Preview FAQ / Troubleshooting

Axiom Guardian is coming soon and is not available for purchase or download. This preview describes the workflow currently in development and testing; final instructions may change before release.

Answers to the most common questions about how Guardian enforces, what it will and won't do, and the issues new users hit first.

Guardian is designed to monitor your NinjaTrader accounts against configured loss limits, give-back, profit targets, trade counts, position size, time restrictions, and other rules. Armed responses can request order cancellation and flattening, apply a software lock until the configured expiry, or alert only. These are reactive actions, not a guarantee that a fill or further loss is prevented.

No. Guardian reacts after account activity is observed. It can request cancellation of working orders and position flattening, but it does not intercept an order before submission. Orders can fill before enforcement completes; response time depends on the running platform, connection, and broker.

The planned release provides no manual early-unlock control. Hard software locks are designed to survive a NinjaTrader restart until their calculated expiry, normally daily rollover or the next permitted session for calendar rules. A cooldown response instead uses its configured timeout. Review the expiry shown in Monitor. Choose Flatten or Alert only before arming if you want a softer response.

Until you switch on Arm enforcement, Guardian runs in shadow mode: it evaluates every rule, raises alerts, and records events to the audit trail, but never closes positions or locks accounts. Shadow mode is the recommended way to tune your limits before going live.

Guardian is designed to keep the broker connection open so enforcement can request order cancellation and flattening. A software lock continues monitoring for re-entry while the platform is running and connected; it is not a broker-side trading block.

No. Guardian is fully standalone. If you also run Cognitive Hub, Guardian's lock, flatten, and alert events appear on every chart for that account, so enforcement is visible where you trade. Guardian does not read or import Cognitive Hub settings.

All accounts connected in your NinjaTrader platform, sim and live. Only accounts you assign a preset to are enforced; unassigned accounts are observe-only, and each account has its own enable switch.

At your preset's rollover — 17:00 US Central by default, which is the Globex open and the daily reset many prop firms use. Allowed trading days, day limits and day P&L use that session boundary on the preset's clock base. Lock expiry is calculated by the rule: normally rollover, the next permitted calendar session, or the configured cooldown timeout. Change the hour, half-hour, or clock base per preset; the Rules tab shows the derived boundary read-only.

From your account's value at this session's open — the rollover boundary — to now, so the day Guardian enforces is the day you actually trade, not the broker's midnight. The anchor is saved to disk: restarting NinjaTrader mid-session restores it, so a restart never resets your day or refunds a spent loss allowance. At rollover the day rebases to zero.

No tool can guarantee that. A fill that reaches the exchange before the flatten completes still costs slippage and fees. Guardian converges your account to flat as fast as the platform allows, but treat limits as lines of defense, not exact stops.

A newly imported add-on registers on the next platform start. Close NinjaTrader completely and reopen it. If it is still missing, re-import the package via Tools → Import → NinjaScript Add-On and restart again.

Yes. The Settings tab has a Privacy card where you set how many characters at the start and end of every account name render as # across Guardian's tables, popups, and the Audit tab — useful when streaming or sharing screenshots. The masking is display-only: rule evaluation, locks, and the on-disk ledger always use the real account name.

A NinjaScript recompile retires the running Guardian engine. Guardian closes its own dashboard and alert popups when that happens; reopen it from Control Center → Tools → Axiom Guardian and the fresh engine takes over. If a stranded window remains, it will say "engine retired (reload)" — close it and reopen from Tools. Do not keep editing settings in a stale window; edits made there do not reach the live engine.

The heartbeat indicator turns red if the enforcement engine has not ticked for a few seconds — usually a sign the platform is under heavy load. If it persists, restart NinjaTrader and check the Audit tab afterward; if the warning returns, contact support with your ledger files.

The software lock releases at the expiry calculated for the rule, normally rollover, the next permitted calendar session, or a configured cooldown timeout. Check the Monitor tab to see which rule fired and when the lock lifts, and the Audit tab for the exact event. If the rollover or clock base was configured wrong, fix the preset — Guardian re-derives affected locks on its next pass and releases or shortens them to match the corrected boundary. A heal never extends a lock.

Configuration, the event ledger, and lock state live under your NinjaTrader documents folder in the PriceAxiom Guardian directory. Ledger files are plain, dated JSONL you can review or archive; retention is configurable in Settings.

If the configuration file ever becomes unreadable — a disk problem, an interrupted write — Guardian does not overwrite it. The damaged file is preserved next to the original with a .bad extension and Guardian starts from safe defaults, so your presets and assignments can still be recovered from the preserved copy.