How Does a Trailing Stop Work in Futures?

A trailing stop is a stop order whose trigger price is moved for you while the market runs in your favour, holding a set distance behind the current price and standing still once price turns back. That distance is the trail offset, and it is the whole of the configuration.

The complication in futures is that the exchange's own order-type documentation does not carry one. CME Group's client-systems wiki publishes the Globex order types in two places, five of them, and a trail is on neither list. So whatever moves your stop is sitting between you and the exchange — your platform, or the routing service it connects through — and what that thing does when it stops running is the part to understand before leaning on one.

What is a trailing stop in futures trading?

A trailing stop is a stop order with a trigger price that gets rewritten as the market moves. The CFTC's futures glossary describes the stop order as one converting to a market order once price reaches a particular level, with a sell stop sitting under the market and a buy stop over it, and it files "stop loss order" as the same instrument. A trailing stop keeps all of that and adds a rule about where the trigger goes.

The rule is the trail offset, and Sierra Chart's order-types documentation frames it as a ceiling: the order trails the market "by maintaining a difference that does not exceed the Trail Offset". That makes the repricing one-directional. A move in your favour would push the gap past the offset, so the stop is rewritten to pull it back. A move toward the stop only narrows the gap, which breaks no rule and leaves the repricing nothing to correct, so the stop either survives the pullback or gets hit.

Where the offset comes from depends on how the order was submitted. On a standalone order, the documentation says it is derived from the gap between the stop price you typed and the market price at submission, so the offset follows from where you placed the stop. On a stop attached to an entry, it comes from the attached-order stop offset setting instead.

The trail has no entry in the regulator's own vocabulary. Searched on 11 October 2026, the CFTC glossary page returns zero occurrences of "trailing"; the five hits for the shorter stem are all the words audit trail, in the glossary's Audit Trail entry and its two entries for Electronic Trading Facility.

Does CME Globex accept a trailing stop as an order type?

No. CME Group's client-systems wiki documents the Globex order types on two pages, and a trail appears on neither. Under its order-type heading the message-level page names five as supported for iLink order entry — stop limit, stop with protection, limit, market limit, and market with protection — and the futures-and-options page opens with a table of the same five.

Searched on 11 October 2026, the words trail, ratchet, OCO and bracket return zero matches in the text of both pages, and so do replace, adjust and move. The stem modif does match, 28 times on one page and 4 on the other, and every one of those is the string modificationDate inside an image URL. That is a census of two named pages and not a claim about everything CME publishes. It still settles what those pages were written to answer: they never describe a resting order's price being changed.

What the exchange does accept is a stationary stop. The futures-and-options page says an accepted stop order stays off the book until a trade occurs at the level submitted with it. It also validates the trigger price by market state, measuring a buy stop against the last trade price while trading is continuous, and against the settlement price when no last trade exists or the market is in its pre-open or no-cancel state. Once triggered, a stop limit rests as a limit order and a stop with protection rests as a market order — what each of those does to your fill is a separate question with a longer answer.

If the exchange does not move the stop, who does?

Either the routing service holds the trail on its own servers, or your platform computes it on the machine in front of you. Which one you get is a property of the connection your platform routes through, and the clearest published evidence of that is a vendor table that answers the question twice.

Quantower's order-types page is laid out as connections against capabilities. One connection's row carries "Trailing Stop (server-side)" in its order-type cell, and its bracket and OCO cells read server-side too. A different connection in the same table gets the opposite entry — "Trailing Stop is not available" — with iceberg and trailing-limit algorithmic orders filed against it instead. One platform, two routes, opposite answers — which is why "a trailing stop works like this in futures" has no single correct ending.

Our own help center says the broker-side half of this plainly: on R|Trader Pro, trailing stops, brackets and OCO orders sit on the server side, which is what lets them survive a laptop dying mid-trade.

The other arrangement is documented just as openly. Sierra Chart's order-types page states that the platform performs trailing-stop repricing itself and supports no server-modified version; the reasons it gives are that the trailing functionality trading services offer is limited, that none of them covers everything the platform's own trailing and move-to-breakeven features do, and that it integrates with several of them. Each repricing is written to its trade activity log, with a field recording the trade price behind the move.

Who holds a trailing stop, and what happens when the software closes?

Three arrangements turn up across the documentation behind this post, and the useful way to tell them apart is what survives you shutting the platform down. A server-side trailing stop carries on. A platform-managed trail keeps the stop price it last wrote and gets no further updates. A local closing order is deleted outright.

The third column is the one worth reading twice. Quantower documents its Local SL/TP feature as closing orders handled entirely on the platform side, offered for connections without native support, and its page warns that closing the platform deletes all of them and that a dropped connection deletes those belonging to that connection with no way to restore them. The feature includes an "is trailing" option, so a local trailing stop is possible, and it is the most fragile of the three.

What has to be true for a platform-managed trail to keep moving?

A platform-managed trail moves only while the software is in a position to move it. Sierra Chart's documentation sets out five conditions for its own trailing stops and chase orders, and they fall into three groups: the program has to be alive and connected, the data has to be arriving, and the window the order came from has to still be the right window.

Alive and connected. The platform has to be running and connected to the data or trading service, and for live trading specifically to the trading service. The page adds the consequence directly: lose connectivity and the trailing stop prices are not updated, and triggering actions for client-side managed orders do not fire either. A chart replay in trade simulation mode is the stated exception.

