Well originally I was of the opinion that the new generation of prop firms where mostly bucket shops.

But then I read somewhere that some of them actually go on to implement orders in the real market.

Making it a win / win proposition where the interests of both prop firm and trader are mutually aligned. I make profits, so do they.

Good stuff, I thought.

Read good things about Topstep bere and there, plus they've been around many years.

So thought, lets go ahead and take a combine.

Said, and done.

Using Ninjatrader and Rithmic as data feed.

Been doing this 3 or 4 days, and never closely looked at how Rithmics trade performance chart correlated with what I've traded.

Kept a closer track today.

Well.

Today my returns per Rithmic have absolutely NOTHING to do with what I was trading,

EG my very last trade, which should have been a $100 winner, shows up as a $25 LOSER instead !?!?

AND both Rithmic and Ninja are saying that out of my 32 trades today I had one single winner of $ 125 ?

Which is just a complete misrepresentation of my trading today.

And again, my very last trade out of my 33 was a $100 winner, NOT the $25 loser it shows up as.

Anyone have any idea whats going on ?

I contacted Topstep, Rithmic, and created a thread on Ninjas support with screenshots.

https://forum.ninjatrader.com/forum/ninjatrader-8/platform-technical-support-aa/1342684-position-entry-p-l-not-showing-on-chart

On Ninja I have just disconnected from my Topstep evaluation account and put a trade on in Ninja Sim.

And, bingo, the trade entry position line showed up along with profit and loss again - unlike when I was using the topstep account where they had not showed up today.



.

AND in my Ninjatrader performance the trade showed up as the winner it was.

UNLIKE my last trade in the Topstep account that misrepresented a 2 point ES winner into a $25 loss.

What IS this ?

It could have something to do with settlement. Although I trade my own money, I've seen similar discrepancies. Furthermore, with Rithmic, the PnL that it shows never matches the PnL on my broker's web platform (Ironbeam via Certigo).

ZB23 

Furthermore, with Rithmic, the PnL that is it shows never matches the PnL on my broker's web platform (Ironbeam via Certigo).

Wow thats pretty scary...

With the number of trades I put on a day, sometimes a hundred, how would I ever know whats my net lol

Have to start writing em down and then miss trades...

Hmm, not good this.

Mind boggling how in this day and age it seems to be a challenge reporting something as simple and binary like if a trade was a winner or not, and adding up the numbers after the trades lol !

The biggie tho was them claiming I had 32 losing trades, and one winner of $125.

And somehow managing to turn my 33rd and last trade, before I checked their stats and noticed sthg was totally off, a $100 winner into a $25 loser, even tho Ninjas chart screen clearly showed my entry and take profit of two points = $100.

Something VERY VERY wrong there somewhere.

One time I had a $2000 deficit pop up out of nowhere. For the life of me, I couldn't understand it. It was too large of an anomaly to disregard. So, I did some digging.

On 12/3, I opened a long BUB (long ZB and short UB).

On 12/9, after 18:00 EDT, I closed the trade (short ZB and long UB) for a nice profit.

On 12/10, before 17:00 EDT, I opened a short ZN Fly (short ZN, long ZF, and long ZB).

Here's the kicker. Since I didn't let the ZB that I opened on 12/3 and closed on 12/9, after 18:00, enter settlement, after 17:00 on 12/10, the exchange used the long entry point on 12/3 instead of the long entry on 12/10, which put me in the hole $2000 from the jump.

Note: A futures trading session spans two calendar days (18:00 EDT - 17:00 EDT, the next day). That's what tripped me up. I was always aware of it. What I wasn't aware of is that there two parts of a closing a trade-- the close that you execute and the settlement that the exchange executes. The two don't occur at the same time.

The painful lesson that I learned is to allow all closed contracts to enter settlement, after 17:00 EDT, before opening the same contracts in the previous direction. So, if closed a long trade on a contract, I won't open another long trade in the same contract before it is settled by the exchange.

I'm not an active trader, so this isn't a problem for me. But for scalpers, that can be problematic.

Hi yep I get that, but I'm just scalping intraday for a few minutes max, so when I close that trade it's settled I guess. (I hope lol !!!)

And also during the evaluation I'm on Sim.

It's only after you've reached a certain profit that they move you over to the real markets.

But must have been disconcerting to say the least that experience you had...

Yeah, it was. I had to hold the trade for approximately 45 days to see a profit.

Another example from today where a winner was reported as a loser.

Short ES 5686, target hit @ 3683.

$ 150 winner per contract.

BUT got reported as a $25 loss again.

LOT of $25 losses that never happened, but showed up as losses in Rithmics and Ninjas trade performance report.



So while I was on the Topstep / Rithmic account all of Ninjas performance figures matched with what Rithmic was showing me.

But

As soon as I noticed Rithmics numbers were way off

and switched to Ninjas SIM to compare, my trades and the numbers from Ninjas acct performance matched up again ???

So really not sure whats going on.

Do those discrepancies ever resolve themselves? What I mean is if you go back to when you first noticed it (assuming sometime in April) does it still show the difference?

Have you raised the issue with either TopStep, Rithmic, or Ninja?

Hi, this was only my third or so day of trading the real evaluation account, and yesterday the first day of real heavy trading where I actually started looking at the trading P&L, before I was just familiarizing myself with Ninja again which I hadn't used in a long long time.

But yep contacted all three of them.

Must say very supportive and helpful response from Topstep - they have really helped me tremendously getting things set up with them must say -, and they've basically put my evaluation on pause until they figure out where the glitch is.

With Ninja I started a thread where they responded immediately as well, and I've emailed my platform logs / data to Ninja.

https://forum.ninjatrader.com/forum/ninjatrader-8/platform-technical-support-aa/1342684-position-entry-p-l-not-showing-on-chart

Rithmic I've contacted also, haven't heard yet.

So suppose we'll get to the bottom of this.

I hope :-)