Clara Core runs on NinjaTrader, free to download with free unlimited sim trading. Create your account first: ninjatraderus.pxf.io/bkyoxM
In the Control Center, open Tools, then Import, then NinjaScript Add-On, and select the Clara Core file you downloaded.
Two standard NinjaTrader notices appear. First a caution that third party add-ons can affect the platform; this is NinjaTrader's boilerplate for every import. Click OK.
Then the confirmation: "NinjaTrader successfully imported all scripts contained in the NinjaScript Archive File." Click OK again. Both messages are normal; nothing about them is specific to Clara Core.
Open a 2-minute MNQ chart. This timeframe is not optional: the strategy was built and tested on 2-minute bars, and the published results come from that chart. Right-click the chart, choose Strategies, select Clara Core, and confirm. Save the workspace (Workspaces menu), and restart NinjaTrader once before the first session. A clean restart after an import is cheap insurance.
Run Clara Core on a simulation account before any real money is involved, and leave it alone for weeks rather than days. A handful of trades tells you nothing about a strategy with a negative risk-to-reward ratio; you need enough of them to see a losing stretch and decide honestly whether you can sit through one. The defaults match the published $300 risk model with the 200-point cap on. Choose your model from the performance data on the website before changing anything.
Everything below lives in one place: the Control Center, the small window with the orange NinjaTrader logo. The tabs along its bottom (Orders, Executions, Strategies, Positions, Accounts, Logs, Messages) are your dashboard; Strategies is where you enable and monitor Clara Core. The bar at the very bottom turns green when you are connected.
On newer NinjaTrader builds the same menu item is called Settings; either way it sits at the bottom of the Tools menu. Five minutes here, once, and your platform matches the way the strategy was built to run. A setting mentioned below that you cannot find simply does not exist on your build; skip it, nothing breaks.
The strategy thinks in New York time; the platform should too. After changing it, click Apply, then OK, then close and reopen NinjaTrader; the change takes effect on restart. Running the platform outside Eastern time? The strategy also has its own time zone offset setting, covered in the strategy settings section of this guide.
Anything still open gets flattened before the futures session closes. Clara Core exits its own trades by session end, so this only ever fires if something has gone genuinely wrong. One honest caveat: this runs inside NinjaTrader, so it only protects you while the platform is running. Skip it if you trade other instruments manually in the evenings on the same machine.
"Cancel exit orders when a strategy is disabled" stays UNCHECKED. This is the setting that keeps your stop and target alive at the broker if the strategy ever stops. Do not check it.
With your protective orders resting at the broker, patience is free: these connection loss values let the platform heal medium outages by itself instead of giving up in minutes. "Once per strategy" means you hear about a problem without being buried in popups.
Leave this section exactly as you found it, disabled. It is for third party integrations Clara Core does not use.
Market recording silently fills your disk over time, which on a small VPS eventually causes real problems. Everything else stays at its default.
Add the account. Choose NinjaTrader, enter your username and password, and give the connection a name you will recognize at a glance: Apex account, Cash account, Roth IRA. Apply, then OK.
Connect. Open the Connections menu again and click the account's name. You will hear the confirmation, a green dot appears to the left of the name with "disconnect" to its right, and the status bar at the bottom of the Control Center turns green.
Green bar means connected. That is your morning check, every morning.
Once your environment is set up, this is the whole morning, a few minutes before the session:
Connect your accounts. Green dot, green bar.
Enable the strategy. In the Strategies tab, click the first row, hold Shift, click the last, right-click, Enable. Every enabled strategy row turns green.
Reload the data. Right-click the strategy's chart and choose Reload All Historical Data, near the bottom of the menu. NinjaTrader warns that reloading will terminate and restart the active strategies; that is expected, click Yes. Then right-click and choose Reload NinjaScript. More than one chart open? Do both reloads on each chart.
Confirm the chart is alive. Price should be moving, not frozen. A tool that makes this obvious: right-click the chart, Indicators, scroll to BarTimer in the left list, Add, Apply, OK. A countdown appears in the bottom right corner ticking down to each bar close. If the countdown is ticking, the chart is alive.
Done. The strategy handles the session from here.
Run the strategy on its own chart and never change that chart's timeframe while the strategy is on it. If you also trade manually, do it on a separate chart.
On a VPS, when you step away, close the remote desktop WINDOW only. Do not use Shut Down inside the VPS: that turns the machine off entirely, and the strategy with it. Closing the remote window leaves the VPS and the strategy running without you.
On days the strategy's filters reject trading, a notice posts automatically to our channels: at 7:00am Eastern for calendar filters (FOMC, rollover week, half days), or at the moment a day is rejected by the market filters. Those notices reach you even if your machine is off. A label also appears on your chart once the strategy is on that day, even if you start it after 7:00am, and every skip day is visible in your own backtest.
A quiet day means no valid entry appeared. That is the system working, not failing.
Automation runs on real machines, and real machines occasionally lose internet, restart, or crash. Read this once now; it is the difference between a calm five minute fix and a panic.
Your stop loss does not live on your computer. When Clara Core places a trade, the protective orders rest at your broker's servers. If your internet dies or your computer shuts off mid-trade, the stop and target remain active at the broker. You can confirm this yourself from the broker's phone app: your position and its orders will be sitting there, normal, even with NinjaTrader completely closed. You are never trading without a stop.
