Two limits that fail differently
Tradeify's own documentation draws the distinction sharply, and it is the single most useful thing to understand about the firm:
- Daily Loss Limit — soft breach. Hitting it pauses trading for the session. You come back the next day with the account intact.
- Max Trailing Drawdown — hard breach. "Hitting this limit FAILS your account permanently. Unlike the Daily Loss Limit, there is no recovery from a drawdown breach."
Most sizing advice treats every limit as equally fatal. Here that is wrong in a way that costs you money. The daily limit is a cost-of-doing-business number — you will touch it occasionally and that is survivable. The drawdown is the number that actually ends things, and it deserves a wider margin than your daily rule implies.
The practical rule: size so that a full daily-limit day still leaves meaningful distance to the drawdown floor. On a 50k Growth with a $1,250 daily limit and a $2,000 drawdown, two maximum-loss days in a row do not just hurt — they end the account.
End-of-day trailing, enforced intraday
This is the detail that catches people, and Tradeify flag it themselves in a FAQ answer.
The drawdown limit updates only at market close, based on your final daily balance. That is the friendly part — an intraday spike into profit does not ratchet your threshold up behind you, and a temporary intraday loss does not move it either.
But it is enforced in real time. In their words: if your balance hits the current drawdown limit during trading, the account fails immediately, even if you might have recovered by end of day. So the threshold is static through the session while your equity is not. "End of day" describes when the number moves, not when it can kill you.
The trap is reasoning that because the limit only updates at close, an intraday dip below it is temporary. It is not. It is terminal.
The drawdown lock — the point the account gets safe
On simulated funded accounts (not evaluations), the drawdown locks once you profit beyond the drawdown amount by $100. After that it becomes a fixed floor at $100 above your starting balance and never moves again.
A 50k Growth account with a $2,000 drawdown locks when the end-of-day balance reaches $52,100. From then on the floor is $50,100 permanently. That is the moment the account stops being able to trail you into a breach, and it is a genuinely different risk regime — worth treating as a milestone in your sizing plan rather than an accounting detail.
Evaluations do not lock. Tradeify state this directly: drawdown locking applies to funded accounts only.
Worked example — MNQ on a 50k Growth
Balance $50,000. Drawdown $2,000, so the floor is $48,000. Daily loss limit $1,250. Contract cap 4 minis / 40 micros.
Take the daily limit and allow three losing trades: roughly $416 per trade. On MNQ at $2 a point, a 20-point stop risks $40 per contract, so risk allows ten contracts.
The cap binds first. Four minis is the ceiling, and ten MNQ micros is well inside 40 micros — but if you were trading full-size NQ at $20 a point, that same 20-point stop risks $400 per contract and the risk budget alone allows one. Two different instruments, two completely different answers from the same account. That is what the calculator is for.
Then sanity-check against the drawdown. Three losers at $416 is $1,248 — 62% of your entire $2,000 buffer in a single session. Survivable once. Not twice.
Account types and contract caps
- 25k — 1 mini / 10 micros.
- 50k — 4 minis / 40 micros. Growth daily loss $1,250.
- 100k — 8 minis / 80 micros. Growth daily loss $2,500.
- 150k — 12 minis / 120 micros. Growth daily loss $3,750.
Ten micros equal one mini, and combined positions are counted at that ratio. There is no scaling period — full limits are available from day one. Note that Select Evaluation has no daily loss limit at all, and 25k Lightning funded accounts have no daily loss protection either; consistency is 40% on Select evaluation, 35% on Growth and 20% on Lightning funded.
Open calculator
Presets carry Growth parameters. Select and Lightning accounts run different daily loss rules — Select Flex and Select Evaluation have none at all — so confirm your account type before relying on the daily figure.
Common questions
Does hitting the daily loss limit fail my account?
No. Tradeify classify it as a soft breach: it pauses trading for the session and you resume the next day. Only the Max Trailing Drawdown is a hard breach, and that one is permanent with no recovery.
Can I trade aggressively knowing the drawdown only updates at end of day?
No — and Tradeify answer this explicitly in their own FAQ. The limit only updates at end of day but is enforced in real time. Touching it intraday fails the account immediately.
Where do these drawdown numbers come from?
Tradeify publish a drawdown lock table rather than a drawdown table, so the per-size figures here are derived as lock minus starting balance minus $100. Their own worked example — a 50k Growth with a $2,000 drawdown locking at $52,100 — confirms the arithmetic. We would rather show you the derivation than present a computed number as a quoted one.
How does Tradeify compare on contract limits?
Tighter than most. Four minis at 50k is below Topstep and Alpha Futures at five, and below Apex at six. See the firm comparison.