Weekend Bot Maintenance: The 15-Minute Sunday Routine That Keeps Your NinjaTrader Bot Portfolio Ready for Monday's Open
Sunday night is the only quiet window your bot portfolio gets all week. The futures market has been closed since Friday's close, every open position is flat, and nothing is about to fill while you're reading this. That's exactly why it's the right time for a maintenance pass — not a deep backtest session, not a strategy overhaul, just a focused 15 minutes that makes sure Monday's open doesn't catch you with a stale data feed, an un-acknowledged alert, or a bot still sized for last month's account balance.
Here's the routine, in the order it actually matters.
Minute 1-3: Confirm NinjaTrader and platform updates
Open NinjaTrader and check for pending updates before you touch anything else. A mid-week NT8 patch that drops Monday morning and forces a restart during the first five minutes of the session is the single easiest problem to avoid — and the easiest one to ignore if you only check on weekdays. Apply any update now, while the market is closed and a restart costs you nothing.
Minute 4-6: Walk each bot's connection and data feed
Open the Control Center and step through Instruments and Accounts for every bot in your portfolio. Confirm the data feed connection shows green, not a stale "disconnected" or "delayed" status left over from Friday's close. If you run more than one bot off the same data feed subscription, this is also the moment to confirm the feed itself hasn't lapsed — a billing hiccup on a Saturday is invisible until Monday's candles don't print.
Minute 7-9: Check account balance, margin, and drawdown numbers
Pull up the actual numbers on every funded account you're running bots against — current balance, trailing drawdown level, and margin in use. This is the step traders skip because "it was fine Friday," but a weekend is exactly when a firm's end-of-day trailing calculation can shift the floor on you without a single trade printing. Know your real drawdown cushion before the open, not after your first loss.
Minute 10-12: Review the week's performance in the Bot Portfolio Tracker
Skim the Bot Portfolio Tracker for the past five sessions. You're not re-optimizing anything here — you're looking for one thing: a bot whose win rate or average trade has drifted noticeably from its backtest baseline. A single bad day is noise. A full week of underperformance across multiple bots in the same regime is a signal worth a longer look later in the week, not during this 15-minute pass.
Minute 13-15: Confirm your alerts are actually configured
Last step: open the Alerts window and fire a test alert on sound, email, and SMS if you've got all three wired up. An alert that silently stopped working three weeks ago is worse than no alert at all, because you've been trading as if it still works. If you haven't set this up yet, it's worth doing once and then just confirming it every Sunday going forward.
Fifteen minutes, every week
None of these five checks takes more than three minutes on its own, and together they catch the handful of issues that actually cost funded traders money: a bot firing on stale data, a drawdown cushion that's thinner than you think, or an alert that's been dead since a software update. Run it this Sunday, then make it the last thing you do before you close the laptop every week.
Looking to add a new bot to the rotation or tighten up your current lineup before you run this week's review? See the full bot portfolio at Push Button Trading — all 13 bots run on the same 4.5 years of backtest data this routine is built to protect.
