The strategy is identical for everyone who downloads it. Your account is not. Which type you buy, how its drawdown is measured, and how many you run matter more than anything else you decide. Most people choose on price and find out what it cost them later.
The operational side of running Clara Core:
The accounts Clara Core runs on, what to start with, and why.
Understanding prop firms: when and how to buy, trailing drawdown, and the rules.
The free FastPass tool, getting funded, staying funded, payouts, scaling, and costs.
VPS, safety stops, avoiding high risk, operational rules, and journaling.
Keeping the platform and every tool updated, and everything running.
Clara Core runs on NinjaTrader.
Clara Core can be used on:
Prop firms: evaluation and funded accounts
Personal cash accounts
Roth IRA / retirement accounts (self-directed, futures-enabled), potential tax-free growth on trading profits for US account holders
The strategy runs the same in all environments. Each account type carries its own rules, initial capital requirements, and risk. The sections below explain the differences in detail: what to use, what to avoid, and what we suggest you start with and why.
Using the strategy is straightforward. Once the environment is fully set up, daily operation takes only a few minutes:
Turn on your computer or VPS
Log into NinjaTrader Desktop
Connect your accounts
Reload the charts and refresh your strategies
Enable your strategies
Confirm charts are active and not frozen
Verify the strategy shows as running (active/green). If it shows yellow, the strategy is currently in a trade; this is normal if you enabled it after the session was already underway.
Once everything is confirmed, the strategy runs on its own. At that point, you can step away.
The Setup Guide covers installing NinjaTrader, full platform setup, and the complete start-to-finish routine in detailed steps.
If you are running Clara Core, or any new strategy, for the first time, we suggest you always start on a simulation account. Run it for 1 or 2 weeks and get the feel for it: see it win, see it lose, and while it trades, read how it trades on the Strategy page and what its past performance looks like on Performance. Those weeks let you test-drive the strategy at no cost and no financial risk. If, after 1 or 2 weeks, you feel the strategy works for you, move to the next step.
Whether this is your first time trading, you have run automated strategies before, or you already have 20 funded accounts, the suggestion is the same: start with one prop firm account. Mistakes stay cheap, the pressure stays manageable, and you learn how the strategy behaves before more is at stake. This is how you should approach any new strategy.
Why start with a prop firm account? It costs anywhere from $85 to $200 and comes with $2,000 to $2,500 of drawdown, the amount the account can lose before it is gone. Fund a personal cash account with $2,000 instead, and the full $2,000 is at risk. As for the type of prop firm account you should get: end of day trailing drawdown.
Cash and retirement accounts have no prop-firm rules or trailing drawdown limits, but they require more of your own capital and carry the full risk of loss. We would not trade any strategy with an account balance under $5,000. If you decide to run a retirement account, do so only with capital you can afford to lose. The performance page shows what a drawdown of that size actually feels like as a percentage of different account balances:
Risk at account size.
When choosing a prop firm connection, there are typically two options: Tradovate or Rithmic. This choice matters. NinjaTrader only allows one Rithmic connection at a time, while Tradovate allows multiple accounts across different prop firms to be connected simultaneously. This cannot be changed after purchase. To switch, you would need to close the evaluation or funded (PA) account and start over.
For users planning to scale across multiple accounts or across multiple prop firms, Tradovate is the more flexible and scalable option.
Prop firms typically include market data, so there are no additional data costs.
If using a personal cash account through NinjaTrader, a market data subscription is required. A basic CME data plan is approximately $4/month, and one subscription can be used across multiple accounts, including IRA accounts.
The honest version, before the numbers. Prop firms sell access to capital. For a fee that is a fraction of what a personal account requires, you get capital to trade and a fixed amount you can lose, and a path to trading firm money. For someone learning to run an automated strategy, that is genuinely useful, and it is where most people should start.
