Ask a funded trader why they lost their account and most point at a bad trade. Ask what rule actually ended it and a surprising number cannot tell you — because they never understood their drawdown model. It is the most misunderstood term in a prop-firm contract, and the one most likely to close your account on a day you were in profit.
There are three models in common use. They sound alike. They are not. On the exact same trade, one leaves you funded and another liquidates you. Here is what each one does, why the difference matters more than your win rate, and — verified from each firm's own rulebook — which prop firms use which.
The three drawdown models
Static (fixed) drawdown
Your maximum-loss line is set once, from your starting balance, and it never moves. Buy a $50,000 account with a $2,000 max loss and your floor sits at $48,000 for the life of the evaluation — whether you are up $200 or up $8,000. This is the most forgiving model: a green day can never drag your liquidation line up toward your balance, and you always know exactly where the floor is. The trade-off is that firms offering static drawdown often pair it with a tighter loss limit.
End-of-day (EOD) trailing drawdown
Your floor trails your balance, but it moves only once a day, after the close, off your end-of-day balance. Intraday swings do not move it. You can run a position deep into profit and give some back during the session without touching your loss limit — the line only ratchets up on the days you close higher. When it is calculated on closed balance (as most EOD firms do it), it is materially more forgiving than the intraday version. It is the middle of the ladder: more room than intraday trailing, less certainty than static.
Intraday trailing drawdown
Your floor trails your peak unrealized equity, in real time, tick by tick. This is the one that ends accounts on green days. Spike $3,000 into profit intraday and your liquidation line jumps up with it — even if you never bank a cent. Hand that $3,000 back and you can breach the trailing floor while still up on the day you started. Scalpers who run into big intraday peaks and let them retrace are the traders this model catches, again and again. It is the strictest of the three, and it is common among US futures firms.
Why it decides more accounts than your strategy
Picture the same session on a $50,000 account with a $2,500 max loss. You catch a move and go +$3,000 unrealized, then the trade retraces and you close the day flat. Nothing was lost. Yet:
- On static drawdown, your floor never moved. You are fine — you are exactly where you started.
- On EOD trailing, your floor is still yesterday's; today's intraday peak is irrelevant until the close. You are fine.
- On intraday trailing, your floor trailed up to roughly $50,500 at the peak. Giving back $3,000 to close flat means you passed through your liquidation line on the way down. The account is gone — on a day you did not lose money.
Same trader, same trade, three different outcomes decided entirely by a rule most people skim past at checkout. That is why our team scores the drawdown model as one of the heaviest-weighted variables on every prop firm — and why it belongs at the top of your checklist, not the bottom.
Which prop firms use which — verified from each firm's own rules
We read every firm's published drawdown rule and classify it, rather than trust the marketing label. Here is where the tvsm-verified prop firms fall at our latest verification. The live, always-current version is the drawdown filter on the homepage terminal table — if a firm changes its model, the Wire catches it there first.
Static — the floor never moves
FTMO, Funding Pips, Phidias Funding, Blue Guardian, The5ers, Lux Trading Firm, Funded Trading Plus, FundedNext, Maven Trading, City Traders Imperium.
EOD trailing — the floor moves once a day
MyFundedFutures, Tradeify, Alpha Futures, E8 Funding, Apex Trader Funding, Goat Funded Trader, Elite Trader Funding, Topstep, The Funded Trader.
A related group runs a balance-based model with end-of-day updates, which behaves like EOD trailing (the forgiving, closed-balance end): Hola Prime, Lucid Trading, FXIFY.
Intraday trailing — the floor moves in real time
The Trading Pit, Earn2Trade, OneUp Trader, TradeDay, Alpha Capital Group, Audacity Capital, Take Profit Trader.
How to use this
Two moves. First, filter for the model that fits how you actually trade: if you scalp into big intraday peaks, an intraday-trailing firm will punish exactly that habit — filter it out on the homepage drawdown filter. Second, before you buy, run the numbers: our survival calculator models how long an account of a given size and drawdown survives your real risk-per-trade, so you can see the liquidation line before you fund, not after.
One nuance most guides skip: the calculation basis
"Trailing" is only half the story — the other half is what it trails. A model can trail your closed balance (only realized, banked profit lifts the floor) or your open equity (unrealized profit lifts it too). Closed-balance is far more forgiving; open-equity is the version that liquidates you on unbanked spikes. When a firm does not clearly disclose the basis, we assume the worse case (open equity) rather than give it the benefit of the doubt — because the trader who assumed otherwise is the one who gets caught. Read the split, the cap, and the drawdown basis together; any one of them can quietly undo the other two.