About 10 minutes before I turned my algo on, my computer crashed. When it rebooted, Ninjatrader had "forgotten" about my data / order connection and my license key. After I frantically got that set up, it wouldn't compile anything. Seems some sort of file corruption occurred.
Anyway, long story short, I missed most of my window. Even worse, the part I missed had some big winners; and the small part I caught was a loser.
Now, with only 1K left in drawdown capacity and 2 trading days left, I guess the plan is an onside kick on Tuesday followed by a hail mary on Wednesday. LOL.
Lesson learned. After this fiasco, I decided to experiment with an Azure VM. I set one up and installed NT7. Ping tests showed about 4 ms to the pricing and order servers, as compared to 30 ms or so from my desktop at home. Going to give it a try tomorrow. I would like to give speedy trading servers a try eventually after I get a bit further along in this journey. The Azure server would be more expensive if I used it 24x7, but as long as I'm only using it for an hour or two each day it's pretty inexpensive.