The trade is that you are trading inside someone else's rulebook, and that rulebook belongs to them. Rules change. Drawdown amounts, consistency requirements, minimum trading days, payout thresholds and discount levels have all changed at various firms, in some cases more than once. Anything published about a specific firm's rules or pricing, on this site or anywhere else, can be out of date by the time you read it.
That is not a reason to avoid prop firms. It is a reason to read the rules yourself, on the day you buy, and to avoid committing more money than you can afford to have sitting in accounts.
What to confirm before paying for an evaluation:
Drawdown type and amount, whether trailing is intraday, end of day, or static, on the account size you want
Consistency rule, if any, and the percentage it uses
Minimum trading days, and any requirement for a minimum number of profitable days
Payout threshold, payout schedule, and how many payouts before restrictions ease
Whether automated strategies are permitted, and whether that covers evaluations, funded accounts, or both
What happens to an account that sits inactive
Renewal billing: when the evaluation fee recurs, and at what rate
If anything is unclear, email the firm directly. They typically answer within 48 hours, and a written answer from the firm is worth more than anything published by a third party, including us.
Evaluation accounts are billed on a recurring basis (typically every 30 days). If you do not pass or fail within that period, the account renews automatically, often at a higher non-discounted rate. This is important to plan for when managing evaluations.
Once you pass and activate a funded account, the monthly evaluation fee stops. You are no longer billed for that account.
None of this is a criticism of the firms. These are structural facts worth knowing before you size an account, and they apply to any strategy, not only ours.
If you fail, or blow a funded account. Failing an evaluation does not get you banned. At almost every firm you can buy another one and start again, and that is the point: evaluation and reset fees are what the business runs on, so a trader who keeps trying is a customer, not a problem.
Blowing a funded account works the same way, as long as you did not break a rule. The account closes and you start over with a new evaluation. It helps to know what a funded account usually is: at many firms it is still a simulated account, with the firm mirroring positions in the live market at its own discretion, and some firms move consistent traders onto a live-funded account later.
None of that should change how you trade. Treat every account, simulated or live, as real money. You are building habits every day, and the habits are what carry over.
Why we do not take prop firm referrals. We do accept referral arrangements for tools we use ourselves, the trading platform, the VPS, and the IRA custodian, and every one of them is disclosed on this site. We deliberately do not accept them from prop firms, for two reasons.
The first is independence. Affiliate agreements commonly include terms restricting what the affiliate may say publicly about the company. We would rather keep the ability to tell you when a rule works against the trader.
The second is incentive. Prop firm referrals pay per account sold. We tell people not to buy more accounts than they can manage, and to wait for a discount rather than buy at full price. Being paid per account would give us a financial reason to say the opposite. We will not.
We have used Apex Trader Funding, Bulenox, and Take Profit Trader ourselves. That is a statement of our own experience, not a recommendation, and not a claim about how any firm will treat you or what its rules will be when you read this.
A caution about other people's discount links. Most prop firms publish their own discount codes on their own front page. At the time of writing, Apex uses SAVENOW, Take Profit Trader usually posts NOFEE40, and Bulenox posts current coupons on its site. Codes change, so check the firm's own page rather than relying on anything written here.
We have no financial relationship with Apex Trader Funding, Bulenox, or Take Profit Trader. We receive nothing whether you use their code, someone else's, or none at all.
One thing to hold on to: passing an evaluation is not the end goal. Long-term success is keeping the funded account and managing it correctly over time.
Most prop firms have three different ways they calculate drawdown: intraday, end of day, or static, with no trailing drawdown at all. A prop firm account fails the moment its balance touches the trailing drawdown limit, the floor. This matters for any strategy you run, not just Clara Core.
All three charts below show the same trading day. A 50K account starts with its floor at $48,000, $2,000 of available drawdown. The trade runs up $500, then $1,000, then $2,000, then falls back and closes the day with a $500 gain, moving the balance to $50,500. Watch what each rule does to the floor along the way.
