Why this kills funded accounts specifically
Load The funded-account week and leave it on end-of-day. The account survives — it is a mediocre week, down slightly, but alive. Now switch the threshold to intraday peak. Same nine days, same trades, same closes. The account is gone.
That is the entire Test-to-funded transition at several firms, drawn. The evaluation measures your closing balances and forgives everything that happened in between. The funded account measures your peak equity including unrealised profit. A trader who habitually goes $1,500 up before closing $200 down has been dragging their threshold upward all along and never knew, because on the evaluation it did not count.
Nothing about their trading got worse. The measurement changed, and the measurement is the rule.
The threshold has no memory of your bad days, only your good ones
Load The good day that killed it. One outstanding session drags the threshold up behind you. You then give some back — never breaching your original level, still up on the run overall — and the account dies anyway.
This is the asymmetry people find hardest to internalise. Profits permanently raise the floor. Losses never lower it. A trailing drawdown converts every good day into a tighter leash, which means your risk budget shrinks precisely when you feel most confident. The moment after your best session is the most dangerous moment on the account.
The lock is the only real safety, and it is worth chasing
Load Grinding to the lock and watch the Threshold locks stat. On most firms the trail stops once the threshold reaches your original starting balance, and from then on it is fixed forever.
Before that point, every dollar of profit tightens the leash. After it, profit is finally just profit. This is why "boring until locked, then size up" beats the reverse — and why blowing up in week one on an account you had almost locked is such a common and such an expensive mistake.
Untick Stops at starting balance to see what a product with no lock looks like. The threshold simply follows you forever, and there is no point at which the account becomes safe.
How to use this before you trade
- Put in your real starting balance and your real trailing drawdown — the comparison table has the figures we have confirmed.
- Set the threshold to whichever rule your account actually uses. If you do not know, that is the first thing to go and find out.
- Enter a realistic bad week — not your best week. The question is whether the account survives your normal variance, not your highlight reel.
- If it dies, your size is wrong. Take the room-left figure into the position size calculator as your daily loss limit and size against reality instead of against the headline balance.
The number to size against is never your account balance. It is the gap between where you are now and where the threshold currently sits — and on a trailing account that gap is smaller than you think, because your good days moved it.