Stop one bad day ending your prop firm challenge

You're copying a VIP group into a challenge account. Gold runs against the calls, the SLs stack up, and one more loss takes you past the firm's daily drawdown. The challenge is over, and it often happens on a day you weren't watching the screen.

Where the limit lives

Trade By Focus has a page for this called Equity Protection. On your phone, open More and look under PROTECTION. It's marked Beta, and every customer can use it.

The page has five tabs: Account, Automations, Signals, Manual and Copier. For prop firm daily drawdown protection, the Account tab matters most. It adds up every trade on the account: bots, signal groups, copied trades, your own trades and anything you placed directly in MetaTrader. Once its limit is reached, it stops everything, including groups and automations that haven't hit a limit of their own.

Each tab has an amber Equity Protection card with a Today limit and a This week limit. You can enter each one as a percentage of balance or as a cash amount in your account's own currency. If you set both, the cash figure is the one used.

Then you choose what happens when the limit is reached:

• Stop opening new trades. Nothing new opens. Trades already running are left to finish on their own SL or TP.
• Close everything out. That section's open trades are closed on your own MT5 the moment the limit is reached, and its resting orders are cancelled.

The two choices measure the day differently. Stopping new trades looks only at your banked result, so a floating dip that recovers doesn't cost you the rest of the day. Closing out counts banked plus floating on open trades, and it fires once per period.

The day resets at your own midnight, using the timezone in your profile, or UK time if you haven't set one. The week resets at Saturday 00:00 on the same clock. A percentage is taken from the balance the period opened with. A deposit or withdrawal during the day doesn't change it.

When a limit is reached, the tab shows a countdown to the reset and two buttons, Give myself more room today and No limit until midnight. On a challenge, both of these undo the protection, so treat them carefully. Lifting the day does not lift the week. Every reached limit, top-up and lift is listed under What happened.

Each signal group and automation can also have its own limit. The group's is in its Signal settings under Equity protection, and the automation's is on its card under Daily result stop. Those limits only see their own trades. The Account tab is the one that sees the whole account.

The edges to watch

It won't close at your exact figure. Prices move in small jumps, and the close usually lands within about one jump of the figure. Bigger lot sizes make each jump worth more. If the market gaps past your figure in one move, for example at the weekly open or on a big news release, the close fills at the next price, the same way a stop loss does. Nothing can close at a price the market never offered. Because of this, set your figure with some room inside the firm's number, not right on it.

News changes the timing. For a pair you trade, from 5 minutes before a high-impact release to 15 minutes after, a loss limit starts its close earlier than usual. It can land noticeably early.

Stopping new trades doesn't cover a trade that's already open. If you chose that option, a running trade can still carry the day past your figure. Close everything out is the firmer choice.

MetaTrader trades are counted, but they can't be blocked. The Manual and Account sections count trades you placed directly in MetaTrader and can close them. They can't stop you placing another one there.

You need the latest version. If the page says "Reconnect to get the latest version", sign out of your MetaTrader 5 in the app and connect again. That updates it on its own, and you can't switch anything on until then.

There are only daily and weekly limits. The page has no other period, so you have to track your firm's overall drawdown yourself. Prop firm accounts connect like any other MT5 account, but whether your firm allows that is down to the firm's own rules.