Straight answers to the questions people ask most. If something here isn't clear, everything is explained in more depth across the site; start with the performance and strategy pages.
Yes. There is no payment, no subscription, and no trial that converts to paid. You fill in the short download form, and the link appears instantly on the confirmation screen. The email you give is for the annual strategy update and a heads-up when something new releases. That's it. We explain exactly why it's free on the Why Free page.
The annual strategy update and a heads-up when something new releases. That is the whole list. No weekly emails, no promotions, no selling or sharing your address.
There isn't a hidden one, but there is an honest one: Clara Core has a negative risk-to-reward ratio. Its average loss is larger than its average win, so it only makes money because it wins 70.53% of the time. That's a real edge but a fragile one, which is exactly why we give it away instead of selling it.
The Micro E-mini Nasdaq (MNQ) futures contract, during the New York session.
NinjaTrader. A free NinjaTrader account is enough to backtest it. To trade it live you'll need a funded or evaluation account through a broker or prop firm.
Virtually zero to try it: Clara Core is free, and you can run it on a free NinjaTrader simulation account from your own PC before risking a dollar. To trade it live, it depends on the path. A discounted 50K prop-firm evaluation runs roughly $200 all-in, evaluation plus activation, and gives you the firm's ~$2,000 drawdown as your working risk room. A personal cash account realistically needs $2,500–$5,000, and a retirement account $5,000 and up. Whichever path you take, plan a buffer for the drawdowns shown on the Performance page before you scale. The Structure page walks through all three paths.
No, but you need patience. Clara Core is friendly to someone starting out because execution is automated, but there is a learning curve in setup and, more importantly, in understanding the data so drawdowns don't surprise you. The documentation walks through every step. What breaks new traders isn't the setup; it's intervening the first time the system loses.
Yes. This is high-variance futures trading. You can lose money, and you can lose an evaluation or funded account. Never run it with money you can't afford to lose. Read the performance data, including the Monte Carlo section, before risking real capital.
On the $300 model, the worst historical drawdown was about -$1,406 over 2019–2026, a window that includes the pandemic, measured including the dip while a trade is open. Monte Carlo stress testing frames it three ways: the actual sequence (-$1,406), the median across 10,000 reshuffles (about -$2,545), and the conservative worst case (about -$3,825). Accounts are structured around the median figure, with a worst-case buffer held before adding risk; never sized off the single actual sequence. Drawdowns have historically lasted one to two months before recovering. Plan for that, and read the full breakdown on the Performance page.
No. Some months lose. Some stretches are flat. The strategy is profitable over years, not guaranteed over any given week or month. If you'll turn it off during a losing stretch, it won't work for you.
The honest mechanics first: every copy of Clara Core acts at the same moments, so if enough contracts ever fired at once, the effect would show up as slippage, slightly worse fills at shared entries and exits. Not as the strategy suddenly failing. MNQ is one of the most liquid futures markets in the world, and Clara Core trades it during the most liquid hours of the New York session, so it takes very large simultaneous size before that effect is even measurable.
And this is not something you have to take on faith. The live execution record on the performance page compares real fills against the backtest, in the open. If crowding ever began to matter, it would appear there first, as a widening gap, gradually and publicly, and we would say so. We would rather run that question in the open than pretend it does not exist.
Leave it alone once it's running: interfering during drawdowns is the most common way traders break a working system. Clara Core is built to run on its own, and we run ours unattended. Automation still carries technical risk (an internet drop, a platform outage, a broker connection issue). Most of it is preventable: use a wired connection rather than wifi, or better a VPS, connect first and let the platform settle before enabling, and set the platform options covered in the setup guide, which keep your stop and target resting at the broker even if NinjaTrader stops. Understand the risk and decide your own comfort level.
Protective orders for an open position rest on the broker's servers, so an existing stop does not vanish when your machine drops. After a short drop, the platform reconnects and the strategy continues on its own. After a longer outage, NinjaTrader disables the strategy; when you re-enable it, Clara Core adopts the open position and re-attaches its management, and the Setup Guide walks the exact steps. The Environment Management section on the Structure page covers how to minimize this, including a VPS for stability.
No, but it's recommended for anyone running live. A VPS gives you a stable connection and consistent execution regardless of your home internet or power. The Environment section on the Structure page covers the setup; our partner link is on Downloads & Resources.
We cannot advise on platform decisions, but here is our own practice: we wait one to two weeks after any NinjaTrader release before installing it. The user base is large, so bugs are usually found and patched fast, and letting the first wave find them costs nothing. More on the operating environment is on the Structure page.
Four inputs: your risk per trade, the risk cap (capped at 200 points; you can set it lower to be more conservative, but not higher), the skip day filters, and a time zone offset. Everything in the strategy logic itself is locked. If you change any default, run a backtest with your settings and compare it against the defaults first; the defaults are the published record.
Because the settings are tethered to the published backtest. If internal parameters were open, any copy could be tuned into a different strategy that no longer matches the published record, and the statistics would stop meaning anything. Locked code is what guarantees every download behaves like the data you evaluated.