The floor is recalculated in real time from your account equity, open trade profit included. The moment the trade touched +$2,000, the system registered a new high of $52,000 and moved the floor up to $50,000, instantly: $52,000 minus the $2,000 limit. The pullback changed nothing, because the floor never comes back down. You closed a winning day at +$500, and the available drawdown still shrank from $2,000 to $500: three quarters of it gone on profit you never got to keep. In practice that means your next trade can only lose $500 before the account is gone.
The floor is recalculated once per day, on the balance you actually locked in at the close. The spike to $52,000 is ignored entirely; the day ends at $50,500, so the floor moves to $48,500: $50,500 minus the $2,000 limit. Same winning day, and the full $2,000 of room is intact. This rule only counts profit you keep, which is how a normal account behaves. In practice that means your next trading day can lose the full $2,000 before the account is gone. This is the trailing drawdown to look for when you buy a prop firm account.
There is no trailing rule here at all: this is how a cash account works, and how prop accounts without a trailing rule work. The $2,000 is simply money in the account, and nothing moves the line, price up or price down. The available drawdown grew to $2,500 because the balance rose to $50,500 while the $48,000 line never moved. As the balance grows, the buffer grows with it. This is the ideal account, and it is also the expensive one: prop firms charge more for it, or you fund a cash account yourself.
On a losing day the rules stop mattering: no floor ever moves down, on any of them. The day closes at −$500 and the loss simply comes out of the available drawdown, $2,000 to $1,500, identically on intraday, end of day, and no trailing. The difference between the rules exists only on winning days.
Same day, same trade, three different distances to failure: $500, $2,000, and $2,500 of available drawdown. Intraday accounts are usually the cheaper ones to buy, and the discount is not worth it: choose end of day, or no trailing drawdown where a firm offers it. That is what we suggest, regardless of the strategy you run.
For Clara Core specifically, this is not a small detail. The strategy lets winners run and hands part of the peak back on the way out, which the give-back section on the Performance page covers, and that is exactly where an intraday rule costs the most: every high a trade touches moves the floor up before the give-back comes off. On an end-of-day account, the give-back never shrinks your available drawdown.
If you already have a prop firm account, check whether it is intraday or end of day, and know that running on an intraday rule raises the risk of failing the account on a day an end-of-day rule would have survived.
Prop firms like Apex run 90% off promotions on evaluation accounts multiple times per year, typically 1–3 times. Take Profit Trader runs 40–50% off a few times a year. We suggest waiting for major promotions to buy evaluation accounts.
We mention both of these companies because we use them. Their rules differ and have changed over time, so we will not dive into them here; researching the current rules is your task when the time comes to buy. Just remember: get an account with a trailing drawdown that is calculated end of day, not intraday.
When buying accounts, buy them responsibly, set a budget and track how much you are spending, because the cheap account is where the trap is. You get $2,000 of trailing drawdown, which is the account size, for $200. That math is simple and it looks amazing, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous.
With Apex, a 50K evaluation on a 90% discount runs anywhere from $20 to $60 depending on account type, and the funded account behind it another $85 to $125. At those small numbers the account stops feeling like money or real risk. You size up, you take on more risk because the downside feels small, and when the account dies you buy another one, because it was only $20 to $60.
Ten tries later you did not risk $20. You spent hundreds or thousands, and you spent months practicing the habits that lost the accounts. The discount is not there to save you money. It is there to sell more accounts, and the model runs on the assumption that most people will trade recklessly once the price stops hurting.
Going to repeat it here again: when buying prop firm accounts, buy them responsibly, set a budget and track how much you are spending.
There are two general approaches to passing evaluations:
1. Slower approach: Clara Core
Run the strategy normally and allow it to pass over time based on market conditions. This typically takes multiple weeks, and in some cases longer, depending on market conditions and strategy performance.
During this period, you will continue paying the monthly evaluation fee until you pass or fail.
Some traders increase risk to pass faster. This can work, but it significantly increases the probability of failing. There is a real trade-off. The performance page shows what each risk model produced month by month, which is the closest thing to a timeline you can look at before choosing one.
