Static drawdown
Static drawdown is a maximum-loss rule fixed to the account's starting balance: the breach floor is set once, on day one, and never rises no matter how high equity climbs.
It is one of several ways firms implement a max drawdown. A trailing drawdown moves the floor up behind the equity peak, and an end-of-day variant re-checks only at the daily close — but a static limit ignores peaks entirely. If equity touches the fixed floor, the account is breached; until then, nothing moves.
The consequence is that profits build genuine cushion. Every dollar earned is a dollar of extra room between equity and the floor, which makes static the most forgiving drawdown type: a winning start lets you absorb a later losing streak that would end a trailing account.
Example
A $100,000 account with a 10% static drawdown has a floor of $90,000, permanently. Grow the account to $112,000 and you can now lose $22,000 before an account breach. A trailing limit of the same size would have followed the peak up to a floor of $102,000 — under static rules, the extra $12,000 of headroom is real and stays yours.
In a prop-firm challenge
Firms mix drawdown types by phase: a trailing limit during the evaluation and a static one after funding is a common pattern, and some firms advertise static-throughout as a headline feature. The type changes which trades survive, so read the measurement details — equity or balance, intraday or close — before planning risk, and remember the daily loss limit still applies inside whatever room the static floor leaves. The full family of rules is compared in drawdown types explained.