Distance to Drawdown — The Only Number That Matters for a Prop Account

Distance to Drawdown = Net Liquidation − Trailing Floor. The Trailing Floor itself is Peak Equity − Trailing Spread (where the spread is the firm's defined trailing drawdown amount — typically $2,500 on a $50K Apex account, similar on equivalent Tradeify / MyFundedFutures / Lucid sizes).

The peak equity is the highest net liquidation your account has ever reached. The floor moves up only — never down. So if you reach $52,000 on a $50K account with a $2,500 spread, your floor is permanently $49,500 until you hit a new peak.

Tradovate's broker UI computes its own auto-liquidation floor based on an end-of-day lock. That number can sit hundreds of dollars away from the live firm rule during the session — especially if you've recently hit a new peak.

If the broker shows you $2,000 of room but the firm-portal rule shows $1,200, you are $1,200 from drawdown, not $2,000. FundedNotes uses the live firm-portal rule so the Distance to Drawdown shown is the one you're actually being evaluated against.

A distance of less than 2x your average per-trade loss is functionally a stop. One bad trade and the account closes. Most experienced traders stop trading the account at 1.5x average loss distance and switch to flatter contract sizing or step away for the day.

On a $50K account where your average loss is $300, that means slowing down at $600 distance and stopping at $450. These numbers should be personal — derive them from your actual loss history, not a generic rule.

Three options. (1) Cut contract size for the rest of the session — the same setup with one contract instead of two has half the bust risk. (2) Stop trading and wait for tomorrow — the account survives, the eval continues. (3) Press forward and try to recover — statistically the worst option, and where most accounts die.

Option 3 is where rev-trading lives. You took a loss, you're mad, you size up to recover. Distance shrinks faster. Two losses in a row at 2x size and you're busted. The data on multi-account traders is brutally consistent: option 1 or 2 wins the meta-game every time.

Distance to drawdown changes with every fill. FundedNotes refreshes each time you sync your trades, so the number you see reflects your latest fills. The drawdown gauge bar (green → gold → red) gives the at-a-glance read you need without doing the maths each time.