For prop futures traders
Stop giving it all back.
Every journal tells you what you did after you blew up. Ballast is the layer that tells you before you do.
The trailing drawdown is the whole account, as far as your survival is concerned. A $1,000 stop is not 1% risk — it is a third of everything keeping you alive. Ballast shows risk against that number, never the headline one.
It watches your trailing-drawdown cushion live, catches the revenge trade in the moment, and grades the one thing that actually decides whether the account survives: whether you followed your own rules.
Built by a trader who spent ten years learning this the hard way
No affiliate money
The rule book documents firms this site takes nothing from. Refusing that money is the reason the numbers can be trusted.
It will tell you not to buy
The readiness check returns “your edge is not established yet” when that is what your trades say. It costs a sale. It stays.
Findings keep their caveats
Sample sizes, confidence, and what could still be luck are published next to every result — including the ones that went the wrong way.
Three things every journal gets wrong
Trailing-drawdown cushion, live
Prop accounts live or die by how much room you had to the floor when you took the trade. Ballast puts that number front and centre — and knows the difference between intraday and end-of-day trailing, which moves the floor by thousands.
Revenge caught in the moment
One tap says how the trade went — by the book, right idea but sloppy, off plan, or chased — and one says how you felt taking it. Then Ballast measures what each of those actually costs you, and warns you inside the window after a loss where accounts die.
Judged on rules, not P&L
A green day where you broke your rules is a failing day. Ballast reports what the trades you took off plan cost against the ones you took by the book — your own record, not a grade — and points at the setting that would have stopped them.
Every prop firm’s drawdown rules, with sources and dates
The actual numbers — not a comparison table built to sell you an account. Each row carries where it came from and when it was last verified, because these rules change and a stale number is worse than none.
The finding no comparison site has
On the same firm and the same account size, how you connect changes the intraday trailing threshold:
- Funded
- stops at start + $100
- Eval / Rithmic
- fixes at target balance
- Eval / Tradovate
- trails indefinitely
Four tools that answer a real question
Cushion calculator
How much room do I actually have?
Your real distance to the trailing floor, and the biggest size you can take without threatening it.
Challenge readiness
Should I even buy that evaluation?
Thousands of rule-aware simulations run from your own trades. If the edge is not there yet, it says so — and saves you the fee.
Behavioural analysis
What are my revenge trades costing me?
Your win rate is an average, and averages hide what is emptying the account. Tag the trades and the damage separates out.
Live session console
What does the engine actually do?
The give-back spiral, played out step by step, with the warnings firing where they would fire in the real thing.
New to any of this? The trailing drawdown, explained plainly — the rule that ends most prop accounts.
The add-on is not on sale yet.
It tells a trader how much room is left before the account dies. A tool that is only usually right about that is worse than no tool, so it ships when it has reconciled to the dollar against a live account and run four clean weeks — not before.