Drawdown Simulator

An intraday trailing drawdown follows your account's highest point in real time, including unrealized profit on open trades. If you start a $50,000 account with a $2,000 drawdown, your limit begins at $48,000. If your balance peaks at $51,000 — even for a moment during an open trade — the limit trails up to $49,000 and never goes back down.

An EOD drawdown only updates once per day based on your closing balance, ignoring intraday swings and unrealized profit. If you close the day at $51,000 on a $50,000 account with a $2,000 limit, the new limit becomes $49,000 the next morning. EOD drawdowns are more forgiving because a winning trade that pulls back intraday cannot raise your limit against you.

The difference is when the limit moves. Intraday trailing drawdown ratchets up with every new equity high, including unrealized profit on open positions, while EOD drawdown only moves at the daily close. The same trading produces very different breach risk under each rule — which is exactly what this simulator lets you visualize step by step.

With intraday trailing drawdowns, unrealized profit raises your limit immediately. If your open trade runs up $1,500 and then retraces, your limit has already trailed up by $1,500 — so a pullback that would have been safe at the start of the trade can now trigger a breach. This is the most common and least understood way traders lose funded accounts.

Many futures prop firms stop trailing the drawdown once it reaches your starting balance (or starting balance plus a small buffer). From that point on it behaves like a static limit — you can no longer breach by giving back profits above that level. Reaching the lock level is a major milestone because your worst case becomes fixed.

Three habits matter most: take partial profits so unrealized gains become realized before they retrace, size positions so a single stop-out never uses more than a fraction of your remaining drawdown, and build a profit buffer early — until the drawdown locks, treat every open profit as if the limit has already trailed up behind it.