A prop account can tell you when it gets close to one of the firm's lines, without you having to open anything. A sweep runs every hour and sends at most a couple of alerts per account per trading day — the firm's day, which for most futures firms begins at 5:00 PM Chicago, not at your midnight.
The three alerts
- Daily loss limit. Once 80% of the day's allowance has gone, and again if the limit itself is reached. Those are two different facts — at most firms the second one is what flattens you for the day — so they are two separate messages rather than one.
- Drawdown room low. When less than 15% of the drawdown allowance is left between your equity and the floor, or when the floor has been crossed.
- Drawdown floor locked. The one piece of good news in the set: a trailing floor has reached the point where it stops following your balance, so profit from here is room that stays. Sent once per account, ever.
They arrive in the bell, and by email or Discord if you have those on. Turn any of them off under Settings → Notifications — they live in their own Prop firm row, separate from Goals, because a goal is a target you chose and a prop rule is a line the firm set.
What the sweep can — and cannot — see
Everything it measures comes from your closed trades. It has no live price feed, so open positions are not marked to market. If your firm measures the daily limit on equity rather than realized P&L, the alert can therefore be late — never early, and never wrong about a number it states. When that applies, the message says so.
A rule your firm does not set produces no alert at all. Apex evaluations have no daily loss limit, so an Apex account never receives that one — telling you that you had used 80% of a limit you do not have would be worse than saying nothing.
And on an estimated drawdown floor — the intraday-trailing kind — an alert will say you are near the floor, and will never say you have crossed it. That floor is reconstructed from your trades and can land slightly high or slightly low, so it is never allowed to assert a failed account. See Tracking a prop-firm account for why.
“Why didn't I get an alert?”
- No trades closed on that firm day — the day-based alerts only speak about days you traded, so an account you have stopped using stops nagging you.
- The firm sets no such rule (see above).
- The category is switched off in your notification preferences.
- Your plan no longer includes prop-firm accounts. The account and its rules are kept, but the alerts stop.
- An open position is carrying the loss. Only closed trades are counted.
You will never get the same alert twice for the same trading day, even though the sweep runs hourly — each one is recorded against that day's own identity.
“What you do near the line”
On a prop dashboard there is also a card that looks at the same limit from the other direction: not where you are, but what you have historically done when you got there. It reports, from your own book only:
- how many firm days reached the daily limit, and on how many of those you kept trading afterwards;
- what those trades averaged, against the trades on the same days before the limit was reached;
- your typical position size after one, two, or three losses, as a multiple of your own usual size.
Size there means notional exposure — entry price × quantity × contract size — not risk, because most journals do not record a stop on every trade. The card stays quiet until there are enough closed trades with entry times to place them in order; a claim about your behaviour drawn from six trades would be worse than no claim. It reports what happened and does not predict what will.