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Risk Management • Visual Master Guide

Drawdown Reset & Server Time

Daily limits reset at the firm server midnight, not your local midnight — trade the wrong hour and you double-count risk.

Every firm anchors its daily window to a server clock, commonly 00:00 CE(S)T for FX firms and 17:00 CT for futures. Your day-start balance and equity are sampled at that instant. A trade opened at 23:55 and closed at 00:05 spans two daily windows and consumes loss room on both days. Daylight-saving shifts move the window by an hour twice a year. Check the platform time in the terminal, never your phone clock.

5 min • Interactive Live visual Test in Simulator
Verified vs official FAQ & Terms

Applies to 3 firms • Risk Management • Evaluation + Funded

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Deep Dive

Why this rule exists

Every firm anchors its daily window to a server clock, commonly 00:00 CE(S)T for FX firms and 17:00 CT for futures. Your day-start balance and equity are sampled at that instant. A trade opened at 23:55 and closed at 00:05 spans two daily windows and consumes loss room on both days. Daylight-saving shifts move the window by an hour twice a year. Check the platform time in the terminal, never your phone clock.

How traders get caught

Risk floors are enforced tick by tick against live equity including spread and swaps. Server-time resets and intraday peaks shrink usable room far below what the headline percent suggests.

How to stay safe

Check the Source Inspector for the exact FAQ excerpt, test your equity distance in the simulator, and keep a 20% buffer above the nearest floor.

The Formula

How it is calculated

Day Start Baseline = max(Balance, Equity) sampled at Server Midnight

Real Dollar Example

On a $100K account with 4% daily loss, server midnight samples $101,000 baseline so the floor is $96,960. You lose $3,000 before midnight and $1,500 after — each day looks small, but the second day floor already reset and the $1,500 counts fresh toward its own $4,040 room.

Common Traps & Mistakes

1

Using local time to plan reset and accidentally carrying a loser across two daily windows.

2

Holding through 00:00 server time with open drawdown that becomes the next day baseline.

3

Ignoring DST shifts that move CE(S)T relative to UTC by one hour.

Firms using this rule

Goat Funded Trader Daily reset at server midnight, FTMO Daily reset 00:00 CE(S)T on MT4/Topstep Futures session roll near 17:00
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