Your threshold does not follow your balance. On an Intraday account it follows the highest your equity has ever printed, including profit you never closed.
An Apex 50K Intraday account has a $2,000 drawdown measured from $50,000, so your threshold opens at $48,000. Everyone knows that part. The part that empties accounts is what moves it.
You open a trade. It runs $1,000 in your favour. You do not close it, and it comes back to $500, where you exit. You made $500.
Your threshold moved $1,000. It moved the instant the tick printed, not when you closed. It is now $49,000 and it will never come back down. You banked $500 of profit and paid $1,000 of room for it, and you are now $500 tighter than when you started the trade.
The freeze, and the number that triggers it
On a Performance Account the threshold does eventually stop climbing. It freezes at your starting balance plus $100, so $50,100 on a 50K. That freeze engages when your peak balance reaches starting balance plus max drawdown plus $100, which is $52,100.
That $52,100 is also your Safety Net number, and it is the single most valuable milestone on the account. Below it, every new high tightens the noose. Above it, every dollar you earn is a dollar of permanent room, and every dollar you withdraw hands one back.
Before $52,100 you are running from your own threshold. After it, you are running from nothing.
The platform trap on evaluations
This is the one almost nobody knows, and it is the difference between passing and not.
On Apex evaluations, whether your threshold ever freezes depends on which platform you trade:
- On Rithmic and WealthCharts, the threshold freezes at your profit-target balance.
- On Tradovate, it never stops trailing. Not at the profit target, not ever.
Same firm, same account size, same trading, different outcome, decided by a dropdown you probably picked without thinking about it.
Apex's own FAQ makes this worse. It says the Rithmic and WealthCharts evaluations stop at "Profit Target Balance + $2,000." That sentence is wrong, and it is contradicted by the body of the same page and by Apex's own worked numbers. The threshold freezes at the profit-target balance. The $2,000 is the 50K drawdown figure leaking into a sentence where it does not belong. Do not plan around it, and do not generalize it to other account sizes.
The asymmetry on EOD accounts
If you are on an Apex End-of-Day product you may believe intraday moves cannot hurt you. Half true, and the wrong half is the dangerous one.
On EOD accounts, unrealized gains never raise your threshold. Only your closing balance does that. But unrealized losses can still breach it in real time. The line moves once a day and cuts continuously.
So an open position that drags you to your threshold at 2pm is a breach at 2pm. Recovering before the close does not undo it, because the account was already closed.
There is no reset
New Apex evaluations have no resets. They expire automatically at 6:00 PM Eastern on day 30 of a 30 consecutive calendar day access window, and a breach inside that window is permanent. There is no paid do-over on this product. That is why knowing the real number matters more here than at firms that will sell you another attempt.
Run your own account through it Every Apex plan, both drawdown types, both platform behaviours, plus the tiered daily loss limit. Free, no signup.The tiered daily loss limit
Apex Performance Accounts also carry a daily loss limit that changes size depending on how much profit you were carrying at the prior session close, and it sets your contract cap at the same time:
Both are fixed for the whole session once it opens. And Apex's own two pages disagree about the boundary: the Daily Loss Limit page prints the top tier as "$6,000 & Up" while the Scaling Levels page prints "$5,999 & Up." If you are sitting inside that band, assume the lower tier.
Unlike the drawdown, hitting the daily loss limit is a lockout, not a death. Positions flatten and you are out for the session. The account survives.
Read it yourself
Everything above is read from Apex's own help center. Rules change without notice, so check them against the source rather than trusting this page: