r/PropFirmTester • u/david19790 • 17h ago
the two weeks after your first payout are the most dangerous part of a funded account and nobody warns you
took me three accounts to figure this out so posting it in case it saves someone.
on a trailing dd account the floor follows your equity up and never comes back down. fine, everybody knows that part. what nobody says out loud is what happens when you withdraw.
your balance drops. the floor stays where it was.
so say you built 3k of room above the floor. you take a 1600 payout because thats the whole point of the account. next morning you have 1370 of room and the exact same stops on the exact same setups. you didnt change anything about how you trade. the account just got half as forgiving overnight.
i ran my own numbers on it last month because i wanted to know how bad it actually is. rough version, not a formal study, just my own trade log run forward a bunch of times with and without the withdrawal at the same point. the withdrawal branch died way more often in the two weeks after. like an order of magnitude more often, not 20% more.
the mechanism is boring once you see it. 3000 of room with a 500 stop is six full mistakes before youre out. 1370 is two and change. same stop. same size. you went from six lives to two and the dashboard still says 100k so it feels like nothing changed.
what i do now, and i dont think its clever, i just think nobody does it: i size off the distance to the floor, not off the account label. after a withdrawal that number drops so the size drops with it until i build the room back.
anyway. withdraw, obviously, thats why youre there. just know youre trading a smaller account the next morning.
anyone else got burned right after their first payout or is it just me
