Intraday trailing drawdown, explained with numbers

Take a $50,000 account with a maximum drawdown of $2,500. The liquidation threshold therefore starts at $47,500.

With an end-of-day drawdown

You open a position that runs up to +$800 of unrealised profit, then close it at +$100. At the close of the session your balance is $50,100. The new threshold becomes $47,600: it has risen by $100, exactly what you banked.

With an intraday trailing drawdown

Same day, same trade. But the threshold followed the highest point reached during the session, that is $50,800. Your threshold now sits at $48,300 — it has risen by $800 while you banked only $100.

Put another way: you lost $700 of room on a winning trade. Repeat that three times in the week and your safety margin has shrunk by $2,100 without your having taken a single loss.

Why this is structural, not incidental

A trader who lets gains run and then gives back part of the move — which is to say very nearly every trend-following strategy — mechanically builds a gap between their unrealised high and their realised balance. Under intraday trailing, that gap is taken permanently out of their margin.

There is a way round it and it is restrictive: bank very early, aim for short targets, never let a position breathe. Plenty of traders pass their evaluation that way, trading against their own method, then fail on the funded account where they go back to their style.

What to check

The trailing often stops once a certain level is reached — at the starting balance, or at the starting balance plus $100. That detail changes everything: it turns a trailing drawdown into a static one once the threshold is crossed. It is almost always written in the help centre, almost never on the pricing page.

The comparison lets you filter directly on the drawdown type. For a first account, EOD remains the easier of the two to reason about.

Figures as of August 16, 2026, recomputed on every data update. Methodology