Reply To: Surge Trader – Discussion/Q&A

This is to help all the traders who don’t know what a trailing drawdown is. This is the explanation they have posted on their website.

”Our Maximum Trailing Drawdown is the maximum your account can drawdown before breaching your account. The initial level is set at 5% from the starting balance of your account. As your account balance increases, the trailing maximum drawdown follows you up until you achieve a profit target of 5% in your account. Once you have achieved a 5% profit target in your account, we take off the trailing drawdown and allow our traders to draw back down to their initial starting balance before breaching the account.

This means for profitable traders the maximum trailing drawdown can be greater than 5%.

For example, if you have a $100,000 account, you can go down to $95,000 before being disqualified. Let’s say you are a profitable trader and make $4,000 in your account. Your High-Water Mark is now $104,000 (balance, so just closed trades). Your max drawdown limit will be $99,000. Next, you make an additional $1,000 in your account. So, your new High-Water Mark is $105,000. Here is where it will lock in, so as your High-Water Mark rises your max drawdown limit will stay at $100,000, which means your maximum drawdown increases beyond 5%. Let’s say you grown your account to $120,000. Your effective maximum drawdown level is now 20% (4x greater).”

I hope it helps.