TL;DR: A static drawdown floor is set once from your starting balance and never moves. A trailing floor follows your high-water mark, so on Propr's Classic 2-Step it sits $800 under your peak on a $10,000 account until it reaches the starting balance, then stops rising. Static floors get looser as you profit; trailing floors do not, until they lock at the starting balance, which is why our 2-Step plans failed mostly on drawdown, not on the daily limit.
What is the difference between trailing and static drawdown?
Drawdown is the fall from a high point. In a prop firm challenge, the maximum drawdown rule turns that into a floor your equity must never touch. The question is where the floor sits and whether it moves.
- Static drawdown: floor = (1 − limit) × starting balance. It is fixed for the life of the account.
- Trailing drawdown: floor = high-water mark − a fixed distance. It rises when you make new highs and never falls.
Propr uses both:
| Challenge | Max drawdown | Floor on $10,000 | Daily loss limit | Target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Classic 1-Step | 6% static | $9,400 | 3% | +10% |
| Turbo 1-Step | 3% static | $9,700 | 3% | +9% |
| Pro 1-Step | 5% static | $9,500 | 3% | +12% |
| Classic 2-Step | 8% trailing | starts at $9,200 | 5% | +5%, then +10% total |
How does a static drawdown work?
The floor is one number, fixed on day one. On a $10,000 Classic 1-Step it is $9,400, and it stays $9,400 whether you are up 1% or 9%.
That has a useful property: your room grows as you profit. At the start you have $600 of room. If equity rises to $10,900, the floor is still $9,400 and your room is $1,500. A trader who builds a cushion early can absorb a rough week near the end. The dangerous stretch of a static challenge is the beginning, when room is smallest.
The Turbo 1-Step is the extreme case. Its 3% static floor ($9,700) is the same size as its daily limit, so for the early part of the challenge, a single bad day can hit both limits at once. It is the tightest box Propr sells, and it also has the lowest fee ($50 for $10k).
How does a trailing drawdown work?
Propr's trailing rule on the Classic 2-Step: floor = high-water mark − 8% × starting balance, and the floor stops rising once it reaches the starting balance. Two details matter:
- The distance is 8% of the starting balance ($800 on $10,000), a fixed dollar amount. It is not 8% of the peak.
- Once the floor reaches $10,000, it stays there. From that point the account behaves like a static one with a floor at breakeven.
A $10,000 worked example:
| Event | High-water mark | Floor | Room below equity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start | $10,000 | $9,200 | $800 |
| Equity rises to $10,400 | $10,400 | $9,600 | $800 |
| Equity falls to $10,100 | $10,400 | $9,600 | $500 |
| Equity rises to $10,800 | $10,800 | $10,000 | $800 |
| Equity rises to $10,900 | $10,900 | $10,000 (capped) | $900 |
| Target reached at $11,000 | pass |
Look at row three. The trader is still up 1% overall, but has only $500 of room, less than at the start. That is the defining trap of trailing drawdown: profits you give back cost you room. A strategy that rallies 4% and then retraces 4% has lost half its room ($400 of $800) while showing a flat account.
The Classic 2-Step's step 1 target is +5%. Balance and high-water mark carry over into step 2, so in practice it is one continuous run to +10%, with the same trailing floor throughout.
A common misreading
Many traders compute "8% below my peak." At a $10,500 peak, 8% of the peak is $840, which suggests a floor of $9,660. The real floor is $10,500 − $800 = $9,700. The misreading overstates your room by $40 here, and by more as the peak grows. Use the starting balance, not the peak. Check Propr's rules page for exactly how the high-water mark is recorded on your account.
Is drawdown measured on balance or equity?
On Propr, breaches are judged on equity at any moment, including open positions, and a momentary touch counts. Two practical effects:
- A wick through the floor fails the challenge even if price recovers before you could react. Stops placed exactly at the floor do not protect you, because slippage and gaps carry fills past them.
