Bracket Boss
The execution-discipline engine for NinjaTrader 8.
Bracket Boss is not another panel. It is a planning surface, a position-sizer, a bracket manager, a rule-enforcer, and a behavioral telemetry system — all running inside one NinjaTrader 8 strategy. Drag your entry, stop, and target lines on the chart. Bracket Boss calculates how many contracts you can hold for a fixed-dollar risk, and the moment your entry fills, your bracket is live. Pre-plan up to three scale-outs. Auto-move your stop to breakeven on a scale fill or after N favorable ticks. Lock your orders for the rest of the session if you don't trust yourself after a red trade. Every action — clean trade, perfect trade, stop move, target cut, early close — is written to a discipline ledger that Drawdown Guardian reads to score your behavior across days, weeks, and months.
Every trade you take, scored for life.
Bracket Boss publishes a discipline event for every meaningful action you take. Move a stop? Penalty. Hold through adversity to your planned target? Recovery. Clean execution? Reward. Drawdown Guardian aggregates those events into a Discipline Score, complete with titles, streaks, and badges — so you can finally see whether you're getting better, or just getting lucky.
- Penalties: stop moves, target cuts, early closes, manual scale before target, planned-scale moves after entry, over-modified trades
- Recoveries: clean trades, perfect trades, adversity holds, correct Order Lock use
- Aggregated into Today / 7-day / month-to-date / 30-day rollups
- Persisted for 35 days or 10,000 events, whichever is larger
- Adversity hold+8
- Clean trade+5
- Stop moved-4
- Order Lock used+3
See it in action
Walk through Bracket Boss on a live chart.
What's inside
Visual planning with risk-based sizing
Drag entry, stop, and target lines directly on the chart. Bracket Boss calculates contract quantity from your Max Risk ($) divided by the stop distance and instrument point value, capped by your Max Contracts setting. Pre-plan up to three scale-out levels (S1, S2, S3) before you ever click Execute.
Auto-protective brackets on every fill
Stop and target attach the instant your entry fills — no race conditions, no orphan positions. Toggle Auto-Bracket Manual Trades on and Bracket Boss intercepts trades placed outside the panel and protects them too. The single-writer architecture eliminates the double-bracket bugs you'll find in lesser tools.
Order Lock — for after the red trade
One click and Bracket Boss disables its own buttons, attempts to disable native Chart Trader buttons (market buy/sell, bid/ask buy/sell, close, reverse), and fights to restore your locked entry/stop/target/scale prices if anything tries to change them. If a manual trade slips through, Bracket Boss attempts a counter-order. Releases at the next market session boundary or when your protected exit fires.
Auto Breakeven (BE)
Set Auto BE to OFF, S1, S2, S3, or a fixed-tick trigger. When the chosen condition fires, Bracket Boss moves the remaining stop to entry plus your configured offset. It's a plan setting, not a manual button — your stop walks itself up while you focus on the chart.
Planned scale-outs as live orders
Planned-scale lines become real working scale-out orders the instant your entry fills. Drag them while planning to set targets exactly where you want them. Move them after entry and Bracket Boss treats it as a discipline event.
Account-mismatch protection
Bracket Boss locks itself to the account it loaded on. If your Chart Trader account ever drifts to a different account, the status line flashes MISMATCH and an audible alert plays. No more 'wait, was that on the funded or the sim?' moments.
Discipline event ledger
Every meaningful action — clean trade, perfect trade, adversity hold, stop move, target cut, early close, manual scale before target, planned-scale move after entry, over-modified trade, correct Order Lock use — is published to a shared CSV ledger. Drawdown Guardian reads this ledger to compute your Discipline Score and Stat Sheet.
Shutdown-resilient brackets
Preserve Working Exits On Shutdown is on by default. If NinjaTrader closes — clean exit, crash, or hard restart — your stops, targets, and planned-scale orders stay live at the broker. You can opt to preserve unfilled entries too if your workflow needs it.
Single-click trade management
50% scale, custom-quantity scale, Move-to-Breakeven, full Close All — all bracket-aware so the remaining position keeps its protection. Close All cancels working orders, sweeps the account/instrument, and submits market exits when needed.
Who it's for
- Prop traders on Apex, MyFundedFutures, TopStep, TradeDay, FTMO
- Discretionary day traders who want hands-off execution discipline
- Anyone who's ever moved a stop and lived to regret it
- Traders who want to measure their discipline, not just talk about it
Tech specs
- Native NinjaScript for NinjaTrader 8 — no DLLs, no external runtime
- Single-writer bracket architecture (eliminates double-bracket race conditions)
- Sub-millisecond fill-to-bracket latency on standard hardware
- Shared discipline-event ledger writes to bin\Custom\Config\ShadowEdgeToolsDisciplineEvents.csv
- Every release passes the Shadow Edge Test Harness — a 5-day continuous Replay qualification run
- One-click .zip install via Tools → Import → NinjaScript Add-On
- Lifetime license + free updates
System requirements
What you need to run Bracket Boss successfully.
