The floor under your account moves. Know when.

A trailing drawdown is a loss floor that follows your account's peak upward and never comes back down. A static drawdown is a floor fixed at your starting balance minus the allowed loss.

That sounds like a detail until it costs you an account. With a trailing rule, every new high lifts the floor. Make money and give it back, and you can end the week above your starting balance. You'll still have far less room than you began with.

Failing this way doesn't need a blow-up. A few good days and a few winners that round-trip are enough. Suddenly the floor is much closer than you assumed. The rule was never hidden. The mistake is tracking profit instead of your distance to the floor, which is the number that actually ends accounts.

There are two common ways firms measure the trail, and you must know which one you have.

Intraday trailing tracks the highest equity your account reaches during the session, open profit included. If a trade is up $800 at its best, the floor rises with that peak. It stays there even if you close for less.

End-of-day trailing only looks at your closing balance. Open swings during the day don't move the floor. Only where you finish counts.

Some firms also stop the trail at some point, for example once the floor reaches the starting balance. After that the floor is effectively static. Rules vary by firm and by account type, so read the exact wording before your first trade. If the rules page is vague, ask support and keep the written answer.

Take an illustrative $50,000 account with a $2,500 drawdown. These are round numbers for the math, not any firm's terms. On day one, the floor is $47,500 under every rule.

During day two, your equity peaks at $51,200 on an open trade. You close the day at $50,400.

Under intraday trailing, the floor becomes $51,200 minus $2,500, which is $48,700. Under end-of-day trailing, it becomes $50,400 minus $2,500, or $47,900. Under a static rule, it stays at $47,500.

Now day three dips to $48,800. With intraday trailing you survive by $100. With end-of-day trailing you have $900 of room. With static you have $1,300. Same trades, same balance, three very different levels of danger. That $800 of open profit you didn't keep cost you $800 of cushion.

An intraday trailing rule charges you for profit you never banked. A trade that runs up $1,000 and comes back to flat leaves your P&L at zero. Your floor moved up $1,000 anyway.

Do that three times in a week and your account looks unchanged while your room has shrunk by a lot. This is why traders who hold for big targets struggle under intraday trailing. The open peak counts against them before they decide anything.

End-of-day trailing is gentler on swings inside the day, but it still punishes round-trips across days. Close one day up $1,500 and give it back the next, and the floor stays $1,500 higher. Static rules are the only kind that ignore your peaks entirely.

Start each morning by writing two numbers: your balance and your floor. The gap between them is your real budget, not the drawdown on the rules page.

Size from that gap. If the gap is $1,200, a trade risking $600 is half your remaining life. Cut size as the gap narrows. Set a daily loss cap from the start-of-day balance, so a bad afternoon can't drain the gap in one go.

Under intraday trailing, take partial profits as the trade works. Banking part of a winner limits how much open peak you hand to the floor. Don't let a large winner come all the way back. Once the trail stops, you can loosen up a little, because the floor won't chase you anymore. Until then, treat every open peak as money already spoken for.

Read the drawdown rules before you pay for the evaluation, not after your first red day. The details below change what kind of trading the account rewards. A scalper and a swing-style day trader can have very different results under the same headline drawdown.

Put the answers in writing, in your own words, and keep them next to your screen. If a rule reads two ways, assume the stricter one until support confirms otherwise in writing. That small habit has no downside. Then run the morning routine every day, including the days you feel sure of yourself. It takes two minutes and turns a vague rule into a number you can see. If you pass, read the funded account's drawdown rules from scratch, since they can differ from the evaluation's.