What is lost while NinjaTrader is down is the active management: breakeven, trailing, and the end-of-session exit only run while the strategy is enabled. Until you recover, your trade is protected by its original stop and target, nothing more.
A short internet drop (a few minutes): NinjaTrader handles this by itself. The strategy stays enabled, the connection recovers, management continues. You will hear the connection-lost and reconnected alerts; no action needed.
A longer outage: after several failed reconnection attempts NinjaTrader stops trying and the strategy disables itself. The recovery settings that control this are in section 02.
Reconnect your account in NinjaTrader. Check "connect on startup" in the connection settings so this happens automatically.
Open the chart. The strategy will be listed but disabled; if a trade was open, the position and its resting stop and target are still live at the broker.
Cancel the resting stop and target that belong to the strategy's trade (right-click them on the chart, or use the Orders tab). NinjaTrader will not let the strategy take the position back while they are working; if you forget, it tells you exactly that when you try to enable.
Enable the strategy. Clara Core ships with start behavior "Adopt account position" and is built to be adopted-position aware: it picks up the open trade, rebuilds its own management state, and resubmits its protection. Confirm the new stop appears on the chart.
Prefer to start clean? The alternative is always available: close the position yourself, from the chart or from your broker's phone app, and enable the strategy afterward.
"Adopt account position" is the shipped setting; leave it. Never change it to "Immediately submit synchronizing orders": after a restart the strategy believes it is flat, and that setting will cancel your protective orders and close your open position at market to match.
If you cannot get to the computer: manage or close the position directly from your broker's phone app. The strategy can be sorted out later; the position cannot.
On Apex accounts, the trailing drawdown shown in the platform can report incorrectly right after a trade, especially after a fast move. The number in your Tradovate account is the actual trailing drawdown, to the cent. Before any decision that depends on remaining room, sizing up, adding an account, taking a payout, verify it there.
Sometimes after a crash or a forced close, starting NinjaTrader shows an error that only one instance can run at a time. The old process is still alive in the background. The fix takes thirty seconds:
On a VPS, do not press Ctrl+Alt+Delete; that opens the task manager on YOUR computer, not the VPS. Instead, click the search bar at the bottom of the VPS's Windows taskbar, type task manager, and open it.
Find the NinjaTrader entry in the list (look for its logo).
Right-click it and choose End task.
Start NinjaTrader normally.
Every statistic on clarasystems.io comes from a NinjaTrader backtest you can run yourself, free. This is how you check our numbers instead of taking our word. None of this is required to trade; it is here because being able to check is the point.
Connect your account (any account works, including a prop firm account).
In the Control Center: Tools, then Historical Data. Click Download in the bottom right corner.
Instrument: the current MNQ contract. MNQ contracts carry a month and year, like MNQ 09-26, and change 4 times a year. If you are not sure which is current, search "what is the current MNQ contract" online.
Start date: 05/06/2019 (MNQ's first trading day). End date: the end date printed on the performance page of the website, so your window matches ours. Interval: Minute. Data type: Last. Click Download.
Wait for it to finish completely. This is 7 years of minute prices; it can take several minutes. A "Loading data" message appears at the bottom right; do not run anything until the download is fully done and the window is idle. An incomplete download is the number one cause of wrong results.
In the Control Center: New, then Strategy Analyzer. It opens as a Backtest.
Strategy: Clara Core 26. Leave every strategy setting at its default to see the published $300 reference model (Risk Per Trade 300, Risk Cap 200, all skip days checked), or test any other model and settings you like.
Data Series: the instrument you just downloaded. Type Minute, Value 2.
Time frame: 05/06/2019 to the same end date as the website window.
Under Setup: Include commission ON, commission template NinjaTrader Brokerage Free. That is $0.95 per contract per side, $1.90 round turn, the highest of NinjaTrader's own rates: most traders pay less than the numbers we publish assume.
Click Run. When it finishes, compare: total trades, net profit, and max drawdown should match the website to the cent.
Almost always, the cause is old or incomplete price data already sitting on your computer. NinjaTrader keeps downloaded prices locally, and new downloads only fill the gaps; they never replace old data that is quietly wrong or incomplete. The backtest then runs over holes in the data and silently skips trades.
The fix is a clean data reset, confirmed with NinjaTrader support:
1. Close NinjaTrader completely.
2. Open your Documents folder, then the NinjaTrader 8 folder.
3. Delete everything inside the tmp folder and the cache folder.
4. Open the db folder. Delete these four folders only: tick, minute, day, cache. Touch nothing else in db.
5. Reopen NinjaTrader, connect, and repeat Step 1 above, letting the download finish completely before running.
Your accounts, settings, charts, and strategies are not affected; NinjaTrader rebuilds these folders automatically. After a clean reset and a complete download, your results should reproduce ours exactly. Ours did, across two machines, to the cent.
One more setting to check if results still differ: in Tools, then Options or Settings, under Market Data, make sure "Record live data as historical" is OFF. When it is on, NinjaTrader uses price data recorded on your own machine instead of the data from its servers, and your backtest will not match anyone else's.
Confirmed with NinjaTrader support: create a free NinjaTrader username, and after the standard two-week trial of live data ends, the platform keeps access to NinjaTrader's historical data servers. That is all this backtest needs. Anyone can check our numbers for free.
Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Past performance does not predict future results.
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