How to Pass the Topstep Combine: Trailing Drawdown Plan

Most Combine failures aren’t a target problem — they’re a trailing drawdown problem. Traders blow the floor on a good day, not a bad one, because they never mapped where the line actually sits.

The Topstep Trading Combine is a one-step evaluation on futures. To clear it you only have to keep three numbers in your head at once, and the whole game is knowing which one is closest to touching you right now.

The three limits you’re trading against

Every Combine account is bounded by the same three constraints. Learn them as a system, not as trivia:

Profit target — the equity gain you must reach to pass. It’s a milestone, not a deadline; there’s no reward for hitting it fast.
Daily loss limit — the most you can be down in a single session before the account is done for the day.
Trailing maximum drawdown — a floor that rises underneath your equity as you make money, then stops rising once it reaches your starting balance.

The exact figures depend on the account size you buy, and Topstep adjusts its programs periodically, so confirm the current numbers on the Topstep firm page or in your dashboard before you place a single trade. What doesn’t change is the shape of the rules — and the trailing floor is the one that ends most runs.

How the trailing floor actually moves

This is the concept that trips people up, so slow down here. Topstep’s max drawdown is end-of-day trailing: it follows your account’s closing balance, not your live intraday peak.

As your closing equity climbs, the floor climbs with it — locked to your gains at each day’s end.
Once your realized profit is large enough that the floor would rise to your original starting balance, it stops there permanently. From that point the drawdown no longer trails; it’s a fixed line at your start.

The practical trap: because it trails on the close, a big intraday spike that you give back before the bell doesn’t lift the floor — but the risk you took to get there was real. Treat every open position as something that can only hurt the floor, never help it, until it’s booked. Our trailing drawdown explainer walks through the arithmetic with worked examples, and the drawdown calculator shows exactly where your floor sits after each closing balance.

Size every trade to a fixed risk

You cannot manage three moving limits if your position size is improvising. Pick a fixed dollar risk per trade — a small, constant slice of the distance between your current equity and the trailing floor — and let that dictate contracts.

Trade micro futures (MES, MNQ, MYM) when the account is small or the floor is close. Micros let you express a view without betting the account on one stop.
Step up to minis only when your cushion above the floor is wide enough that a full stop-out is a rounding error, not a crisis.
Convert risk to size, don’t reverse-engineer it. Decide the dollars first, then the position size calculator tells you how many contracts and where the stop goes.

Fixed risk turns a losing streak into a slow bleed you can survive instead of a cliff you fall off.

Set a personal daily stop below Topstep’s

Topstep’s daily loss limit is a hard wall. You should never be the one to test it. Set your own daily stop meaningfully tighter — a level where you close the platform for the day with cushion to spare.

Two reasons this matters more than it looks:

Slippage, a runaway news candle, or one revenge trade can carry you from “near my personal stop” to “past the firm’s limit” in seconds. The gap is your safety margin.
A personal stop you actually honor is a discipline rep. The Combine is really testing whether you can stop trading on command — the profit takes care of itself if you never have the catastrophic day.

The hard part is honoring the stop when you’re tilted. Willpower is the worst enforcement mechanism there is, which is the whole reason for the last section.

Pace the target across the minimum days

There’s a minimum number of trading days before you can pass, so sprinting to the target on day two buys you nothing except a fat position you didn’t need. Reframe the target as a pace, not a finish line:

Divide the profit target by a comfortable number of days above the minimum. That per-day number should feel almost boring.
On green days, banking the day early protects the closing balance that your trailing floor locks to — you’re literally ratcheting your own safety net up.
On red days, the goal is simply to not dig the hole deeper than your personal stop. Flat is a win.

Slow pacing and fixed risk are the same discipline viewed from two angles: never let a single day matter too much.

Hand the rules to something that can’t tilt

You now have a plan — fixed risk, a personal daily stop, a paced target, and a mental map of the trailing floor. The problem is that you enforce all of it, and you enforce it worst exactly when it matters most.

This is where an enforcement layer earns its keep. Shibiki auto-journals every fill from your connected Tradovate account, tracks live edge health per strategy with a Wilson confidence interval so you know whether your system is actually working or just lucky, and — critically — pushes hard risk limits down to the broker so your daily stop and max size hold even when you’re tempted to override them. The rule you set when you were calm gets enforced when you’re not. That’s the difference between a plan and a result.