Your backtest can show a closed balance of $10,756.64 while the account value including an open trade is $10,019.82. In my saved EURUSD run, the daily floor was $10,256.64. The closed balance stayed above it. The open trade took equity below it. When you inspect a challenge report, keep the row from inside the trade beside the row from its close.
The row a closed-trade list leaves out
A trader asked for a free way to replay historical gold candles and record entries and exits. That raises a useful report question: what happened to the account while the trade stayed open? It is an easy detail to miss when your report lists only entries, exits and the final balance. Those rows tell you what the trade eventually did. They may leave out the lowest account value on the way there.
Equity is the account value including the current result of open trades. Balance is the value after closed trades and account charges. A daily rule that uses equity can be crossed before the position closes. The later result cannot remove that earlier crossing from your history.
I kept both lines in the EURUSD run because that question needed a time inside the trade. A list of winning and losing closes would not answer it.
What happened in the saved run
On 19 May 2025, the saved day-start balance was $10,756.64. The daily allowance in this example was $500, giving a floor of $10,256.64. At the selected moment, one position remained open. Closed balance was still $10,756.64, but equity had fallen to $10,019.82.
The saved account values already include the commissions and swaps charged by the tester. I used those account values directly. Taking the charges off again would have changed the question and counted the same cost twice.
The graph comes from the saved tester rows. The closed balance line and the equity line share a money scale with the daily floor. Find the point where equity crosses the floor, then look at the balance at that same time. Comparing them at different times can hide the reason the daily rule was crossed.
Keep one short note beside each trade
You do not need to turn your journal into a large software project. Start by saving the time of the deepest open loss, the balance at that time, the equity at that time and the daily floor used for that day. Keep the eventual close as a separate result.
Then check your report's meaning. Does its drawdown figure follow closed balance or account equity? Does it inspect the price path while a position is open, or only sample the account at a candle close? Write the answer beside the report. A familiar label can cover a different measurement.
Keep the daily clock there too. Your chart's next candle and your firm's new day can occur at different times. Use the reset time in your own account rules when assigning a saved row to a day. For this run, I kept an empirically aligned server clock with the saved account rows.
Finally, keep the costs beside the account figures. Record the spread treatment, commission and swap used by your software. If those charges already appear in its account values, use that treatment consistently when comparing the values with the loss limit.
This was a historical simulation with ticks generated from one-minute candles, an empirically aligned clock and a continued example after the first breach on 6 May; it does not represent a continuing valid challenge account or predict a future result.
For your own report, the free Challenge Pre-Check starts with your platform, account size and daily rule. Keep the open-trade row ready so the check can answer the question your final balance leaves open.
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