Yes. Different firms have different rules on automation, so always confirm what your firm permits before you begin. Clara Core closes all positions before market close, which helps with rules that require flat-by-close.
Yes, and across every account type it supports: prop firm evaluations and funded accounts of any size, personal cash accounts, Roth IRA accounts, and free NinjaTrader simulation accounts, all at the same time. But remember that more accounts means more total exposure. Scale slowly, and only after you've built a real buffer. The Structure page explains when to scale.
No. Clara Core is licensed for personal use only. You may not resell, redistribute, decompile, or share the strategy file or its code. What you can share, freely, is the website and our socials: anyone you send here can download the strategy themselves, free.
No. Only download Clara Core from clarasystems.io. Anyone can put our name on a file, and a copy from any other source can be altered or carry malware. The locked file protects the strategy logic, but we cannot vouch for a file that never came from us.
Yes, for the tools we use ourselves: NinjaTrader, Hyonix VPS, and Equity Trust, all on the Downloads & Resources page. Using them costs you nothing extra and supports the work. We do not publish prop firm referral links or discount codes; the next question explains why.
Two reasons. Affiliate agreements commonly restrict what the affiliate can say publicly about the company, and we would rather keep the ability to tell you when a rule works against the trader. And prop firm referrals pay per account sold, which would give us a financial reason to encourage buying more accounts than you should.
Use the firm's own public discount code instead. Apex, Bulenox and Take Profit Trader all publish current codes on their own front pages. The full reasoning, including a caution about using third-party codes, is on the Structure page.
Yes. A free compliance template, for anyone whose prop firm asks about their trading approach, is available on the Downloads & Resources page. It comes as a PDF and an editable text file; you fill in your own details and describe your own operation.
FastPass is a free hedging tool for attempting to pass prop-firm evaluations quickly, currently in testing. It takes two evaluation accounts and enters one long and one short at the same moment, at a time you set: typically the market open into a fast directional move, sometimes around a high-impact news release (some firms restrict trading around news; check yours), and it can be run in quieter conditions too. Test it on two simulation accounts first to find what fits your outcome. One account can pass while the other blows up, and a choppy session can blow both. It is eval-only, high risk, has no edge, and works best on accounts bought at a deep discount, ideally 90% off. Read the full breakdown on the Structure page.
Each release carries a one-year usage window. When it ends, the strategy stops trading and shows a notice on the chart; the current version is always a free re-download. It keeps every running copy on the latest logic and settings, and keeps old files from circulating for years. Beyond that, we ship at most one corrected version per cycle, before year end, and only if something actually needs work. As much as we have watched this run live across real accounts, errors can still happen, so our standard is simple: test on the backtest first, then on live accounts, with every entry and exit condition exercised, and monitor live behavior against the code logic every trading day. That monitoring is our job, not yours; you do not need to watch for something going wrong with the strategy logic. If a corrected version ever ships, it is announced through the channels and delivered through the same free download, which is exactly why following along and staying up to date matters. Realistic and honest beats pretending software never breaks.
Yes, for free. With a free NinjaTrader account you can download the historical MNQ data and run the backtest yourself in a few minutes, no paid data subscription required. There is nothing in it for us when you run it. It is simply how you confirm the numbers instead of taking our word.
Because it is the same platform you run the strategy on, and the same one you can verify it in. NinjaTrader exports the full trade-by-trade log, and its free backtester reaches back to MNQ's first trading day in May 2019, so the published window and the window you can reproduce are identical. We run the same logic in TradingView as an independent cross-check, and show both on the performance page. Two platforms, each doing what it does best: NinjaTrader for the record you can reproduce, TradingView for a second opinion, and its server-side alerts are what post our trade confirmations to Discord and Telegram, even when our own machines are off.
Both runs carry the same $1.90 round-turn cost, so the differences come from the platforms themselves: TradingView uses a continuous synthetic contract while NinjaTrader uses the real front-month contract with rollovers, so an occasional candle closes differently. Across the roughly 1,263 trades on the window both platforms cover, they agree on all but one entry, about 99.9%, with net results within $78. The full side-by-side is on the performance page.
No. Clara Core is a self-directed system, everything you need is documented across this site. There are no trade signals to follow and no support desk. That's a deliberate part of keeping it free.
Yes. Each release runs for one year, then stops trading and points you to the current version, always a free re-download. It also carries the date-based skip calendars (FOMC and similar), which the annual release keeps current. The full explanation is under "Why does Clara Core expire every year?"
Through the email you provide at download and through our social channels. We don't send promotional emails.
Possibly, but only for a future product that meets a higher standard than Clara Core, and never for Clara Core itself, which stays free. If we ever price something, you'll already know it cleared the standard we describe on the Why Free page.
A final round of site corrections is in progress. Data, downloads, and page formatting on desktop and mobile are being fine-tuned. If something looks off, it is being corrected.