Free tool
Trailing drawdown calculator
Where a funded account’s liquidation threshold sits right now and how much room is left, and, from your own win rate and trade sizes, the odds of reaching the profit target before the threshold catches you.
Where the threshold is now
How far below the peak the account may fall.
How far below the peak the account may fall.
Open profit counts: the best the account has ever been, mid-trade included.
Open profit counts: the best the account has ever been, mid-trade included.
Liquidation threshold $48,700. Room left $900.
The odds of reaching the target first
Uses the plan above. Every trade is an independent win or loss of the average size you enter, simulated across up to 10,000 accounts; the count and the sampling error are printed under the result.
Above the starting balance.
Above the starting balance.
As a positive number.
As a positive number.
Up to 250.
Up to 250.
Stops trading for the day. Blank for none.
Reach the target first: 81.7%.
10,000 simulated accounts, same seed every time, so the pass rate is within about ±0.8 points of the model's own at 95% confidence. Equity is marked at each closed trade, so an intraday threshold here is the optimistic reading: a real one also follows open profit a trade gives back.
How a trailing drawdown works
A static loss limit is a floor: the account ends if the balance falls below a fixed number. A trailing drawdown is a leash. The threshold sits a fixed distance below the highest point the account has reached, it rises with every new high, and it never comes back down.
threshold = highest point reached − trailing drawdown
room left = balance now − thresholdAn account that starts at $50,000 with a $2,500 trailing drawdown can fall to $47,500 on day one. Once it has reached $51,200, the threshold has followed it up to $48,700, and a pullback to $49,600 leaves $900 of room, not the $2,100 that a glance at the starting balance suggests. Profit tightened the leash.
Intraday versus end-of-day trailing
The two differ in what counts as the high. An intraday threshold follows the account’s equity at every moment, open profit included. An end-of-day threshold follows only the closing balance.
Suppose the account is at its peak and a trade runs to $800 of open profit before closing for $100. An intraday threshold has moved up $800 and stays there; an end-of-day threshold moves up $100 at the close. The trader banked $100 and, under the intraday rule, spent $700 of room to do it. Strategies that let winners run and give some back pay that price on every trade.
When the threshold stops trailing
Many plans stop the trail once the threshold reaches a set level, commonly the starting balance. After that the threshold is static, and every further dollar of profit is room rather than leash. In the example above, the threshold locks after another $1,300 of peak, at $50,000. The first part of any funded account’s life is the race to that lock.
Why a backtest’s maximum drawdown is the wrong comparison
A backtest reports its maximum drawdown as one number: the deepest fall from a peak to a trough on closed trades, over the whole history. A trailing threshold measures the distance from the running peak at every moment, and an intraday one charges open losses too. A strategy whose backtest shows a $2,000 maximum drawdown does not fit a $2,500 threshold with $500 to spare.
The historical drawdown is also a single draw. The path the strategy happened to take is one of many it could have taken, and the next one is as likely to be deeper as shallower. The research record found the same thing from the other side: ranking strategies by their drawdown ratio has no out-of-sample content, because the realised drawdown path is one draw that no resampling of itself recovers.
A payout lowers the balance, not the threshold
Once the threshold has locked, a withdrawal takes money from the balance and leaves the threshold where it is. Every dollar withdrawn is a dollar of room given up, and withdrawing to a plan’s minimum turns a healthy account into one the next ordinary losing session can end. How much to leave in after a payout is a decision the plan does not make for you, and it matters as much as the strategy.
Reading the simulation
The second calculator walks thousands of accounts forward, one trade at a time, with each trade an independent win or loss of the size you entered. It estimates the odds under that model, to within the sampling error printed under the result, and is blind to everything outside it: streaks that cluster, winners that vary, consistency rules, minimum trading days. Use it to compare settings, such as what halving the size does to the odds, rather than to forecast one account.
For a strategy that has been through the screener, the funded-account fit report does this walk on the strategy’s own trades instead of an average win and loss. It walks your account forward under the rules you give it — a trailing threshold that follows the peak and never comes back down, the intraday excursion that charges every open position its full risk, the daily loss limit, the consistency rule and the payout clock — and reports the probability of a breach, the probability of a payout, sessions to the first withdrawal and the size curve with its interior optimum. It costs 1 credit. Every rule in it is one you typed. We do not hold any prop firm's agreement, we do not know what yours says, and the report is worth exactly what the numbers you enter are worth. It is also not advice about whether to take an evaluation.
Questions
- What is a trailing drawdown?
- A loss limit measured from the account's highest point rather than from where it started. The liquidation threshold sits a fixed distance below the peak and rises with every new high, but never comes back down, so profit tightens the limit instead of loosening it.
- What is the difference between intraday and end-of-day trailing drawdown?
- An intraday threshold follows the highest equity the account reaches at any moment, open profit included. An end-of-day threshold follows only the closing balance. A trade that runs up and gives the gain back moves an intraday threshold and leaves an end-of-day one where it was.
- Does a trailing drawdown ever stop trailing?
- On many plans it does: once the threshold reaches a set level, often the starting balance, it stops rising and stays there. From then on it behaves like a static limit. Check your own plan's terms; this calculator lets you enter whichever level applies.
- Does unrealized profit count toward a trailing drawdown?
- Under an intraday threshold, yes: the peak includes open profit, so the threshold can rise during a trade that later closes for less. Under an end-of-day threshold, only the closing balance counts.
- Is a trailing drawdown the same as a daily loss limit?
- No. A daily loss limit caps what one session can lose and resets the next day. A trailing drawdown caps the distance from the account's best point, across all days. Many plans have both, and the calculator's simulation can apply a daily limit as a stop for the day.
- How accurate is the pass probability?
- It is an estimate from a sample of simulated accounts, with its sampling error printed under it, and only as good as the model: independent trades of fixed size at your win rate. Real results cluster, winners and losers vary, and an intraday threshold also follows open profit, so treat the figure as a comparison between settings rather than a forecast.
Test the strategy before you pay for the evaluation.
A pass probability is only as good as the win rate typed into it. The screener measures the real one, on tick data and after costs, before an evaluation fee rides on it.