Data arriving. Real-time data has to be coming in for that symbol, and there has to be actual price movement in the chart for the stop to have anything to follow. It also asks for the stored time-and-sales record count to be at least 5000, so no trade record is missed as the platform works through prices. Delayed data still gets used — the page discusses delays as small as 100 milliseconds, and warns that prints predating a parent order's fill can reprice an attached stop unexpectedly.

The right window. The chart or Trade DOM the order was entered from has to stay open and stay set to the same symbol and the same trade account as the order. For a chart, chart trade mode has to be on.

That list is a risk inventory. A platform-managed trail is a program running on a desk, and the lid of a laptop is one of its inputs.

How much is a trail offset worth per contract?

A trail offset is a price distance, so its cost is the offset multiplied by what a point is worth on that contract. Eight ticks behind the E-mini S&P 500 is two points, and at the $12.50 tick value published on our instruments page that is $100 per contract — $300 if you are holding three.

The same offset in points lands at very different dollar amounts across contracts. A ten-point trail on the E-mini Nasdaq 100 is $200 a contract at a $5 tick value; the same ten points on the micro version of that contract is $20, because the tick there is worth 50 cents. Tick size and tick value covers why the two numbers move independently.

Offsets are not always entered in points, either. Platform documentation covers offsets and step amounts expressed in ticks, as an absolute price, or as a percentage, and the local closing-order page offers the same three. Whichever unit you use, the figure to carry in your head is the dollar one, because that is what the offset gives back from the best price the trail reached — before any slippage between the trigger and the fill.

What are triggered and step trailing stops?

Triggered and step are modifiers on the same base order. Sierra Chart documents eight trailing order types, and they resolve into one base type and three independent switches: whether the trail waits for a trigger price before it starts, whether it advances in steps, and whether it carries a limit price. On that last switch the page is explicit: the limit variant behaves identically to the plain one, except that a limit price is set for you a configured distance from the stop.

A triggered trailing stop does nothing until the trigger price is reached, and only then begins to follow price. On an order attached to an entry, the documentation says the trigger price is calculated from a trigger offset setting, and the attached order has to be at an open status before it can be triggered at all.

A step trailing stop advances in increments of a step amount. Take a long position in a contract trading at 5,000 with a ten-point offset and a four-point step: the stop sits at 4,990, and the market has to reach 5,004 before the stop is rewritten to 4,994, then 5,008 before it goes to 4,998. The step amount can be given in ticks, as a price or as a percentage, only attached orders can set one that differs from the trail offset, and the step cannot be changed once the order is submitted.

One setting is easy to miss. Move a trailing stop by hand and the platform recalculates the trail offset from your new stop price only when its "Adjust Trail Offset When Modifying Trail Order" global setting is on; with it off, the original offset survives the edit. The step variant is the exception: its offset is left alone even then.

What does a trailing stop mean on a funded account?

On a funded account two trailing lines are running at once, and only one of them is yours. The trailing stop is an order with an offset you chose. The account's trailing drawdown is a rule, it follows a different trigger, and it ends the account when it is touched.

Our drawdown line sits a fixed distance beneath the highest end-of-day balance the account has ever recorded. It steps up when a day closes above the account's previous best, never retreats, and is monitored in real time so that touching it liquidates the account immediately; once profit equals the drawdown amount it stops moving for good. The amounts by account size live on that page, which is where to read them.

The two trails answer to different things, and that produces a result worth sitting with. A position that runs thirty points your way and hands it all back before the close has moved your trailing stop several times and has left the drawdown line precisely where it started the day, because that line only rises on a closing balance. How a trailing drawdown behaves across a winning week works through the arithmetic of that gap.

One more interaction. These are simulated accounts with a real payout on the profits, and the drawdown rule is monitored for the whole session, while a platform-managed trail stops being updated the moment the connection drops. The account rule does not pause while your software reconnects — which is an argument for knowing which of the three arrangements you are on before the week you need it.

FAQ

Can you set a trailing stop that keeps working when your computer is off?

Only a server-side one. Our help center states that R|Trader Pro keeps brackets, trailing stops and OCO orders on the server side, where they survive the machine failing mid-trade, and one connection row in Quantower's order-types table lists a server-side trailing stop. The other arrangements need the software running: Sierra Chart documents that it reprices trails itself and supports no server-modified version, and Quantower's local closing orders are deleted when the platform closes.

What happens to a trailing stop if your internet connection drops?

It depends on the arrangement. A server-side trailing stop is unaffected, because the routing service does the work. A platform-managed trail stops being repriced — Sierra Chart documents that trailing stop prices go un-updated once connectivity to the data or trading service is lost — so the stop stays where it was last written. A local closing order fares worst: Quantower warns that local stops and targets on that connection are permanently deleted and cannot be restored on reconnecting.

Does a trailing stop lock in profit?

It sets a distance, which is not the same as securing a price. The CFTC glossary's stop-order entry has the order turning into a market order once the level is reached, so the fill lands at whatever is available then. The glossary also files a Globex stop logic provision, under which matching pauses momentarily if the stops that have just fired would take price outside values set in advance. The offset describes what you give back from the best price the trail reached, before slippage.

Is a trailing stop the same thing as a trailing drawdown?

No, and they trigger on different events. A trailing stop is an order you place with an offset you choose, following the traded price during the session. A trailing drawdown is an account rule: ours is anchored to the account's record closing balance, it never retreats, and a balance that touches the line ends the account on the spot. One closes a trade, the other closes the account.