TickTick Trader, Tradovate and NinjaTrader: the route is closed

TickTick Trader does not issue Tradovate credentials for NinjaTrader any more, and at the moment it is not issuing credentials for anything else either. The Tradovate arrangement ended in November 2025, the firm’s help centre is offline, and every evaluation plan on its own website now reads “Coming soon” with no checkout behind it. If you came here to get a TickTick Trader account into NinjaTrader Desktop, the honest answer is that there is nothing to connect to.

What actually happened

In November 2025 Tradovate suspended access for TickTick Trader’s traders. Tradovate’s own message to affected traders said the firm was in breach of its Evaluation Services Agreement. TickTick Trader described the same event as operational constraints on Tradovate’s side that affected their ability to keep supporting external providers. The two accounts do not agree, and we cannot settle which is right — but the outcome is not in dispute. The Tradovate route closed, and traders were moved across to ProjectX.

ProjectX was never going to be a long-term home. It moved to Topstep-exclusive licensing early the following year, and every other firm on it, TickTick Trader included, had to leave. The second door shut within a few months of the first.

Since then the firm’s public site has named no trading platform and no data feed at all — not Tradovate, not Rithmic, not NinjaTrader. The plan cards carry a “Coming soon” label where a buy button used to be. The navigation still shows a Help Center link, but the help centre behind it returns a 404, including the one article the homepage itself links to directly. There is no current firm documentation for any connection route, because there is no current firm documentation.

What the route used to be

This is worth knowing, because it is not what most people assume, and because you will find stale pages telling you otherwise.

TickTick Trader did sell a Tradovate product line, and at one point published an article on connecting Tradovate to NinjaTrader. But their main, most recently maintained NinjaTrader article did not use Tradovate at all. It routed NinjaTrader over Rithmic: a connection named TickTickTrader, a username issued in the form TTTU followed by four more characters, a twenty-character Rithmic password, and a System entry chosen by region — Chicago if you were in the United States, Europe if you were in Europe, and Singapore or Hong Kong if you were in Asia.

One detail from that guide is worth carrying forward if you end up at another Rithmic firm: TickTick Trader told you to leave Market Data Plug-in Mode unchecked. That is the opposite of what several other Rithmic firms require, and it is a common reason a trader who has already set up one firm cannot get the next one working. Plug-in mode is a per-firm answer, never a habit.

Two things in that old article are out of date for current NinjaTrader 8 builds, and you should ignore them wherever you meet them. It sent you to Tools, then Options, which is what older NinjaTrader 8 builds call that menu item. In current NinjaTrader Desktop builds the Multi-Provider tick box lives in Tools, then Settings, then General, and NinjaTrader has to be restarted afterwards or Configure never appears in the Connections menu at all. It also framed a NinjaTrader license key as part of the setup; the firm itself dropped that requirement for evaluation accounts created after July 2024.

If you still hold a TickTick Trader account

• Do not spend anything on the strength of it. No paid market data, no add-ons, no VPS bought specifically to keep the account alive.
• If your account was moved to ProjectX, understand that ProjectX is not a NinjaTrader connection in any form. Nothing you do inside NinjaTrader will reach it.
• Traders have reported long payout waits and unanswered support mail. The firm, replying publicly to those reviews, says it remains operational and that payouts are queued behind a platform migration. Treat any timeline you are given as unconfirmed until the money actually lands.
• Keep your own records — order history, payout requests, correspondence — exported and stored locally rather than only inside a portal you may lose access to.

If you need a Tradovate firm in NinjaTrader anyway

The mechanics are the same at every firm that issues Tradovate credentials, so a working setup elsewhere transfers cleanly. Control Center, Connections, Configure, then double-click NinjaTrader in the Available list. That is the entry that carries Tradovate prop accounts. The credentials are the Tradovate username and password the firm issued you, never the firm’s own website login. Set Account Type to Simulation — that is correct for evaluations and for funded accounts alike, because Live is for a retail Tradovate brokerage account. Sign the market-data agreement in the Tradovate web app before you try, and type the credentials rather than pasting them, since a trailing space is the most common cause of a rejected logon.

One genuine advantage on the Tradovate side: it does not cap how many connections you hold. Two Tradovate firms will sit open in the same NinjaTrader at the same time, with no add-on and no workaround. The full walkthrough is in our Tradovate connection guide.

TickTick Trader and NinjaTrader: questions we get

Is there any way to connect TickTick Trader to NinjaTrader today?

No. Not over Tradovate, not over Rithmic, not over anything else. This is not a settings problem you can work around at your end. The firm is not issuing platform credentials, and the documentation that would have told you how has been taken offline.

Their old guide said Rithmic. Should I try that route instead?

There is nothing to try it with. A Rithmic username only works while the firm keeps it provisioned, and an old TTTU login will not authenticate on its own. If you are moving to a different Rithmic firm, one thing to plan for: NinjaTrader holds one Rithmic connection at a time. Unlimited Prop Firm Connections lets you keep two Rithmic firms open together.

A review site says TickTick Trader supports NinjaTrader. Is it wrong?

Out of date rather than dishonest. Prop-firm review pages are rewritten rarely and copied often, so a platform list can sit unchanged for a year after the arrangement behind it ended. The test we use is simple and you can apply it yourself: open the firm’s own help centre and find the connection article. If a firm will not put the route in writing on its own site, treat the route as unavailable, whatever a third party says about it.

Related

• Connection guides for every prop firm
• Connecting a Tradovate account to NinjaTrader 8
• Connecting a Rithmic account to NinjaTrader 8

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.