How to Keep a Funded Account

Funded Account Risk Calculator

Pick your firm and account, tell the tool where the account stands today, and it hands back the one number that matters: how many dollars you can lose on the next trade and still be in the game. It cuts that number in half once you have used half your drawdown and in half again at three quarters. It counts how many losers in a row the account survives from here, and it turns your losers-per-day rule into a dollar stop for today. Trading an account we do not track? Hit Enter My Own Numbers.

This tool sizes off the drawdown you have left, because running out of it is what blows the account. It doesn't know your stop distance or your market. The Position Size Calculator turns this dollar figure into contracts.

If the firm has locked your drawdown line at the starting balance, type the locked number. The tool never guesses a lock.

The Rules of a Funded Account

The rules of a funded account are the eval's rules with something changed, and the something is different at every firm. The drawdown usually carries over at the same dollar amount. The consistency rule usually stays, but the percent can move. A daily loss limit can appear or disappear, and contract limits can loosen. And a whole set of payout rules you never saw on the eval shows up: minimum trading days, a payout buffer you have to sit above, a minimum payout amount, and the number of days between requests. A payout buffer is profit that has to stay in the account, say the first $250 above your starting balance. So the first thing I do when a funded account activates is read the funded account's rules again, before the first trade, to make sure I know every hidden thing I need to watch out for. Two lines I check every time are the number of days between payouts and the minimum payout amount, because those two decide when the account starts paying and every firm sets them differently. Make sure you read through the rules once you get funded. Every firm changes something, and the one you skip is the one that gets you.

The four rules that close accounts are the same four on both sides of the pass.

Rule 1: The Drawdown

The drawdown is the one that matters most. At most of the firms we track the funded drawdown line keeps trailing up behind you until it reaches about the starting balance and stops there for good. That means your available drawdown on day one of the funded account is the drawdown and nothing more, and it stays that small until you build a cushion above the lock.

Rule 2: How the Drawdown Line Moves

Whether the drawdown line moves at the close or in real time is the second rule, and it changes the whole way you have to size. If you are not sure which one your account runs, the trailing drawdown guide covers both.

Rule 3: The Consistency Rule

The consistency rule is the third. On the funded side it stops being a pass condition and becomes a payout condition: your biggest day cannot be more than a set share of what you are withdrawing, or the request waits. Some firms keep the eval's percent, several publish a different one for the funded account, and a couple publish none at all. The consistency rule guide has the math and a calculator for it.

Rule 4: The Daily Loss Limit

The daily loss limit is the fourth. About half the firms we track publish one on at least one eval account. What happens to it once you are funded is written in each firm's rules, sometimes as a number, sometimes as a sentence, sometimes as a rule you can turn off.

Conduct Rules

Then there are the conduct rules, which are the ones traders forget exist until an email arrives. Hold-time minimums on trades, no hedging across accounts, no copying trades that are not yours, no trading through a news release, no more than the contract limit even for a second. None of those get a warning. They get a closed account. I do not bend any of them, because bending rules is what a gambler does and the firm is not the market, it is the referee.

Funded Rules by Firm

The table below is the funded-stage drawdown type and the funded consistency percent each futures firm we track publishes. Varies by account means the same firm sells different rules on different sizes. The daily loss limit and the payout rules live on each firm's review, because most firms publish them as sentences, not numbers, and a sentence doesn't fit in a cell.

If you are picking an account with the funded rules in mind rather than the eval, the no consistency rule list and the static drawdown list show which firms sell those accounts. The payout rules get their own page: the payout process guide covers minimum days, payout buffers, caps and profit splits.

Why a Funded Account Is a Different Game

A funded account is a different beast in your head before it is different on the screen. Pulling profits out into your own bank account is a real possibility now, and the pull of that first payday makes you want to trade more. That is the whole trap. The rules did not get harder. You did. The eval was practice for the exact way you will trade when you are funded. The traders who keep their accounts are the ones who did not change a thing on the day the label changed. They kept their emotions in check, stayed patient, stayed disciplined, and let the payouts come to them instead of chasing them. The ones who lose it treat the pass as permission.

I blew my first funded account inside a week. I hit the payout buffer, which is the number you have to sit above before a payout can even be requested, and then I posted loss after loss until the account was gone. I got emotional, I made bad decisions, and none of it was the market's fault. The lesson stuck: keep emotion out of it and stick to your strategy at all times, and trade the funded account exactly like the eval that earned it. I treat every prop account like it is my own money, eval or funded, and that is most of the reason the label change doesn't change a thing for me. People ask how to pass a funded account, and that is the honest answer. You pass it by not losing it, one plain day at a time, for as long as it takes to meet the payout rules. And know going in that the run has a finish line at most firms, a payout count or a dollar total that either moves you to live or closes the account and sends you back to an eval. So the plan is to bank every payout the account allows, not to grow it forever.