Keep in mind that prop firms have different rules on this. Some allow passing in a single day; others require consistency across multiple days and cap how much of the profit target can count per day. Check your firm's current evaluation rules before choosing an approach. This is not a recommendation: just an example of how traders have approached it in practice.
2. Faster approach: FastPass
Clara FastPass is a free to use, hedge-based, fully automated tool for passing prop firm evaluations quickly. Setup instructions and the FastPass tool are on the Downloads page.
FastPass fires once per day, at a time you set. The classic play is the New York open at 9:30am ET, when movement is strongest; it can also be timed to news releases or quieter conditions. The fire time, stop loss, and take profit are all user-set. It involves running two evaluation accounts simultaneously, one long and one short.
The objective is simple: if price moves directionally, one account reaches the profit target and passes, while the other reaches its drawdown limit and fails.
Also consider the account type you run: as we have said many times, end of day trailing drawdown is the account type to use with both FastPass and Clara Core. An end of day trailing drawdown account does cost more than an intraday account.
Account types can carry different evaluation rules as well: what a firm permits on an end of day trailing account it may prohibit on an intraday trailing account, or the reverse. When the firm's own page does not settle it, email the firm before you buy the accounts; in our experience they answer within 24 to 48 hours.
Understanding How It Works
FastPass performance depends on market behavior. If price moves cleanly in one direction, one account reaches the target quickly. If price becomes choppy or reverses frequently, trailing drawdown can be hit on both accounts, resulting in failure of both accounts.
Account Structure Examples
50K account ·
Profit target: $3,000 ·
Drawdown: $2,000
25K account ·
Profit target: $1,500 ·
Drawdown: $1,000
Smaller accounts may offer a more balanced structure between target and drawdown, and FastPass can be used across different account sizes. However, 50K accounts are typically preferred due to larger available drawdown, better scaling potential, and better payout structure.
FastPass is high-risk by design: you must fully understand the risk and rules before using it. Run it on two simulation accounts first, for as many sessions as it takes to see the execution live, before ever using it on a paid evaluation.
FastPass is intended for evaluation accounts only. It is not designed for funded accounts or daily automated trading. Once you move to a funded (performance / PA) account, this method is no longer applicable.
Prop-firm rules on this vary and change without notice: some firms prohibit opposite positions across evaluation accounts outright and close the accounts for it. Verify directly with your firm, in writing, before every attempt. You are responsible for understanding your prop firm's rules and verifying what is permitted before using this method.
Use responsibly.
Once an account becomes eligible for payouts, there are two general approaches: take payouts early, or build a buffer before withdrawing to safeguard the account.
How much buffer you require is a risk choice. On the $300 model the worst historical drawdown was about -$1,406; the Monte Carlo median, about -$2,477; the worst case, about -$3,706. We use the worst case ourselves, and we would not scale on anything thinner than the historical maximum.
How this looks in practice: a prop firm account's trailing drawdown only moves up, and it stops moving once it reaches a set threshold. Each firm is different, but say you have $2,000 of trailing drawdown: once you make $2,000, it stops moving up. A safety buffer would then be a balance $4,477 above your starting balance on the Monte Carlo median, or $5,706 above it on the worst case, and you would only take payouts above that balance. There is no single correct approach.
Scaling is where most traders make mistakes. The strategy can run across multiple accounts, but adding accounts increases total exposure, and most traders are not prepared for the psychological impact of scaling too quickly.
You'll see companies sell you on scaling across ten or twenty accounts. Ten times the returns sounds good, doesn't it? We won't, because that isn't a plan, it's a casino bet. Running twenty accounts doesn't mean twenty times the result; it means twenty times the exposure to the same fragile edge at the same time. If the strategy hits a rough stretch, it hits every account at once, and you've put up real capital across all of them.
Look at the risk first. Say you run 20 accounts, the maximum Apex allows, and let us say each one cost about $200 to acquire. Lose all 20 and it is not just a $4,000 loss: you pass every evaluation again, and you pay for every account again. The twenty-account pitch is sales math, built to inflate the returns you imagine on top of the thousands you already spent on a strategy, and the companies selling those strategies often earn a commission every time you buy another account.