- NinjaTrader 8 Desktop on Windows
- Designed for futures (MES, MNQ, ES, NQ, MCL, and more)
- One chart, one instrument, one account per strategy/indicator instance
- Internet connection for license activation; runs locally after that
Honest limits
Trading software that doesn't admit its limits is software you can't trust. Here's what Bracket Boss is not.
- Not a signal generator — you decide where to enter, Bracket Boss handles the execution
- Not a guarantee — markets gap, brokers reject, connections drop. We're explicit about this in the docs.
- Not a substitute for your broker. If something is wrong, use Control Center or your broker support desk first.
- Not for NinjaTrader 7, NinjaTrader Web, NinjaTrader Mobile, or non-Windows platforms.
Frequently asked
Will it work with my prop firm?+
Bracket Boss runs entirely inside your local NinjaTrader 8 instance and uses standard bracket orders — compatible with any prop firm that allows automated bracket orders. That includes Apex, MyFundedFutures, TopStep, TradeDay, FTMO, Earn2Trade, Take Profit Trader, Bulenox, and most others. If your firm has a specific question, email us before you buy and we'll confirm.
What instruments does it support?+
Anything NinjaTrader 8 itself supports where tick size, point value, bid/ask/last, and order routing are correct. The main target is futures — MES, MNQ, ES, NQ, MCL — but it's not symbol-locked. Test your instrument in Sim before going live; the docs walk through what to verify.
What happens if NinjaTrader crashes mid-trade?+
Preserve Working Exits On Shutdown is on by default. Your stops, targets, and planned-scale orders are real broker-side working orders, so they stay live even if NinjaTrader closes unexpectedly. After any restart, verify Control Center and broker-side state before resuming — that's good practice with or without our tools.
Does Order Lock actually stop me from trading?+
It tries hard. When active, it disables Bracket Boss's own controls, attempts to disable the native Chart Trader buttons it can detect (market buy/sell, bid/ask, close, reverse), and fights to restore your locked prices if anything tries to change them. It cannot block every possible order-entry path on every NinjaTrader configuration — broker apps, hotkeys, and other add-ons can route around it. We're upfront about this in the docs. It's a discipline aid, not a kill switch.
What's a 'discipline event'?+
Anything Bracket Boss can observe about how you executed a trade. Moving your stop closer mid-trade is a penalty. Letting a planned target fill is a recovery. Holding through adversity to your planned exit is a recovery. Cutting a target short is a penalty. Drawdown Guardian aggregates these into your Discipline Score and Stat Sheet.
Can I run it on multiple charts at once?+
One Bracket Boss strategy instance is meant to control one account on one instrument. Running multiple instances against the same account/instrument or one instance across multiple accounts is not a supported configuration unless that exact setup has been tested. Drawdown Guardian on the other hand can monitor a single account across multiple charts.
Do I need a subscription?+
No. One-time purchase, lifetime license, free updates included. Refund within 14 days if it isn't a fit.
How do I install it?+
After purchase you'll receive an email with a .zip and an install guide. In NinjaTrader 8: Tools → Import → NinjaScript Add-On → select the .zip. Compile, restart, add to a chart, test in Sim. Full step-by-step guide is included.
Go deeper
Background on the concepts and patterns this product is built around.
- Risk Management · 9 min readTrailing Drawdown vs End-of-Day Drawdown: The Complete Prop Trader's Guide
Most prop accounts don't get blown by bad trades — they get blown by traders who don't fully understand which drawdown rule they're trading under. Here's how each one works, and why trailing drawdown is the silent killer.
Read the guide - NinjaTrader · 11 min readNinjaTrader 8 Risk Management Setup: A Prop Trader's Playbook
NinjaTrader 8 is the dominant platform for funded futures traders, but its default risk setup is minimal. Here's the layered risk stack we use to keep funded accounts alive — what NT8 gives you out of the box, what's missing, and how to fill the gaps.
Read the guide - Trading Psychology · 8 min readHow to Measure Your Trading Discipline (and Why P&L Doesn't Tell You)
Two traders take the same setups, follow the same plan, and end the month with identical P&L. One was disciplined every step of the way; the other got lucky on three trades that should have been losses. P&L can't tell them apart. Discipline scoring can.
Read the guide
Bracket Boss is launching soon.
Join the early-access list and we'll email you the moment Bracket Boss is available. Launch price $199 — one-time purchase, lifetime updates.