Why NinjaTrader Will Not Reconnect After a Disconnect

A connection drops overnight. You come back in the morning to a platform that has been sitting disconnected for six hours, with positions open and nothing watching them. NinjaTrader did not keep trying, and there was no setting you failed to switch on.

What NinjaTrader actually does

When a broker connection is lost, NinjaTrader makes its own internal attempts to re-establish it. Often that works and you never notice. When it does not work, the platform stops.

At that point NinjaTrader writes an entry to its log along the lines of Panic, unable to re-establish connection. That is not a warning that it is still trying. It is the platform recording that it has given up. The connection stays down indefinitely until a person clicks something.

There is no auto-reconnect setting

This surprises almost everyone who goes looking, because it is such a standard feature elsewhere. NinjaTrader 8 has no user-configurable auto-reconnect. Requests for one go back as far as NinjaTrader 7 and have been answered as not supported.

What NinjaTrader does offer is separate and narrower: strategies have On Connection Loss handling, which governs what a running strategy does while the platform is disconnected. That is worth understanding, but it does not reconnect anything.

The part that catches out automated traders

There is a second problem stacked on top of the first, and it is the one that costs money.

To bring a dead connection back you generally have to disconnect it first. Disconnecting resets running strategies. So the act of recovering from a connection loss can disable and restart the very strategies that were meant to be managing your open positions, and they come back with no memory of what they were doing.

The On Connection Loss options force a trade-off with no good answer. Keep Running holds the strategy live, but strategy events can fire while the platform is disconnected, so you can end up with the strategy position and the account position disagreeing. Recalculate tries to work out the position again on reconnect, which can produce entries you did not expect.

Either way, the thing to check the moment a connection comes back is whether your strategy position matches your account position. They are not guaranteed to.

What you can do today

• Know immediately. A drop you find out about six hours later is a different problem from one you find out about in ten seconds. An audible alert at the moment of the drop is worth more than any amount of after-the-fact logging.
• Use a wired connection. Wi-Fi is the most common cause of avoidable drops on a trading machine.
• Restart the platform daily. Traders running on a VPS generally restart NinjaTrader on a schedule rather than leaving it up for weeks.
• Check your sync after every recovery. Strategy position against account position, every time.

To be clear about what is and is not solved: the connection health window tells you the moment a connection drops, what you were holding when it happened, and lets you bring it back without going through the Control Center. It does not reconnect for you automatically. Nothing running inside NinjaTrader can stop your internet dropping, and any tool claiming otherwise is overselling.

Affordable Indicators, Inc. is not affiliated with or endorsed by Rithmic, NinjaTrader, or any prop firm or broker named here; your firm’s and broker’s own terms govern how you may use your account, so check with them first.