What we actually do, and what we suggest: run one or two accounts. We start with a single prop-firm account. We add a second only in one of two situations:
The first account is profitable, past its trailing drawdown, and paying out; then we fund a second account from those profits, not from our own capital.
Or the first account is deep in drawdown: past 50%, where recovery can take a long and unknown amount of time. We've had accounts come back, so we don't abandon them; we just put a second account to work while the first digs out.
That's it. We rarely run more than two. Adding an account is driven by the balance and by the trailing drawdown being locked, never by a calendar or a discount. Whatever strategy you run, ours or anyone's, and especially a new one, we'd advise against going beyond two accounts.
More accounts is more of the same bet, not a safer one. Capital preservation first; growth is what's left after you've protected the downside.
Trade copiers. You can run the strategy individually on each account, or use a trade copier to mirror trades from one master account to multiple accounts. We do not provide trade copier software; there are free and paid options, and one commonly used paid option is Replikanto. We do not use one ourselves. A copier puts a step between the master account and the rest, and the copied accounts can fill later and slightly worse than the master, which matters most on a trailing drawdown account where every tick of room counts.
Some prop firms send compliance inquiries asking traders to describe their trading approach. This is standard practice and does not indicate a problem. We have received exactly one, from Apex. We still have accounts with them running Clara Core.
Review your prop firm's current terms to understand what is permitted.
To assist with compliance inquiries, we provide a base response template. It can be submitted to an AI model, lightly adjusted to reflect your specific risk settings, and used as a starting point. The template is available free on the Downloads page, as a PDF file to read, and an editable text file to submit if your prop firm asks. Send the text file, not the PDF: the PDF carries our name on it, and what you send your firm should carry only yours.
Prop Firm Compliance Template →Clara Core is fully automated. How you choose to operate and represent your trading approach to your prop firm is your responsibility. We cannot advise on compliance decisions for your specific firm.
Phishing Awareness
Prop firms occasionally send compliance or verification emails. Before responding to any unexpected email:
Go directly to your prop firm's official website
Contact their support team directly to verify
Confirm the email is legitimate before responding or providing any account information
Scam attempts targeting funded traders do occur. When in doubt, verify first.
The strategy is designed to run without manual intervention. Automation removes emotional decisions, but results depend on how consistently the strategy is executed.
To maintain consistency:
Take every trade the strategy fires
Do not interfere with trades while they are active
Do not skip or miss any trading days: let the strategy handle that
Risk per trade must remain fixed and predefined. There is no increasing size after wins. Risk should only be increased when your account is clear of a trailing drawdown and has a safe cushion of profit over the drawdown, measured against the median or worst case Monte Carlo drawdown projections.
The strategy runs its own calendar: it skips FOMC days, market half-days, the day after a half-day, and rollover week, one week each in March, June, September, and December, and it trades through most other conditions, including red news days and periods of high volatility.
Deviating from the strategy's rules can impact results.
Running a simulation account alongside your live accounts is one of the most underused tools in automated trading. If you have the habit of intervening in an open trade or skipping days, there is a practical solution: run one account on a sim account and let it trade every day, untouched. Any day you intervene on your prop firm or cash account, the sim keeps the record, and over time you build a track record of what the strategy did and what you did.
That comparison is the journal entry. Did you follow your rules today? If not, was it the right call? The journal shows exactly what it cost, not your memory of how the trade felt.
Over time this practice does three things:
It shows whether your manual decisions are adding or removing value from the strategy
It removes emotion from the evaluation: you are comparing numbers, not feelings
It builds the discipline to let the strategy run
Over a full year that log becomes one of the most valuable documents you have, a clear record of where discipline held and where it broke down.
A pre-built daily tracking spreadsheet is available as a free download.
Download Trade Journal Template →Don't do it.
