In this letter, we propose a novel adaptive reduced-rank strategy based on joint iterative optimization (JIO) of filters according to the minimization of the bit error rate (BER) cost function. The proposed optimization technique adjusts the weights of a subspace projection matrix and a reduced-rank filter jointly. We develop stochastic gradient (SG) algorithms for their adaptive implementation and introduce a novel automatic rank selection method based on the BER criterion. Simulation results for direct-sequence code-division-multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems show that the proposed adaptive algorithms significantly outperform the existing schemes.