TradeDay rules explained: end-of-day drawdown and the 45% day
TradeDay is the mirror image of the strict futures firms: the drawdown moves once a day rather than tick by tick, and there is no daily loss limit at all. Both of those are genuine advantages, and both of them remove a guardrail that was holding somebody up.
Prop firms change their terms, and rules differ by plan size, phase and promotion. TradeDay’s own rules page is authoritative — always check it against the plan you hold before you trade.
TradeDay at a glance
Where a row says “set per plan size”, the firm states that limit in dollars per account rather than as a single percentage — read it off your own account and enter it when you set the account up.
The floor trails your end-of-day balance. In practice that means your intraday swings are invisible to it: a position that runs $2,000 in your favour and closes flat leaves the line exactly where it was this morning. Only the closing balance moves it, and only upward. Compared to an intraday trail this is a different sport — it is what lets a trader hold a runner without the act of being right tightening the account.
The floor stops rising once it reaches your starting balance, and everything you make above that is buffer you cannot lose back to the trail.
No daily loss limit is not the same as no daily risk
There is no daily loss limit on this rule set. One line does all the work: the trailing drawdown. That is genuinely simpler, and it is why the firm advertises it — but it also means nothing stops you at lunchtime. At a firm with a daily limit, a bad morning ends with the platform locking you out. Here the only thing that ends a bad morning is you.
The failure mode is therefore slower and less dramatic than a daily-limit breach, and much harder to notice from inside: an account is not killed by a session, it is killed by four sessions in a row that each felt survivable. Set a personal daily stop and treat it as though the firm enforced it, because the firm is not going to.
The consistency rule, and what it does to a good week
No single day may be worth more than 45% of your total profit. That is a rule about the SHAPE of your profit, not its size, and it is the one traders discover too late — after the good day, when it cannot be undone. If your best day is above the share, the only remedy is to keep trading and grow the denominator.
Worked through: on a 45% cap, a day that books $4,000 needs total profit of about $8,900 before it is compliant. A trader who hits their target in two sessions has not passed — they have set themselves a larger target and now have to reach it without another outsized day.
Days, splits and getting paid
5 trading days on this rule set before a payout can be requested. Any day with a trade on it counts, whatever the result. The split is 80/20.
What most often ends a TradeDay account
- Treating no daily limit as permission. The absent rule was the one that used to stop you. Nothing replaced it except your own judgement on the worst day of the month.
- Front-loading the profit. A consistency rule makes one huge day into a longer wait, not a shorter one.
- Forgetting the floor still ratchets. End-of-day trailing is forgiving intraday and permanent overnight: a strong close raises the line for good.
Tracking a TradeDay account
The reason these rules are worth reading closely is that none of them are checked by your platform. Your broker shows you a balance; the firm is watching a floor and a share of profit that your balance alone does not tell you about. Edgekeeper loads this rule set onto an account and does the arithmetic on every trade you log: where the drawdown floor currently sits, how many qualifying days you have, and whether one big day has put the consistency rule between you and a payout.
It also warns you before you write the trade, not after. The point is not to be a scoreboard — it is to be the thing that says "this trade takes you inside the last third of your remaining drawdown" while you can still decide something about it.
Prop firms revise their rules regularly, and they differ by plan size, by phase and sometimes by promotion. Everything above is the rule set Edgekeeper loads for TradeDay, checked against the firm's own published rules on the date at the top of this page — but TradeDay's own page is the authority, and every field is editable on your account, so if your plan differs you can change it and the app will judge you by your numbers rather than these.
TradeDay rules: common questions
Does TradeDay have a daily loss limit?
Not on this rule set. The trailing drawdown is the only hard line, which makes the rules simpler but leaves nothing to stop a bad session except your own daily stop. Set one and treat it as the firm's.
How does the TradeDay trailing drawdown work?
It is a floor that trails your end-of-day balance, so intraday swings do not move it — only the daily close does, and only upward. The floor stops rising once it reaches your starting balance, and everything you make above that is buffer you cannot lose back to the trail.
What is the TradeDay consistency rule?
No single day may account for more than 45% of your total profit on this rule set. If your best day is over the share, the only fix is more total profit — the day itself cannot be un-traded.
When does the TradeDay trading day reset?
At 5:00 p.m. America/Chicago. That is the futures session boundary rather than local midnight, so a late-evening trade usually belongs to the next trading day — which is also when the end-of-day floor is recalculated.
Track a TradeDay account in Edgekeeper — free
These are the exact rules Edgekeeper loads. Create the account and every trade you log updates your daily loss room, your live drawdown floor, your qualifying days and your payout eligibility — and warns you before a trade takes you past a limit. One prop account is free, forever, no card.
Track a TradeDay account freeOther prop firms
New to these limits? Start with daily loss vs. trailing max drawdown.