Refine-My-Trade is now available. See what it can tell you that NinjaTrader’s Trade Performance report can’t →
Strategy Optimisation and Prop Firm Rule Testing for NinjaTrader 8
Two questions NinjaTrader’s reports weren’t built to answer
Is the strategy actually any good? And would it survive your prop firm’s rules?
Most prop traders can tell you the day it went wrong. Far fewer can tell you why.
Was it the trailing drawdown, creeping up behind a good morning until one ordinary pullback touched it? Was it a daily loss limit you didn’t notice you’d hit? Was it the consistency rule quietly holding back a payout you’d already earned? (You can check that one now with our free consistency rule calculator.)
Or was the strategy fine all along, and your exits were leaving most of the move on the table?
And on the other side of it: are you trading your best hours, or funding them with your worst? Does a losing run make the next trade worse, or does it just feel that way? Would stopping the day at a set profit have paid, or cost you?
NinjaTrader will not tell you any of it. It reports what filled. It has no opinion on whether a different target would have served you better, no view on which hour of the day earns your money, and it knows nothing at all about your prop firm’s rules.
That’s what we built Refine-My-Trade for.
What Refine-My-Trade does for NinjaTrader prop traders
Refine-My-Trade is a NinjaTrader 8 AddOn that records your trades tick by tick as they happen, then answers two questions that matter to a prop trader:
Is the strategy any good? And would it survive your prop firm’s rules?
It keeps those two questions apart on purpose. There is an Optimise mode that ignores prop firm rules entirely and judges the strategy on its own merit, because mixing the two is how you end up rebuilding a strategy that was never the problem, or passing an evaluation with a method that was never going to survive a funded account.
It tests your exits against what actually happened
Every trade is recorded with its full intra-trade price path. Not the bar high and low. Every tick between your entry fill and your exit fill.
That means Refine-My-Trade can replay your own trades at every target and stop level and tell you what each would have produced. Not a backtest of a different strategy. Your trades, your entries, your timing, with one thing changed.
You get total P&L at each level, the change against what you actually did, how many trades it helps and hurts, and the deepest single position you would have had to sit through to get there. That last column matters: a wider target that adds profit is worthless if it needs you to hold a drawdown that would have ended the account.
Trailing stops and break-even stops get the same treatment, neither of which NinjaTrader can test against your own fills. Break-even is a trade-off almost nobody measures, saving some losers while scratching some winners, so both counts sit side by side rather than one being assumed to outweigh the other.
And when nothing beats what you already do, it says so. “No change” is a real answer, and it means alternatives were tested and yours won.
It finds the hours and the days that earn your money
Every trade is bucketed by hour and by weekday, then measured properly: profit per trade, win rate, how far the average trade ran in your favour and against you, and how much of the average peak you actually kept.
That last figure is the one that separates two very different problems. A low share kept alongside a healthy run in your favour means the setups are fine and the exits are giving it back. A weak run in your favour means the entries were not there to begin with. Same disappointing P&L, opposite fixes.
Buckets with too few trades are dimmed and labelled rather than quietly included, because ten trades in an hour band is not a pattern and no headline should rest on it.
The questions traders argue about get the same treatment. Would stopping the day at a fixed profit or loss have paid, tested at every level against the days you actually traded? Does your trading really deteriorate after two or three losses, measured within the day rather than across the week? Both answered with numbers, and both honest about when the sample is still too thin to answer.
A recommendation at the top, the whole table underneath
Analysis you have to interpret is analysis most people never use.
So every run opens with a verdict and a short list of suggestions, ordered by what matters most, each one saying what is true, why it matters and what to do about it. Underneath sits a management summary with one line per decision: stop, target, trailing stop, break-even, daily stop, daily profit, best time, what happens after losses, and a badge against each: no change needed, worth testing, or already what you do.
For most sessions that is the whole answer. Read four lines, know what to change.
Every one of those verdicts is backed by the table that produced it, one click down: every target level, every trailing distance, every break-even trigger, every hour and weekday, with the full working.
Take the headline when you are busy. Open the tables when you want to argue with it.
It models your prop firm’s rules, not a generic version
Here’s the part that doesn’t exist anywhere else in NinjaTrader, and the reason we built the tool at all.
Refine-My-Trade lets you enter your own account’s rules (starting balance, drawdown type and amount, where the trailing drawdown stops following you up and where it locks, daily loss limit and its consequence, scaling levels, consistency limit, minimum trading days, position caps, payout thresholds) and then applies them to the trades you actually took.
Evaluation and funded rules are set separately, side by side on one screen, because prop firms apply different numbers to each.
We deliberately ship a neutral template rather than presets branded to particular prop firms. Prop firm rules change, and they differ by account size, account type and promotion. A preset that has gone stale is worse than no preset at all, because you would trust it. Take the numbers from your own account dashboard once, and every analysis after that is measured against your real constraints.
It replays your whole NinjaTrader session as real prop firm accounts
This is the feature we think traders will open first.
Refine-My-Trade takes your captured trades and replays them as a sequence of accounts. It starts a fresh evaluation, applies your evaluation rules until the account passes or blows, opens a funded account the next trading day, and carries on.
You get a day-by-day table for each account: balance, where the drawdown floor sat, your consistency position, and every payout with its amount. Where a payout was possible but didn’t happen, it tells you which rule held it back and by how much: not enough qualifying days, biggest day over the consistency limit, or less available than your prop firm’s minimum withdrawal.
For the first time you can look at a month of trading and see the thing you actually care about: how many accounts this would have cost you, how many it would have passed, and what it would really have paid.
It tells you when it doesn’t know
Fifteen trades will show you an obvious problem. They will not tell you whether a subtler pattern is real or luck.
So Refine-My-Trade grades the evidence separately from the result. One badge says how big the edge is. A second says how settled it is, whether there are enough trades to clear chance and enough of the calendar to have seen more than one kind of market. A strong edge can still read “needs more data”, and that is not a contradiction.
Every suggestion is gated the same way. Findings resting on a single outlier are rejected rather than reported. A level that works at exactly one setting and fails a tick either side is called fragile, not recommended.
We would rather the tool said nothing than said something confident and wrong.
Built alongside Q-My-Trade, for the same traders
If you already run Q-My-Trade, you know the approach: tools built by prop traders, for prop traders, that do the unglamorous things properly.
Q-My-Trade handles execution across your accounts, rotation, copying, structured multi-account control. Refine-My-Trade handles the question that comes afterwards: given what you just traded, what should change?
Neither requires the other, but both rest on the same idea, that a trader is better served by an honest number than a flattering one.
Refine-My-Trade is included with every Q-My-Trade subscription, monthly and lifetime, at no extra cost. If you subscribe to Q-My-Trade, your existing licence key activates it.
If you don’t use Q-My-Trade, Refine-My-Trade will also be available as a standalone lifetime licence.
How do you get it?
Refine-My-Trade is available to download now from the Downloads page. It installs like any NinjaScript AddOn and comes with a quick start guide and a full user guide.
It’s included with Q-My-Trade Monthly and Lifetime, or available on its own. Join us on Discord where we post updates first and answer questions directly.
Refine-My-Trade is an analysis tool. It does not place orders, close positions or enforce limits, and nothing it produces is trading advice. Prop firm rules are modelled from the values you enter and are not authoritative. Trading involves substantial risk of loss.