Soft pause, hard cap or none: read what your daily loss limit does

The drawdown floor is cumulative and account-long. It tracks a high-water mark, moves only in the direction the firm publishes, and does not reset because a new session started. A daily loss limit measures one session against that session’s starting point and clears at the firm’s published daily reset. The two fire independently: the $1,000 session that trips a daily limit can leave the $2,000 floor with room, and a floor can end an account on a day that never approached the daily line.

So “how much can I lose today” has two answers and the smaller one governs. Measure the distance from current balance to your floor, read the published daily limit, and today’s real ceiling is whichever is closer.

Two further details decide when either line is actually touched, and firms publish them separately: whether the test runs on closing balance or on open equity, and what the platform does at the moment of the touch. Six of the eight firms whose terms are structured on this site publish an evaluation drawdown floor that is tested live against open equity, so a dip through the line that recovers by the close has still breached; the other two never state the timing. Ask the same two questions of the daily limit, because that half is published less often.

The structured rule data behind this site carries three values for a plan’s daily-loss cell (none, soft, fixed) and each one leaves you in a different state at the close of the same losing session.

Treating a soft limit as “nothing happened” is the expensive version of this mistake. A soft lockout ends the session’s earning capacity and leaves the floor wherever the losses put it, so tomorrow opens with less room than yesterday did. The account survived; the arithmetic did not.

Treating “fixed” as “account dead” is the other half of the same error, and it pushes traders off plans that would have suited them. The label tells you a machine will act at the line. Only the plan’s own wording tells you what state you are in one minute later, exactly one firm carries a fixed value in the structured phase data here, and its own help page describes an auto-liquidation that pauses the day while the account stays active.

Here is what each value does at the moment the line is touched, run against the hypothetical session below.

• None: nothing intervenes. The session can keep running until the account floor is reached, so on the hypothetical day below the remaining $1,000 of floor is fully spendable before dinner.
• Soft: the platform stops new orders for the rest of the session and the account stays active. You keep the account, and the floor stays exactly where the day’s losses left it.
• Fixed: a published dollar line triggers automatic liquidation when it is touched. Whether that closes only the day or the whole account is the firm’s own sentence. One firm in this set publishes a fixed daily limit that auto-liquidates and pauses the day while the account stays alive.

On several products the daily loss limit is not a property of the firm at all. It is a purchase-time option, and it is priced. One firm sells the limit as an ON/OFF choice made at purchase that sets the evaluation fee and then applies in both phases, with the limit switched ON being the cheaper order. Another sells it as a paid add-on on one plan family only. A third offers it at checkout, where taking it lowers the monthly fee and doubles the per-size payout cap on the funded account that follows.

The timing of that choice is load-bearing. On at least one product the option must be taken when the account is bought; adding the same limit later does not unlock the payout ceiling that came with it. That is why “does this firm have a daily loss limit” has no firm-level answer for these products. The answer is on your order confirmation and in the account’s own rule panel, and it can differ between two accounts bought from the same firm in the same week.

It also makes the trade explicit and worth pricing before you buy: a tighter daily rule in exchange for a lower fee or a higher payout ceiling. If your logged sessions never come near the line, the option costs you nothing you were using. If your method depends on one large recovery session, it is the rule most likely to close your day.

Evaluation and funded are separate values, and they disagree often. In this set one firm publishes no daily loss guard on its evaluation and a size-scaled dollar limit once the account is qualified. Another carries a fixed limit on one evaluation family and none on the other, then applies a tier-based limit to both families once funded, scaling upward as profit accumulates. Carrying the evaluation answer forward is how a trader meets a rule they never read, on the account that finally has money behind it.

“Not published for this phase” is its own state and never means “none”. In the structured phase data, one firm’s funded daily-loss value is unresolved while its evaluation value is published, the firm documents one and not the other. Treat unresolved as a number you owe yourself before the first funded trade, and take it from the live account terms rather than from the evaluation you just finished.

Take the published daily limit, set your session ceiling below it, then derive per-trade risk from your ceiling. On the hypothetical account below ($50,000 start, $2,000 floor, $1,000 published daily limit) a self-set $600 session ceiling with a $200 per-trade stop allows three full planned losses before you stop, and leaves $1,400 of floor standing at the close.

Using the published limit itself as your session stop guarantees that on your worst day the firm’s machine acts before you do, and under a fixed limit that machine liquidates at market rather than at your price. The published line is a backstop. The number you actually stop at should be smaller and chosen in advance.

On a plan with no daily loss limit the work does not disappear, it transfers. The only line left is the account floor, so the session ceiling is entirely yours to set and enforce, and $1,000 spent in one afternoon out of a $2,000 floor is half the account’s life gone before the second session starts.