- Under a trailing rule, large unrealised swings are expensive. A position that runs up and comes back can move the high-water mark and then the floor, depending on how the high-water mark is recorded, so read the firm's definition before relying on open profit.
Which type is harder to pass?
Both the size of the limit and its type matter. With no edge, the chance of reaching the target before a fixed floor is about drawdown ÷ (target + drawdown), from the gambler's ruin result. A trailing floor needs a simulation instead:
| Challenge | Zero-edge pass chance |
|---|---|
| Classic 1-Step (6% static) | about 37.5% |
| Classic 2-Step (8% trailing) | about 32% (the simple formula's 44% ignores the trailing floor) |
| Pro 1-Step (5% static) | about 29.4% |
| Turbo 1-Step (3% static) | 25% |
The trailing rule costs the 2-Step about 12 points. Its floor follows the peak until it locks at the starting balance, so every gain that is later given back shrinks the room, and a random walk gives back gains often. An 8% trailing limit ends up less forgiving than a 6% static one, while Turbo's 3% static floor remains the tightest. The full derivation is in the odds math post.
What our replays show
We replayed Trigr's house plans with a fresh challenge started on every UTC day since 2023-07-24, each run up to 365 days under Propr's exact rules. Where failed starts failed:
| Plan | Failed by daily loss | Failed by drawdown |
|---|---|---|
| Classic 1-Step Fast (6% static) | 36% | 4% |
| Turbo 1-Step Fast (3% static) | 13% | 28% |
| Turbo 1-Step Balanced | 5% | 23% |
| Classic 2-Step Fast (8% trailing) | 7% | 30% |
| Classic 2-Step Balanced | 3% | 10% |
With a wide static floor, the daily limit is what bites at aggressive sizes; at Balanced sizes drawdown takes over even there (Classic 1-Step Balanced failed 2% on daily loss and 11% on drawdown). With a tight static floor (Turbo) or a trailing one (2-Step), drawdown takes over.
These are in-sample figures: the plans were chosen with the 2025 data visible, and overlapping daily starts are not independent tries. The pass rates attached to them (59–87%) are far above what our out-of-sample research found, about 25–34% for picks scored on newer data, with 40–55% as a realistic planning figure for the slowest, smallest-size tier. Use the failure split as a map of which rule binds, not as a forecast. More in prop firm challenge pass rates.
How should your strategy change under each rule?
Under a static floor:
- Be most careful in the first days, when room is smallest. Smaller size early, normal size once a cushion exists, is a reasonable shape.
- Expect the daily limit to be your main risk if the drawdown is wide and your size is aggressive. Size for the worst day, as in the daily loss limit guide.
- On Turbo, treat the 3% as a single shared budget for both rules.
Under a trailing floor:
- Prefer strategies that take profits or trail stops, rather than ones that let large open gains round-trip. Every retracement from a new high costs room.
- The danger zone is between the start and a peak 8% up ($10,800 on $10,000). Once the floor locks at the starting balance, the account is static from there.
- Avoid stacking correlated positions that move equity sharply in both directions. Our multi-strategy agent guide covers slot correlation.
In both cases, keep leverage modest. Our best results came at 1–3x, and the position sizing guide shows why high leverage eats a tight floor through costs alone.
How Trigr fits in
Trigr's rules check, run when you deploy your own agent on Propr (a house plan skips this step: Trigr shows the plan's measured record and sizes every slot itself), measures maximum drawdown the way the connected account defines it: a static floor from the starting balance, or a trailing floor that follows the high-water mark. It replays the combined backtest with a fresh challenge on every UTC day, reports the worst drawdown against the limit. You can then press Optimize sizing, which shrinks positions over up to three re-runs per press until the backtest fits with a 0.5% margin under each limit.
On Discover › Propr, each of the four challenges has Fast, Balanced and Conservative plans, with their failure split between daily loss and drawdown, so you can see how a plan behaves under a trailing or static rule before choosing it. The trading agents docs cover setup. If you decide to take a challenge, you can open one through our Propr referral link.