The math side of the different game is how much money you really have to work with. A $50,000 account with a $2,500 drawdown is not a $50,000 account for sizing purposes. It is a $2,500 account with a $50,000 margin allowance, and the day you get funded the drawdown line usually sits at its worst. On the eval the profit target gave you a reason to push. On the funded account there is no target. There is only a drawdown line behind you, and the cushion between your balance and that line is the entire business. Grow it and everything gets easier, because the drawdown line locks at the start and every dollar of cushion above it is dollars you can afford to give back. Spend it and the account is over, no reset, a new eval and a new activation fee. What that costs and what happens next is the blowing a funded account guide's whole subject, so this page stays on the prevention side.

Risk Per Trade: The Math That Keeps You In

Risk 10% of the total drawdown or less on any one trade, in dollars, and cut that number in half once you have used half the drawdown and in half again at three quarters. That is the rule I run on every account, and the reason it works is that the drawdown is what is chasing you the whole time, so the drawdown is the number every trade has to be measured against. Not the account size, not the profit you are up, not the number of contracts. The drawdown limit is in dollars, the thing that blows the account is dollars, so the risk on a trade is a dollar figure set against the stop, and nothing else matters.

Here is the math on a $50,000 account with a $2,500 drawdown. 10% of $2,500 is $250, so $250 is the most a full-size trade can lose, and a fresh account survives ten straight losers at that size. Now take it down step by step, the way the rule does. After five losers you have used $1,250 of the $2,500, which is half, so the risk drops to $125. Five more losers at $125 uses another $625, which puts you at three quarters used, so the risk drops again to about $62. From there it takes ten more losers to blow the account. That is twenty consecutive losing trades before the account dies, on a rule that started at ten, and every one of those extra trades is a chance for the market to turn. Cutting size is not giving up. It is buying more shots at the same target with the drawdown you have left.

Why the 2% Rule Does Not Fit

Compare that with the 2% rule a lot of people quote, the one that was written for a personal account where the drawdown is your whole balance. 2% of $50,000 is $1,000 a trade. On a funded account that is 40% of the drawdown, three losers and you are gone. That is why the account-size version of the rule blows funded accounts by the thousands, and why a rule that reads as conservative on a retail account reads as reckless here. So if you are asking how much to risk on a 50K funded account, the answer is a slice of the drawdown, not a slice of the 50K, and 10% of the drawdown is the ceiling, not the target. Newer traders and intraday trailing accounts do better lower. The calculator at the top runs those size cuts on your own numbers and counts the losers you have left, and the 1% and 5% presets are there for exactly that reason.

What Your Winners Have to Pay

The last piece is what a loser buys you. If your winners pay two times what your losers cost, you can be right four times out of ten and still grow the cushion. If they pay one to one, you have to be right more often than most traders honestly are. The risk-reward calculator runs that breakeven for your own numbers. Once you have the dollar figure for a trade, the position size calculator turns it into contracts against your stop distance and the tick value of your market, which is the one thing this page's calculator deliberately doesn't do.

Your Ceiling Beneath the Firm's Rules

Three losses in a day and I stop trading. That is a hard rule, not a guideline, and it is the single rule that has kept more of my accounts alive than any other. The days that blow accounts are not the days the market beats you once. They are the days you are not performing or the market is not doing what you expect it to and you keep going anyway. Three losers is the tell that one of those two things is true. So I close the platform, come back the next day, and wait for better trading conditions, and the account is still there when I do.

Your Daily Stop Sits Under the Firm's

The firm's daily loss limit is not your daily stop. It is the point where the firm stops you. By the time you reach it you have already handed over a big slice of the drawdown in one sitting, which is the fastest way to turn a full-size account into a quarter-size one. Your ceiling has to sit under theirs, and it has to be set in dollars before the day starts, because a number you decide on mid-day is a number you will move. The calculator at the top does the arithmetic: your losers per day times your risk at today's size is your daily stop. If that figure comes out bigger than the daily loss limit the account carries on the eval, the tool flags it, because the firm's number wins every time. Where a firm publishes its funded daily loss limit as a sentence instead of a number, the tool shows you the sentence as the firm wrote it and leaves the comparison to you.

The Size Cuts

The size cuts are the other half of the ceiling. At half the drawdown used I cut position size in half, at three quarters I cut it in half again, and I keep it there until the cushion builds back. Keep in mind that the cut is not a punishment for a bad week. It is what lets you stay in the game longer, and a trader who is still in the game can recover, while a trader who kept full size until the account blew cannot recover anything. Where your account stands on those cuts today is the Drawdown Used number on the calculator, read off your balance and the drawdown line your dashboard shows.

How the Drawdown Type Changes It

Drawdown type changes how the ceiling behaves. On an end-of-day trailing account the drawdown line only moves on your closed balance, so an open winner that gives some back has not moved anything until the session closes. On an intraday trailing account the drawdown line follows your open equity in real time. A trade that runs in your favor and comes back to breakeven has still dragged it up behind you, and three of those in a day can eat your available drawdown without a single loss on a closed trade. That is why the same 10% rule needs a lower number on an intraday account, and why the trailing drawdown guide is worth a re-read the day you switch account types. Static drawdown accounts are the calm version, the drawdown line never moves, and the static drawdown list shows which firms sell them.

