8 One's trailing floor stays where your closed profit put it when you withdraw, and FundedNext's Stellar Instant warns that a full withdrawal can pull you down to the trailing limit.

Some firms move the floor for you. FundedNext Futures resets the floor to your initial balance after the first withdrawal on Rapid and Legacy, and to your start plus $100 on Flex, which changes the math on every payout after that. E8 Pro's static floor rises to the initial balance after your first payout. PipFarm's 1-Stage trailing accounts adjust the high-water mark downward by the payout amount, so the floor moves down with the withdrawal instead of staying put. Lucid's Flex plan does something different again: requesting a payout snaps your max loss limit to its locked level ($50,100 on a $50K account), so the withdrawal itself tightens your floor.

A few firms prevent the trap outright with a buffer you can't withdraw. E8 Signature parks an amount equal to your drawdown in the account permanently. E8 Pro keeps half your profit. Apex, Bulenox, Lucid, and Top One all require your balance to stay above a stated threshold after any payout.

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.

Closed-balance trailing, where offered, is more forgiving still, since a winning day that you don't close out doesn't move the floor at all. Only E8 One and PipFarm's 1-Stage use it, and both are CFD products.

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), your live equity (intraday), or only your closed profit, 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: September 20th, 2026