EOD vs intraday trailing vs static drawdown on a prop firm account

A prop-firm drawdown limit is a floor under your account balance: the lowest balance the account may reach. If the account touches the floor, the evaluation fails. (An evaluation account is the test account you have to pass first.) Firms differ on three things: how the floor moves (not at all, or upward behind your high point), when it moves (live, or once a day at the close), and what is checked against it (only gains and losses from closed trades, or open trades too).

The three kinds

• Static. The floor never moves. A $50,000 account with a $2,000 static limit fails at $48,000 every day.
• Intraday trailing. The floor follows the highest the account has been, including open profit, and updates as it happens. It only moves up.
• End-of-day (EOD) trailing. The floor follows the highest closing balance, and moves once, at the close. It only moves up.

Side by side, from the pages read for this page:

	Static	End-of-day trailing	Intraday trailing
Does the floor move?	Never	Up only, once a day at the close	Up only, as it happens
What it follows	Nothing: it is fixed	The highest closing balance	The highest balance, open profit included
Does open profit that later disappears raise it?	No	No	Yes
Is an open loss checked against it?	Not stated on the page read	Yes at four of the five firms below	Yes
Where the pages read describe it	Topstep Labs $50K Static challengeS2	TopstepS1, TradeifyS6, MyFundedFutures Rapid EODS9, Take Profit TraderS10, Apex’s end-of-day versionS4	Apex’s standard evaluationS3,S5

“End-of-day” does not mean the floor ignores what happens during the day. It means the floor is recalculated at the close; at four of these five firms a touch of the floor is still checked against live equity.

A made-up example

Numbers below are invented to show the mechanics. They are not any firm’s data. A $50,000 account has a $2,000 limit. On day 1 its balance, counting open trades, peaks at $51,000 during the session and closes at $50,400.

Floor at the start of day 2	Floor
Static	$48,000
EOD trailing	$48,400 (closing balance $50,400, less $2,000)
Intraday trailing	$49,000 (peak $51,000, less $2,000)

On day 2 the balance, open trades included, dips to $48,900. The intraday-trailing account has touched its floor and fails. The EOD-trailing and static accounts are still alive. Suppose instead that day 1 had been a round trip: the account peaked at $51,000 and closed at $50,000, where it started. The intraday-trailing floor would still be $49,000, and the EOD-trailing floor $48,000.

The dip does not need to be a closed loss: at the firms below, an open trade that touches the floor counts.

What each firm says

All figures are for the 50K evaluation account. Small labels such as S1 link to the Sources list at the bottom of the page.

Topstep

End-of-day trailing on balance, watched in real time. The firm says the limit “updates at the end of each trading day but is monitored in real time”, and that “both realized and unrealized P&L (profit and loss, from closed and open trades) count toward it”^S1. The size is $2,000. It stops trailing at the starting balance: “Once it reaches your starting balance, it locks permanently”^S1. Topstep Labs lists a separate $50K Static challenge at “$2,000 (static, non-trailing)”^S2. The Topstep guide goes into more detail: Topstep trailing drawdown.

Apex Trader Funding

The standard evaluation uses an intraday trailing limit. Apex says it “follows Peak Balance and never moves down”^S5, and the peak “includes both realized and unrealized gains”^S3. Apex also sells an end-of-day version, whose floor is “recalculated once per trading day at 4:59:59 PM ET” and, in Apex’s words, “enforced in real time”^S4. Apex’s newer pages give $2,000 on the 50K account; an older page gave $2,500^S11. See Apex intraday vs EOD drawdown.

Tradeify (Select and Growth)

End-of-day trailing from the highest closing balance. Tradeify says the limit “updates at end of day but is enforced in real time against your net liquidation value”^S6. The size is $2,000 on both account types. Whether an evaluation account ever stops trailing is where Tradeify’s pages disagree, below.

MyFundedFutures (Rapid EOD)

End-of-day trailing, $2,000^S9. Open trades count: “open equity losses are taken into consideration when calculating whether or not the account failed on this rule”^S8. The firm describes a lock at “$100 plus the initial starting balance”^S8; whether that lock applies in the evaluation is where its pages are unclear, below.

Take Profit Trader (Test account)

End-of-day trailing, $2,000^S10. The firm writes that the drawdown “is calculated only at the end of the trading day, not during open trades”, and also that if the account drops to the minimum balance “at any time — through realized or unrealized losses” it is liquidated^S10. The two sentences fit together as: the floor moves at the close, and an open loss that reaches it still counts. It stops trailing at the starting balance: “it stops trailing and remains fixed”^S10.

Where the firms’ own pages disagree

• Apex, size. An older Apex article lists a $2,500 drawdown on the 50K account^S11; the newer help-centre pages list $2,000^S3,^S5. The pages we read do not say which applies to which account.
• Tradeify, lock in evaluations. One page says “Evaluation accounts do not have drawdown locking”^S6. Another page, under its “All Evaluation Accounts” heading, gives an example of a Growth account whose floor “locks” at $50,100^S7. Both carry the same page date, 2026-08-26.
• MyFundedFutures, lock and size. The page that describes the $100 lock does not say whether it applies in the evaluation or only on funded accounts^S8. The same page says 50K accounts “have 4% DD” in one sentence and shows $2,000 in its tables^S8.

Why this matters if you test a strategy against these rules

At four of these five firms, the floor moves on the closing balance but a touch is checked against live equity, open trades included. A test that only looks at daily closes cannot tell a floor that was reached mid-day from one that was not. A faithful check needs both series: each day’s closing balance, and the account’s equity through the day.