Keeping More Than One Account Alive

Running several funded accounts off one copier means one bad day hits every account at once, so the survival rule on a stack is the same rule as on one account, applied to the weakest account in the group. The sizing comes off the smallest drawdown in the stack, not the biggest, and the daily stop is one number for the whole copier, not one per account. Where the stack version differs is what you do when one account is closer to its drawdown limit than the others.

My rule is to pull accounts out of the copier at 50% or 75% of their drawdown instead of riding every account to the drawdown limit together. If one account has used most of its drawdown and the rest are fine, that account comes off the copier and sits, and the others keep trading. That way you do not have to blow them all. Especially with funded accounts, cutting a few out of the copier keeps those accounts alive, and you can come back later and build them up again without doing more evals and paying more activation fees. A parked account costs nothing to leave parked, as long as you know the firm's inactivity rule and trade it once inside that window, and a blown account costs a new eval. Those are the only two options, so the parking one wins.

How stacks are built, what they honestly cost, and which firms allow copying between accounts is the prop firm stacking guide's subject. Its rotation section covers how traders move accounts in and out of a copier as they get close to their drawdown limits. This page owns one idea from that: the pull-out point is a drawdown percent decided before the day, the same as everything else on a funded account.

The Mindset Shift After You Pass

Getting funded gives you confidence in your abilities, and confidence is a recipe for disaster in the markets. You may have passed your account during a week the market was trending with nice, clean price action. Then as soon as you get funded the market chops all week and stops you out until the account is gone, and you never changed a thing. The pass proved you can trade one kind of week. It did not prove you can sit through the other kind. Every day is a different day, the market and you will both react differently each day, and some days the right trade is no trade, because the conditions are bad or you are the one making bad decisions. That is why the three-loss stop exists. It takes the judgment call away from the version of you who is already tilted.

Trading Not to Lose

The don't-lose-it trap is the other side of the same coin. Some traders get funded and stop taking the setups they passed with, because now a loss feels like it costs something. A trader who is trading not to lose takes late entries, cuts winners early, and slowly bleeds the drawdown on trades that should have been left alone. The account that was supposed to be protected dies of caution. The fix is the one from earlier on this page: the eval was practice for exactly how you trade the funded account. So trade it exactly the same way, same setups, same stops, same size rule against the drawdown, and let the rule carry the fear for you.

Payout Pressure

Payout pressure is the funded-only version of overtrading. There is a payout buffer to clear, a minimum day count to reach, and a minimum payout amount to hit, and every one of those is a number that can make you take one more trade than the day deserved. That pull is what ended my first funded account. These days I hold size down until the payout buffer is clear and then some, so a few bad days do not send me back to an eval, and the extra cushion is what lets me add contracts later. Payouts open up on their own schedule. Your job is to still have the account when they do. The reverse pattern is worth naming too, because we see it often once the first withdrawal lands: a trader gets paid, feels like the cushion is house money, and gets loose for a week. It is not house money. It is the cushion between your balance and the drawdown line, and it is the only thing keeping you funded.

If You Are Moved to Live

Your firm may move you from a simulated funded account to a live one, and most of them do it at a payout count or a profit total rather than by your choice. If it does, the rules on this page do not change at all. Fills can, spreads can, and the feeling of real money leaving the account can, but the drawdown is still the number chasing you and the ceiling is still yours to keep. Lucid's Flex accounts are the plain version: after 5 payouts from an account the trader is moved live, no vote. Nothing about being live, or being on your last allowed payout, makes the 10% rule or the three-loss stop optional.

Buying an Account to Keep, Not Just to Pass

When I buy an account to keep it rather than just to pass it, the payout gaps decide it before anything else. I will not take a firm with monthly payout gaps. It has to be a shorter cycle, a week or so, and the shorter the gap between requests the better. A long gap is a long stretch of holding profit inside an account that can still be closed, and every week the profit sits there is a week the market can take it back. The fastest payout ranking is based on exactly that, and the payout process guide covers the payout rules themselves. Check the payout ceiling in the same read. A firm that caps a sim account at a handful of payouts and then closes it or moves you live is selling you a run of a known length, and the length should be part of the price.

After the payout gaps, the funded rules from earlier on this page run in order. A funded consistency rule turns your best day into a payout problem, so a firm with none at the funded stage, or a loose percent, is easier to keep paying: the no consistency rule list has them. A static or end-of-day drawdown is easier to hold than an intraday one for the reasons in the ceiling section above, and the static drawdown list covers the static side. A published funded daily loss limit is a rule you have to size under, so know before you buy whether the account you want carries one. Then the prop firm finder filters the firms we cover by drawdown type and ranks them on what matters most to you, fast payouts included, which is faster than reading fifteen sets of rules. The how to choose a prop firm guide is the long version of the same decision.

None of this replaces reading the funded account's rules the day the account activates, because the account you bought and the account you keep are governed by two documents, and the second one is the one that pays. The drawdown is what is chasing you the whole time. Pick a firm whose drawdown and whose payout rules you can live with, size every trade against that drawdown, stop when the day tells you to, and the account stays open long enough to do what you bought it for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Written and maintained by Lane Dotson, an active futures day trader with more than 13 years in the markets. More about Lane