Three kinds of drawdown
Every prop account has a floor: a balance it must never touch. The maximum drawdown is the distance between your balance and that floor. What changes from firm to firm is how the floor moves.
- Static: the floor is the starting balance minus the drawdown, and it never moves.
- End-of-day trailing: after each session the floor rises to your highest closing balance minus the drawdown. It never comes back down.
- Intraday trailing: the floor follows your highest balance during the day, open profit included. A trade that runs up and comes back can raise the floor without leaving you any profit.
Calculated at the close, enforced all day
"End of day" describes when the floor moves, not when it counts. Tradeify writes that the limit "only UPDATES at the end of each trading day, but it is ENFORCED continuously throughout the day", and Topstep describes its Maximum Loss Limit as "Calculated end of day, enforced intraday". If your balance, open trades included, touches the floor at 10:15, the account fails at 10:15, even if you would have closed green. That is why the calculator asks for the low of the day.
Where the floor stops
Many firms stop the trailing floor at a fixed balance. On a Lucid 50K LucidFlex account it stops at $50,100; on a Topstep 50K Combine it stops at the starting balance; on a Tradeify funded account it locks at $100 above the starting balance, but on a Tradeify evaluation it never locks. Pick your account above and the calculator fills the level from the firm's page, with the date it was read.
Why a good day makes tomorrow tighter
Example: a $50,000 account with a $2,000 end-of-day trailing drawdown. You close day one at $51,500: the floor rises from $48,000 to $49,500. On day two you have $2,000 of room again, measured from $51,500, not from $50,000. Give back $2,000 and the account fails, even though it is still $1,500 above where it started.
The floor rarely ends an account on its own. It ends it when the stop gets moved, or when one more trade follows a loss. That part is not arithmetic.