Ever opened NinjaTrader’s performance report and felt the numbers didn’t quite match how you actually traded? A win rate that seems off. A trade count higher than the number of times you actually pulled the trigger. Averages that feel smaller than they should.
You’re not imagining it. And it isn’t your maths, it’s how NinjaTrader counts.
NinjaTrader counts executions, not trades
Here’s the part most prop traders never get told: NinjaTrader’s Trade Performance report is built on executions, not completed trades. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s documented by NinjaTrader’s own support team on their official forum, where a moderator confirms the report is “typically based on executions, not directly on orders.”
In plain English: if one of your trades doesn’t fill in a single clean execution and on a live prop account, very few do, NinjaTrader can count it as several trades.
Picture a 9-contract entry. It fills in three partial fills as the book moves. You took one trade. NinjaTrader may log three. Same for scaling in, and same for a position that exits in tranches: in NinjaTrader’s own worked example, a single click-in, click-out trade that closes in three parts “would appear as 3 ‘Trades’.”
One trader on that forum put it bluntly: his strategy made 10 trades, but they were “recorded for performance analysis purposes as 23 trades” because the orders couldn’t fill in one execution. His word for what it did to his numbers: skews.
Why this quietly wrecks every other stat
A wrong trade count isn’t a cosmetic problem. It’s the denominator under almost every metric you care about:
- Win rate is wins ÷ trades. Inflate the trade count and the percentage drifts from reality.
- Average win and average loss are total P&L spread across the trade count. Count 4x more “trades” and your average win looks a quarter of its true size, a real $470 average win can show as barely over $100.
- Profit factor, expectancy, streaks, all distorted. A “59-trade winning streak” isn’t 59 trades; it’s execution rows from a handful of real ones.
And here’s the kicker, again from NinjaTrader’s own staff: when that trader asked how to get accurate per-trade metrics like profit factor on a completed-trade basis, the answer was “I am not aware of a way to see the trades as you describe within the default NinjaTrader Platform.”
So if you’ve ever felt your stats were off, they may well be. The platform itself says it can’t give you the clean version.
Important, and we mean it: this matters most when your fills fragment, partial fills, scale-ins, scaled exits. If every one of your trades fills in a single execution, your count will be fine. But on live prop accounts, with size, fragmented fills are the norm, not the exception, which is exactly when the distortion creeps in.
How Q-My-Trade fixes it: one trade is one trade
Q-My-Trade was built for traders running multiple prop accounts, and from day one it had to get trade accounting right, because copying and rotating across accounts is meaningless if you can’t trust the numbers afterwards.
So the built-in Trade History journal does the thing NinjaTrader’s report can’t: it counts one trade as one trade. One entry, one exit, one P&L line, no matter how many contracts it held or how many fills it took to get there.
Every row above is one trade you actually took. The fills are handled behind the scenes; what you see is the trade.
Which means the stats built on top of it are finally the real ones:
Win rate, profit factor, expectancy, average win and loss, average R:R, peak and max drawdown, win and loss streaks, all calculated on real trades, not execution rows. Filter by account, by master group, by mode, by symbol, by direction. Export the lot to CSV.
And it’s all in one place, inside the tool you’re already using to run your accounts. No second subscription. No separate journaling platform to log into. No exporting fills into a spreadsheet at midnight to work out what your week actually looked like.
“Been using QMT for a while now. everything you need under one tool.. To have a copier / rotator that also journals automatically, I can save time & money!! ….bye bye Tradezella & Replikanto.”
Mr Ed, Q-My-Trade user
See your own numbers, for real
The fastest way to find out how far off your current stats are is to run your own trades through a journal that counts them properly.
Q-My-Trade includes the full Trade History journal with a monthly subscription or a lifetime licence. Copy or rotate across your prop accounts, then review your trading analytics in one place.
View Q-My-Trade plans and pricing
Disclaimer to sit near the performance images: Figures shown are from simulated/replay trading and are for demonstration of Q-My-Trade’s analytics features only. They are not real-money results and are not a representation that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses. Simulated performance has inherent limitations. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss.