QT Funded Max Drawdown Rules (2026): Daily, Overall & How To Survive Them

QT Funded, headquartered in London, UK (operations in South Africa) (founded 2023) enforces two separate drawdown limits on every challenge and funded account: a daily drawdown that resets each new trading day and an overall drawdown that follows your account for the whole life of the program. Hit either one — even by a single tick — and the account is breached.

QT Funded is a prop trading firm and FSCA-regulated broker serving 60,000+ traders across 180+ countries, offering multiple evaluation programs with low-latency infrastructure in New York and London.

The daily drawdown caps how much your equity is allowed to fall from the highest point reached at the start of the trading day (the "day-start equity"). Crucially, QT Funded — like most modern prop firms — calculates this on EQUITY, not closing balance. That means an open trade in the red counts immediately against your daily limit, even if you have not closed it.

The practical implication: a stop-loss that gets blown past during a fast move can breach you from inside an open position. Always size such that, at the worst plausible adverse excursion, your floating loss never reaches the daily cap.

QT Funded uses one of two flavours of overall drawdown: static or trailing.

• Static — fixed at a percentage of the original starting balance. It never moves. Once your equity rises, the overall stop-loss stays where it was.

• Trailing — follows the highest equity point you ever reached on the account, until you cross a "lock" threshold (often equal to the original profit target). After lock, the trailing stop converts to a static stop at the locked level.

Trailing drawdowns are stricter for traders who run up profits and then give them back. Static drawdowns are friendlier to swing traders.

Check the exact wording on your specific QT Funded account dashboard — the rule can differ between challenge types.

Take a $100,000 QT Funded account with a 5% daily drawdown and a 10% overall drawdown.

• Daily limit: $5,000. If your equity at the start of the day is $102,000, your floor for the day is $97,000. Touching $96,999 even intraday breaches the account.

• Overall limit (static version): $90,000. No matter how high your equity goes, $89,999 ends the account.

• Overall limit (trailing version): $90,000 today, but if you push equity to $108,000, the floor lifts to $98,000. Cross the lock and it freezes at the locked value.

The two limits are simultaneous. You always have to respect whichever is closer.

1. Risk per trade. Cap risk at 0.5%–1% of the account. With a 5% daily drawdown, that gives you 5–10 losing trades of room before breach — enough to recover from a bad cluster.

2. Stop-loss every time. QT Funded accounts have been blown in seconds during news releases by traders who left positions unprotected.

3. Watch overnight gaps. If you hold over the weekend or over a major news release, gap risk can punch straight through your daily limit on the open.

4. Track the trailing stop manually. Some platforms don't visibly show the moving floor on a trailing-drawdown account. Calculate it yourself after every closed trade.

5. If you are within 1% of the overall, stop trading and request a payout (if eligible) instead of pushing.

QT Funded supports MetaTrader 5, cTrader, DXTrade, and TradeLocker, all of which display real-time equity so you can monitor both limits live.