If you’ve ever traded futures on a platform without reliable price alerts, you already know the frustration.
You set up on multiple monitors, step away to grab coffee or handle a quick call, and suddenly price has blasted through your level — or worse, reversed and tagged your stop while you weren’t looking. In a fast-moving ES or NQ market, those missed moments can turn a solid plan into an expensive lesson.
Today, Topstep CEO Michael Patak gave the community something traders have been waiting for.
In a recent post, Patak announced that price alerts are coming to TopstepX — and he put a timeline on it: “Give us 45 days.”
That’s the kind of straightforward commitment prop traders appreciate. No vague “coming soon.” Just a realistic window for a feature that should be table stakes on any professional-grade trading platform.
Why Price Alerts Matter So Much in Prop Trading
TopstepX was built from the ground up with discipline and risk management in mind — personal daily loss limits, profit targets, hotkeys, the Tilt indicator, built-in trade copier, and account lockouts. These tools help traders stick to a plan instead of blowing up combines through revenge trading or overleveraging.
Yet even the best risk rules are harder to follow if you can’t easily monitor key price levels when you’re not staring at the chart 100% of the time.
Price alerts would change that. Imagine:
- Getting notified the moment price hits your entry zone while you’re cooking dinner or in another room.
- An audible or mobile push when the market approaches your profit target or a key support/resistance level.
- The ability to walk away from the screens during slower periods without missing critical moves in volatile sessions.
For prop traders balancing a day job, family, or multiple accounts, this isn’t a luxury — it’s a practical edge that supports better decision-making and reduces the mental load of constant screen time.
It’s surprising (and a bit disappointing) that a modern platform like TopstepX didn’t already include robust price alerts. Many traders on forums have pointed this out as a noticeable gap. The good news? Topstep appears to be closing that gap quickly.
Trading Tones: A Nice Quiet Update
Alongside the bigger news, Topstep quietly rolled out Trading Tones — a feature that lets you upload custom audio files for various platform events.
You can now assign your own sounds to things like order fills, take-profit/stop-loss hits, position closes (in or out of the money), daily loss limits, and more. Head to Settings → Misc → Custom Sounds, upload an .mp3, .wav or similar file (max 3 MB), and you’re set.
It’s a fun, personal touch. Some traders will go meme-mode with victory sounds on profit targets or humorous “failure” tones for loss-limit breaches. Others will keep it simple and professional.
Trading Tones arrived with relatively little fanfare compared to the price alerts tease. It’s a solid quality-of-life improvement that pairs nicely with the audio notifications traders will eventually get from the upcoming alerts. But the real story here is the commitment to adding proper price alerts.
What This Says About TopstepX’s Direction
Topstep continues to iterate on TopstepX with a clear trader-first mindset. They’ve focused on tools that promote consistency — locking accounts after profit targets or loss limits, seamless trade copying, fast CME data, and now moving toward better monitoring capabilities.
Adding price alerts in the next 45 days would bring TopstepX closer to the complete package many prop traders want: execution, risk controls, and now reliable notifications in one integrated environment.
Bottom Line
Price alerts aren’t flashy, but they’re essential. They support the very discipline Topstep preaches by letting traders step away confidently while still staying connected to the market.
If you’re on TopstepX, keep an eye out over the next month and a half. This could be one of those small-but-impactful additions that makes the platform noticeably better for real-world trading.
What price levels would you set your first alerts on? Or what custom sound are you planning for Trading Tones in the meantime? Drop your thoughts below or tag @PropInformer — I’m curious to hear how the community plans to use these new (and upcoming) tools.
Trading futures is tough enough. The more a platform helps you stay disciplined without being chained to the screen, the better.
