Every funded account has a floor. Go below it and the account is over, whatever your equity curve looked like an hour earlier. What varies between firms is where that floor sits and whether it moves — and those two differences are large enough that the same trading can pass at one firm and fail at another.
The three kinds
Static drawdown
The floor is fixed at your starting balance minus the drawdown allowance, and it never moves. A $50,000 account with a $2,000 static drawdown fails at $48,000, on day one and on day two hundred.
This is the friendliest kind. Profit is genuinely yours to give back: run to $54,000 and you can still lose $6,000 before you are out.
End-of-day trailing drawdown
The floor rises with your closing balance. Each time you finish a day at a new high, the floor moves up to stay a fixed distance below it. It never moves back down.
Because it measures closes, a spike you gave back before the bell does not count against you. Your unrealised high during the session is irrelevant — only where you finished.
Intraday trailing drawdown
The floor rises with the highest your account reached at any moment, including open profit you never banked. Go $1,500 up on a runner, give it all back, and the floor has still moved up $1,500.
This is the strictest kind, and the one most likely to end an account that finished the day flat. If your firm uses it, an unclosed winner is a liability as well as a position.
The same account, under each
A $50,000 account with a $2,000 drawdown. Four sessions: up $1,200, up $1,300 after being $2,500 up at one point, down $900, down $1,100.
| After | Balance | Static floor | EOD floor | Intraday floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start | $50,000 | $48,000 | $48,000 | $48,000 |
| Day 1 | $51,200 | $48,000 | $49,200 | $49,200 |
| Day 2 | $52,500 | $48,000 | $50,500 | $51,700 |
| Day 3 | $51,600 | $48,000 | $50,500 | $51,700 |
| Day 4 | $50,500 | $48,000 | $50,500 | $51,700 |
| Room left | $2,500 | $0 | −$1,200 |
Identical trading. Under static you have $2,500 of room and a comfortable week. Under end-of-day trailing you are exactly on the floor. Under intraday trailing you were out on day four — because on day two the account touched $53,700 for a few minutes, and the floor remembered.
The row that matters is day two. The intraday floor moved to $51,700 on the strength of profit that was never banked. If you scale out of runners, that gap between your high-water mark and your closing balance is the number to watch.
Rule one that catches people: when the floor stops trailing
Most trailing drawdowns stop trailing eventually. The common arrangement is that once the floor rises to your starting balance, it locks there and becomes static — so on a $50,000 account with a $2,000 drawdown, once you have reached $52,000 the floor sits at $50,000 and stays. Everything above that is genuinely yours to risk.
But not every firm does this, and some never lock at all. Their floor keeps trailing your high-water mark for the life of the account.
The difference is not academic, and it is asymmetric. Assuming a lock that does not exist puts your floor lower than it really is, which makes your remaining room look bigger than it is. That error never announces itself as a warning — it announces itself as a breach you were not expecting.
Look at your firm’s dashboard over several days, at the field usually called minimum account balance or trailing threshold. Note whether it keeps climbing after it passes your starting balance. If it does, your account never locks — and no calculator that assumes otherwise is telling you the truth.
Rule two that catches people: what a payout does
Taking a withdrawal lowers your balance. It does not lower a trailing floor — because the floor was set by the highest balance the account reached, and taking money out does not un-earn that high.
So a payout spends your drawdown room, roughly dollar for dollar. Withdraw $2,000 from an account sitting $2,000 above its floor and you are now sitting on the floor, one bad trade from the end, having done nothing wrong.
| Balance | Floor | Room | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before the payout | $52,500 | $50,500 | $2,000 |
| After a $2,000 payout | $50,500 | $50,500 | $0 |
This is not a reason to avoid taking payouts — getting paid is the entire point. It is a reason to know the number before you request one, and to size the withdrawal against the room you are prepared to give up.
How to work out your own
- Room left is your current balance minus the floor. Nothing else.
- Find the floor on your firm’s own dashboard. If your figure disagrees with theirs, theirs is the one that closes the account.
- Watch it across a week, not one afternoon. Whether it trails, when it stops, and whether a payout moves it are all things you can only see over time.
- Commissions come out of the balance. A gross P&L figure will overstate your room by everything you have paid the broker.
Or let Choptick keep the number for you
Choptick tracks each prop account against its own firm’s rules — drawdown type, where the floor locks, consistency, winning days and payouts — and tells you the room you actually have.
See ChoptickFigures in the examples are invented and illustrative. Written for traders working out how their own account is measured. Prop firms change their rules, and the terms you agreed to are the ones that apply — always check your firm’s own dashboard and agreement. Nothing here is financial advice.