Prop accounts: someone else’s rules, the same arithmetic
A funded account changes what happens when you break a limit, not what the limits are for. The daily loss cap, the overall drawdown cap and the profit target are the same three constraints you should already be running — except now a breach ends the account instead of the day.
The one genuinely new thing to understand is how the drawdown is measured, because firms differ and the difference is large. A static cap is a fixed floor beneath your starting balance. A trailing cap follows your highest equity, so profit raises the floor underneath you and a stretch of gains can leave you closer to failure than when you started. Trailing on closed balance and trailing on intraday equity are different again: the second can fail you on an open position that later recovers.
The practical consequence is that on a trailing account the size question changes as you go. The distance from your current equity to the floor is the number that matters, and it is not the same as the distance from your balance to the starting cap. Sizing off the wrong one of those is the most common way a passing account fails in its best week.
The second consequence is that consistency rules and minimum trading days push against the instinct to take one big swing after a drawdown. Most firms explicitly penalise a single day carrying most of the profit. That rule is unpopular and it is correct: it is the firm insisting on the same thing this course does, that the result comes from a repeatable process rather than one lucky session.
None of this replaces the arithmetic of the earlier chapters. It adds a hard external floor to it. If your per-trade risk and daily limit were already sized so that a normal losing run is survivable, the firm’s rules are simply a stricter version of a constraint you had. If they were not, the funded account will find that out faster than your own money would.
What to take away
- Prop rules are the same three constraints with harder consequences.
- Trailing drawdown moves the floor up as you profit — size against current distance to the floor.
- Consistency rules exist to stop one lucky day passing an account.
Where it goes wrong
- Sizing against the starting cap on a trailing-drawdown account.
- Ignoring whether the trail follows closed balance or intraday equity.
- Trying to recover a drawdown with one oversized day and breaching the consistency rule.
This chapter, measured against your own trades
In the app the same chapter ends in your figures rather than an example: how often you did the thing it describes, over your last ninety days. You pick one change to make, and Evidence checks afterwards whether it actually changed — from your journal, arithmetic, no opinion involved. Questions you get wrong come back a week later and again a month after that.
Open the free plan →Check that it stuck
Answers shown — in the app these are asked before you see them, and the ones you get wrong come back after a week.