> Static and trailing are not two rules but five. Answer four questions about your rule text, or see the floor under every reading still possible. - Canonical: https://hadalinstruments.com/tools/trailing-vs-static-drawdown/ --- Tool # Which drawdown rule do you actually have? Static and trailing are not two rules, they are five. A trailing limit can follow your highest **closing balance** or your highest **live equity including open trades**, and it can climb forever or stop at breakeven — and the phrase "trailing [drawdown](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/drawdown/)" in a rule document does not tell you which. Those variants place your floor in different places on the same account. Answer what your rule text actually says and this works out which one governs you; where your answers do not settle it, it computes the floor under every reading still possible and shows you the gap. Your architecture — Your architecture — Room before breach, at your size — Where your floor sits under each reading still possible Architecture | Floor | Room | Status | Static | — | — | — | End-of-day trailing, no ceiling | — | — | — | End-of-day trailing, locks at breakeven | — | — | — | Intraday trailing, no ceiling | — | — | — | Intraday trailing, locks at breakeven | — | — | — | Spread between best and worst reading — ## The five architectures - **Static** — The floor is set once from the starting balance and never moves. Profit does not raise it; the room you have is the room you started with, minus whatever you are down. - **End-of-day trailing, no ceiling** — The floor follows the highest CLOSING balance and keeps climbing for as long as the account does. An unrealised high does not move it. - **End-of-day trailing, locks at breakeven** — The floor follows the highest CLOSING balance, but stops rising once it reaches your starting balance. Past that point further profit is genuinely yours. - **Intraday trailing, no ceiling** — The floor follows the highest EQUITY including open positions. A profit spike you never banked still drags the floor up permanently. The harshest of the five. - **Intraday trailing, locks at breakeven** — Follows unrealised highs, but stops rising at the starting balance. Harsh early, then bounded. ## Why "trailing versus static" is the wrong comparison Put like that it sounds like a choice between two things, one of which is stricter. The real distance is inside the trailing family. A floor that follows closing balances and a floor that follows live equity are both called trailing, and on an account that has ever held a winning position through a spike they are not close: the second has already been dragged up by a number the trader never banked, and it does not come back down. That single detail moves the floor further than the choice between static and trailing usually does. The lock is the other half. Some rules stop the floor rising once it reaches the starting balance, which caps the damage and means profit past that point is genuinely yours. Others state no ceiling at all, and the floor climbs for as long as the account does — so a good run raises the bar for survival permanently. **It is not safe to assume yours locks.** The lock is common in one part of the market and absent in another, and the only reliable way to know is the sentence in your own document. ## An indeterminate answer is a real answer If your rule text does not settle which architecture applies, this tool will not pick one for you. Guessing would hand you a floor with false precision at exactly the moment precision matters, and the guess would be wrong roughly as often as it was right. What it does instead is compute the floor under every reading still consistent with what you have told it, and report the distance between the safest and the harshest. That spread is the quantity you are actually carrying while the question is open, and it is usually larger than people expect. It also points at the fix: the panel names which question would narrow the range most, so you know which sentence to go and look for rather than re-reading the whole agreement. ## What this does not do **WHAT THIS IS — AND WHAT IS NOT PUBLISHED.** This is method. I have measured and published nothing about prop-firm outcomes, and nothing here is a claim about any firm's conduct or results. This page names no firm and describes no firm's terms. Where this page and your rule document disagree, your rule document is the fact. Hadal carries no affiliate links and takes no commission from any firm. There is no dropdown of firms here and there never will be. Reproducing a named firm's terms would be publishing a claim about that firm, and it would go stale silently the first time the terms were edited — leaving a reader trusting a floor that had moved. Your agreement is the source; this page is the arithmetic. It also predicts nothing and computes no probability of survival. It tells you where a floor sits and how far you are from it, in the unit you trade. What you do about that stays yours. Once you know which architecture you have, the [trailing drawdown calculator](https://hadalinstruments.com/tools/trailing-drawdown-calculator/) computes the distance to the floor as it moves, and the [maximum drawdown calculator](https://hadalinstruments.com/tools/maximum-drawdown-calculator/) walks an equity curve for the decline itself. The day-scoped rule that runs alongside this one is the [daily loss limit](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/daily-loss-limit/); the rule capping what a single day may contribute is the [consistency rule](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/consistency-rule/). The term is defined at [trailing drawdown](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/trailing-drawdown/), and [why an account can be breached while closing in profit](https://hadalinstruments.com/research/why-was-my-account-breached-in-profit/) is the mechanism the intraday variant produces. Once you know which rule you are under, watching that floor ratchet in real time — and being warned before a fill breaches it rather than after — is the [Prop-Evaluee Risk Guardian](https://hadalinstruments.com/instruments/prop-evaluee-risk-guardian/). And when the answers cannot support a verdict, the panel above refuses and says why rather than picking an architecture for you — [why an instrument refuses to answer](https://hadalinstruments.com/docs/insufficient-n/) is that design, written down.