If you have a gambler's spirit and want to run higher risk models on small accounts, chasing a lucky streak to reach payouts faster, we cannot stop you. We do not suggest it at all, and it builds bad habits over time.
If you have that itch, run the higher model on sim for 30–60 days alongside default settings first. The comparison gives you real data on whether the higher risk fits your psychology before it costs you anything.
You are responsible for your own risk. Do not trade capital you are not comfortable losing.
A stable environment is important for consistent execution.
It is important to understand that connection issues can occur between Tradovate, prop firms, and NinjaTrader. These are external systems, and we cannot control, predict, or prevent these issues. What we can do is provide guidance so you are prepared if it happens.
If NinjaTrader disconnects during a trade, your stop and exit orders remain active at the broker, so the position stays protected, provided the platform setting in the Setup Guide is in place. The full mechanism is on the Strategy page, and the Setup Guide walks through the exact recovery steps.
You can monitor or close trades directly through your broker if needed, using the Tradovate app, desktop platform, or NinjaTrader once reconnected. We suggest having the Tradovate mobile app installed for quick access in case you are away from your computer.
This is not something that happens frequently, but it does happen. The goal is not to avoid it completely, but to be prepared and know exactly what to do if it occurs.
This does not mean you need to monitor your trades during the session. You do not. The steps in Environment Management and VPS Usage below minimize the risk of interruptions. If a disconnection does happen, you may miss a trade or two; a minor inconvenience, not a crisis.
Tradovate allows you to set a maximum daily loss limit. This acts as a safety mechanism in worst-case scenarios and helps protect your account even if you are not actively monitoring the strategy. This has never been triggered while using Clara Core, but it is a best practice to have it configured.
We suggest shutting down NinjaTrader at the end of the trading week (Friday after market close) and restarting the VPS. This keeps the environment clean, reduces the chance of performance issues, and ensures a stable environment going into the next trading week.
You can also schedule Windows updates for your VPS or personal computer during weekends or specific off-hours. This prevents unexpected restarts during active trading sessions.
Platform updates: we cannot tell you when to update NinjaTrader, but here is our own practice. We update only at the end of the trading week, inside that same Friday routine. If a release lands midweek, we run the current version through Friday. After the close: disconnect the accounts, save everything, close NinjaTrader, and reopen it so it prompts the update. Update, save, shut down, and restart the VPS. Monday starts on the new version.
Using a VPS can reduce the risk of interruptions and improve execution speed. However, it does not eliminate connection issues related to Tradovate, NinjaTrader, or prop firms.
A VPS is a Windows machine in a data center with its own connection and backup power, and it keeps running even if your machine is off. Your own computer carries every interruption your home internet and power do.
On a Mac, NinjaTrader Desktop runs on Windows only, so a Windows VPS is the cleanest path to running it. There are three other options we found available online: Parallels, which is paid; VMware Fusion and UTM, which are free. We have not tested any of these tools, so do your own research and read what other users report before relying on one. Read more on this in the FAQ.
We have tested multiple VPS providers over time. We currently use Hyonix VPS, with servers in Chicago for execution speed. It has worked well in our own use, with no connectivity issues so far.
If you are test-driving Clara Core on a simulation account to see if it is for you, you can run it free and without a VPS. And if you are running only one prop firm account and have reliable internet, you should be fine as well.
For reference on capacity: even a large setup running many accounts at once fits comfortably on an HS-3 plan (~$24/month), so VPS cost stays low regardless of how many accounts you run.
Most people running one or two accounts need far less.
Smaller setups can use lower-tier plans such as:
HS-1 (~$6.50/month)
HS-2 (~$12/month)
The Hyonix link on the Downloads page is a referral link: Clara Systems may earn a commission if you use it, at no extra cost to you. A VPS is optional, but we suggest one for stability, speed, and execution efficiency.
Hyonix VPS →All information provided is for educational purposes only. Examples and scenarios are based on backtested data. They are not guarantees of future performance.