Enter your account size, maximum drawdown percentage, and drawdown type to see your exact breach level in dollars — and how much buffer you have left. Switch between static and trailing to understand how your floor moves (or doesn’t) as you profit.

Static vs Trailing Drawdown: What Actually Differs

A static drawdown fixes the breach level against your starting balance. On a $100,000 account with 10% static drawdown, your floor is $90,000 on day one and stays $90,000 forever — whether you’re up $8,000 or down $5,000. Profits don’t move the floor; they just widen your buffer.

A trailing drawdown follows your equity high-water mark. Make $3,000 and your floor rises to $93,000. Make another $2,000 and it rises to $95,000. Critically: the floor only moves up, never down. This means every new high converts profits into required floor — the buffer you earned is immediately collateralised. Traders who misunderstand trailing drawdown often feel safe after a good run precisely when their practical buffer has been squeezed the most.

Run the numbers above for your specific account before starting any evaluation. Knowing your breach level in dollars — not percentages — changes how you react to a bad session in real time.

How the Drawdown Floor Interacts With Daily Loss Limits

The drawdown floor and the daily loss limit are separate constraints, both of which can end an evaluation independently. A common failure pattern: a trader stays well inside the daily limit but loses consistently across many sessions, eventually walking the account down to the drawdown floor. The fix is to compute both limits in dollars before the evaluation starts, then size positions so a normal losing session can’t consume more than half the daily limit — leaving room for the variance that always exists.

See also: Position Size Calculator — once you know your breach level, calculate the lot size that keeps any single trade well within your budget. Read the full framework in How to Pass a 2-Step Evaluation.