Futures Trading Glossary
Plain-language definitions for the terms that matter most to prop firm and futures traders — drawdown and risk rules, copy trading mechanics, and the order types and performance metrics that show up in every trading platform.
Risk & Prop Firm Terms
Trailing Drawdown
Trailing drawdown is a prop firm loss limit that follows your account's peak equity upward, so a pullback from a high can breach you even while green.
Daily Loss Limit
A daily loss limit is the most an account may lose in one trading day before it's stopped out. Prop firms hard-enforce it; solo traders rely on discipline.
Drawdown
Drawdown is the peak-to-trough decline in an account or strategy — the umbrella term for how far equity has fallen from its highest point.
Maximum Drawdown
Maximum drawdown is the largest peak-to-trough equity decline over a period — a single worst-case statistic used to judge a strategy's risk.
High-Water Mark
A high-water mark is the highest equity value an account has ever reached — the reference peak that trailing drawdown rules measure your decline against.
Profit Target
A profit target is a set gain level — an evaluation goal to pass, or a daily/weekly stop-when-green level that locks in profit and halts trading.
Consistency Rule
A consistency rule caps how much of your total profit can come from a single day, pushing steady results over one lucky outsized session.
Prop Firm Evaluation
A prop firm evaluation is a paid test where you trade to a profit target under strict risk rules to earn a funded account. Passing is never assured.
Funded Account
A funded account lets you trade a prop firm's capital after passing its evaluation, keeping a share of profits while the firm's risk rules still apply.
Copy Trading Terms
Trade Copier
A trade copier automatically replicates trades from one account to others. Local vs cloud copiers, and where MimikTrader fits.
Copy Trading
Copy trading means one account's trades are automatically mirrored to another. There are two very different versions of it — know which one you're using.
Leader / Follower
The leader is the account you trade; followers mirror it. The leader account itself never receives a copied order.
Position Sizing
Position sizing is how many contracts you trade. In a copier, each follower gets its own multiplier so accounts of different sizes can trade the same signal.
Contract Multiplier
A futures contract's multiplier is its dollar value per point. Not to be confused with a copier's follower multiplier, which scales quantity.
Micro Futures
Micro futures are one-tenth-size versions of standard futures contracts. See the 6 supported mini/micro pairs and how cross-contract copying handles them.
Tick Size & Tick Value
Tick size is the minimum price increment a futures contract can move; tick value is what that increment is worth in dollars. A CME reference table.
Orders & Performance Metrics
OCO Order
OCO (one-cancels-the-other) pairs two working orders — usually a take profit and a stop loss — so filling one automatically cancels the other.
Bracket Order
A bracket order pairs an entry with a take profit and a stop loss submitted together, so a filled entry immediately has both exits working.
Stop Loss Order
A stop loss order triggers a market or limit exit once price reaches a set level, capping downside on an open futures position.
Partial Fill
A partial fill happens when only part of an order's quantity executes at the available price, leaving the rest working or cancelled.
Slippage
Slippage is the gap between an order's expected price and the price it actually fills at, caused by market movement or liquidity.
Flatten
Flattening closes an open position down to zero contracts, either by a trader's manual order or an automatic risk-driven close.
Profit Factor
Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss across a set of trades — a single ratio describing overall trading efficiency.
Win Rate
Win rate is the percentage of trades that closed profitably — a frequency measure that means little without average win and loss size.
Expectancy
Expectancy is the average dollar (or point) result you can expect per trade, combining win rate with average win and loss size.