Your First Two Weeks With a Bot: The Sim-to-Live Checklist Before Real Money Touches an Eval Account

You bought the bots, you installed NinjaTrader 8, and the strategy is finally showing up on the chart. Now comes the part most traders rush: the two weeks between "it runs" and "it runs on an account that can actually be lost." Skipping that window is the single most expensive shortcut in automated trading, because a bot that misfires in sim costs you nothing, and the same bot misfiring on day two of an evaluation costs you the account.

Here is the sim-to-live checklist we walk new members through — a day-by-day sequence for judging your setup before real money is on the line.

Days 1-3: Prove the plumbing, not the profit

Your first job is not to make money. It is to confirm that four things are wired correctly, because every one of them can silently change how a bot behaves:

• Data feed. Confirm your NinjaTrader 8 connection is live, the instrument is the front-month contract, and you have enough historical data loaded for the strategy's lookback. A 10 EMA bot with a thin chart is a different bot.
• Order routing. Check that your sim account routes to the same order type the live account will use. Market, stop-market, and limit fills behave differently the second real liquidity is involved.
• Session template and time zone. An ORB bot that thinks the open is an hour off is not a strategy, it is a random number generator.
• Sizing. Set the contract count you actually plan to trade in the evaluation. One micro. Not five, not "whatever the default was."

Run the bots on sim for three sessions and compare every fill to what the chart says should have happened. You are looking for mismatches, not P&L.

Days 4-7: One bot, one instrument, one session

The temptation is to switch on the whole lineup. Don't. Pick one strategy — ORB, Snapback, Scalper, 10 EMA, NR7, or Volume Spike — and let it run alone for a week. When something goes wrong with six bots running, you have no idea which one caused it. When it goes wrong with one, you have a diagnosis.

Log every trade. Entry time, exit reason, whether the bot did what you expected. By Friday you should be able to describe, in a sentence, the market conditions your bot likes and the ones it hates. That sentence is worth more than any backtest report.

Days 8-11: Add the second and third bot, then check correlation

Now build toward a lineup. The point of running several strategies is that they lose at different times — a breakout bot and a mean-reversion bot are supposed to disagree. Use the Bot Portfolio Builder and Analyzer to see how your combination behaves together, not just individually. If two bots keep entering the same trade in the same direction within a few minutes of each other, you do not have diversification, you have double size.

This is also where the 4.5 years of backtest data earns its keep. Look at the worst historical day for your combination, not the average day, and ask whether that drawdown fits inside the rules of the account you are about to buy.

Days 12-14: Dry-run the eval rules, not just the strategy

Before you fund anything, run the last three sessions as if the rules were live. Apex, Lucid, BluSky, and TakeProfit each define trailing drawdown, daily loss, and minimum trading days a little differently. Pull up your chosen firm's rule sheet and answer three questions with your own sim data:

• Would my worst sim day have breached the daily loss limit?
• Does my drawdown ever get close enough to the trailing threshold that one bad open ends the account?
• Does my lineup actually trade often enough to hit the minimum trading days?

If the answer to any of those is uncomfortable, the fix is smaller size or fewer bots — not hope. Traders who cut size before the eval pass more often than traders who cut it after the first drawdown.

The handoff to live

When you flip to a funded evaluation account, change exactly one thing: the account. Same bots, same contract count, same session template, same start and stop times. Every variable you change at the handoff is a variable you cannot blame when something goes sideways in week one. If you use the Trade Copier across multiple accounts later, add that after your single-account results are boring and predictable.

Two weeks feels slow when you are excited. It is also the difference between a trader who knows why their lineup works and one who is guessing with an activation fee on the line.

New to the platform? Start with the 14-day free trial and run this exact checklist in sim — no coding required. If you want the process taught step by step, the 30-Day Bot Workshop walks you through setup, testing, and going live with the lineup you built. Come do it with people who have already made the mistakes.