Tools / Drawdown simulator
Drawdown simulator
Enter ten days of P&L and watch how trailing, end-of-day trailing and static drawdown models diverge — often the model, not the percentage, decides whether you survive a rough patch.
Daily P&L (10 trading days)
Intraday trailing
Survived
Final equity $52,100
| 48k | 49k | 49k | 50k | 50k | 50k | 50k | 50k | 50k | 50k |
EOD trailing
Survived
Final equity $52,100
| 48k | 49k | 49k | 50k | 50k | 50k | 50k | 50k | 50k | 50k |
Static
Survived
Final equity $52,100
| 48k | 48k | 48k | 48k | 48k | 48k | 48k | 48k | 48k | 48k |
Firms by drawdown model
Verified July 20, 2026.
Intraday trailing
EOD trailing
Drawdown is the single rule that decides whether a losing streak ends your evaluation or is just a bad week. Firms describe it with one percentage, but the mechanism behind that percentage varies enormously, and the mechanism is what actually determines survivability.
Static drawdown is the simplest and, for most traders, the most forgiving. The stop-out level is set once, against your starting balance, and it never moves regardless of how much profit you bank. FTMO, The5ers, FundedNext, Alpha Capital Group and FunderPro all use a static model. The practical effect is that early profit builds a genuine cushion: if you are up $3,000 on a $50,000 account with a 10% ($5,000) static buffer, you can lose the full $3,000 back and still have $2,000 of room before breaching — the buffer does not tighten just because you made money.
Intraday trailing drawdown is the opposite: the stop-out level rises every time your equity marks a new high, tick by tick, and it never comes back down. Apex Trader Funding and Elite Trader Funding's trailing plans work this way. The dangerous property is that unrealised profit you later give back still counts against you — if your equity peaks at $53,000 intraday on a $5,000 trailing buffer, your floor is now $48,000 even if you close the day flat at $50,000. A trader who is net profitable for the day can still be breached by an intraday round-trip.
End-of-day trailing drawdown, used by Topstep, Tradeify and Take Profit Trader, splits the difference: the stop-out level only recalculates once per day using the day's closing balance, not the intraday high. That gives you room to have a genuinely rough intraday session — down a lot, up a lot, down again — and still be fine as long as you close near where you started. It is a meaningfully easier model to trade around than full intraday trailing, which is one reason futures firms increasingly favour it over the older trailing-drawdown standard.
Once the buffer is exhausted, the underlying trailing calculation stops updating in all three models — a breach ends the account, it does not reset the reference point. That is why the simulator above marks a model as 'breached' on the first day the stop-out level is touched and holds the line flat afterward: in practice trading stops there.
The takeaway for choosing between two similarly priced accounts is to compare the model before the percentage. A 5% intraday trailing account and a 10% static account can have almost identical real-world survivability for a trader who has occasional volatile drawdown days, because the static account's buffer stays put while the trailing account's floor rises with every new high and then punishes the give-back.
How the simulator works
- ·Static model: the stop-out level is fixed at starting balance minus the buffer for the entire sequence.
- ·EOD-trailing model: the stop-out level recalculates once per day from the prior day's closing balance high-water mark.
- ·Intraday trailing model: the stop-out level tracks the running high-water mark including each day's peak, approximated here as start-of-day equity plus that day's gain when the day is positive.
- ·A model is marked breached on the first day its equity crosses its own stop-out level; subsequent days are frozen because trading would have stopped.
This is a simplified illustrative model, not the exact formula every firm uses internally. Confirm the precise drawdown mechanics in the firm's own rulebook before trading a funded account.
FAQ
- What is the difference between trailing and static drawdown?
- Static drawdown sets a fixed loss buffer against your starting balance that never moves, no matter how much profit you make. Trailing drawdown moves the stop-out level up as your equity makes new highs — intraday, tick by tick — which means unrealised profit you later give back can still trigger a breach even though you never touched the original buffer.
- What is end-of-day (EOD) trailing drawdown?
- EOD-trailing only recalculates the stop-out level once per day, using the day's closing balance, rather than every tick. It gives you room to have a rough intraday swing and still recover by the close, which is why futures firms like Topstep and Tradeify use it as a middle ground between static and full intraday trailing.
- Which drawdown model is easiest to survive?
- Static, because the buffer never tightens as you profit. Full intraday trailing is hardest, because your best days raise the floor and a subsequent pullback — even one that leaves you net profitable overall — can trigger a breach. EOD-trailing sits in between.
- Does the drawdown model matter more than the percentage?
- Often, yes. A 10% static drawdown can be easier to survive than a 5% intraday trailing drawdown, because the static buffer stays fixed while the trailing one tightens every time you make money. Compare the model, not just the headline percentage, before choosing an account.