The rules are the product
A prop firm is not really selling capital. It is selling a set of constraints, and the price of failing one of them is the fee you already paid. Strategy gets all the attention; the rulebook does the killing. Here is the whole rulebook, in the order it tends to catch people.
1. The maximum loss, and how it moves
Every account has a floor. What varies is whether that floor stays still.
- Static — set once at your starting balance minus the maximum loss, and never recalculated. Standard on CFD firms. Profit you make is genuinely yours; it does not raise the bar behind you.
- End-of-day trailing — follows your closing balance. Make a new equity high at the close and the floor comes up by the same amount. Intraday swings are ignored.
- Intraday trailing — follows your highest unrealised equity. A trade showing +$800 that you close flat has still raised your floor by $800. This is the one that surprises people.
Trailing floors stop moving once they reach a fixed level — usually your starting balance, or starting balance plus $100 on Apex. From that point you can only lose profit you already made. Getting there is the real milestone of an evaluation, more than the profit target.
You can watch the mechanic move on your own numbers with the trailing drawdown calculator.
2. The daily loss limit
A cap on what a single day may cost. Cross it and the account is done, even if your overall balance is far above the maximum loss. On most futures firms it is measured on realised P&L at the close; on CFD firms it is often measured against the balance at the start of the day, including open positions.
The daily limit is the rule that punishes recovery trading. Nobody breaches it with their planned setup — they breach it with the trade that was supposed to undo the first two.
3. The profit target
The distance you must cover to pass. It only sounds like the main rule. In practice the target is the thing that makes traders violate the other five: the account that dies in the last $300 of a challenge is a cliché because it happens constantly.
A useful reframing: the target is not a deadline. On most evaluations there is no time limit any more, so the only way to lose the race is to end it early.
4. The consistency rule
A cap on how much of your total profit a single day may represent — typically 30% to 50%. If the rule is 30% and your best day is $1,800, you need $6,000 of total profit before that day stops blocking you.
It is usually a payout condition rather than a fail condition, which is why traders discover it at the worst possible moment: when they ask for the money. The fix is slow and boring — keep taking ordinary days until the total catches up.
The consistency calculator shows exactly how much more profit a given best day needs.
5. Minimum trading days
A floor on how many days you must trade before passing or withdrawing, often five. Harmless on its own, and occasionally useful: it stops a single lucky session from ending the evaluation before you have proved anything.
It matters most in combination. A trader who hits the target in two days now has to keep trading a live account for three more — and that is where a passed evaluation sometimes turns back into a failed one.
6. News, overnight and platform restrictions
The rules that do not involve money at all: no holding through high-impact news, no positions overnight or over the weekend, no trading certain products, no fully automated execution, one account per IP. They vary more than any other category and change more often.
They rarely cost you the account through bad trading — they cost you through ignorance. Read them once, properly, on the day you buy the account.
The rule you are not tracking is the one that gets you
None of this is complicated. It is just too much to hold in your head across three or four accounts, every day, while also trading. The trader who fails at $200 from the target did not misunderstand the trailing drawdown — they were carrying yesterday's number.
That is the entire argument for writing it down, in a journal that knows the rules rather than a spreadsheet that has to be told them.
Track the rules instead of remembering them
Propbook keeps your drawdown, daily loss, target and consistency live on every account you trade, and warns you on Telegram before a limit is crossed. Free, no card.
Open Propbook →FAQ
What is the most common reason prop accounts fail?
Breaching a loss limit, not failing to reach the target. Usually the daily loss limit after a recovery trade, or the trailing drawdown after a peak that the trader did not account for.
Do all prop firms use a trailing drawdown?
No. Futures firms mostly use trailing (intraday or end-of-day); CFD and forex firms mostly use a static maximum loss with a separate daily limit.
Does the consistency rule fail my account?
On most firms it blocks or delays the payout rather than failing the account. Check your own contract — a minority apply it to the evaluation itself.
How do I keep track of all of this?
Either a disciplined spreadsheet that you update every single day, or a journal built for it. Propbook carries the rule set for 19 firms and keeps the remaining room live for each account, free.