Glossary
NinjaTrader, Rithmic & Prop Firm Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the connectivity and copy-trading terms used across this site — the concepts behind connecting Rithmic prop firm accounts and running several of them in one NinjaTrader instance.
- Rithmic
- A low-latency futures market-data and order-routing technology used by many prop firms. NinjaTrader 8 ships with a fixed list of Rithmic connection options, which is why some Rithmic prop firms cannot connect to NinjaTrader natively — PropFirmConnector adds those missing Rithmic connections inside NinjaTrader.
- Tradovate
- A cloud-based futures platform that is now part of NinjaTrader — NinjaTrader Group acquired Tradovate in 2022, and Tradovate, LLC was merged into NinjaTrader Clearing, LLC in November 2024. It is a separate connection path from Rithmic, and a Tradovate-track prop account connects to NinjaTrader natively with the credentials the firm issues. PropFirmConnector focuses on Rithmic prop firm connections.
- CQG
- An independent futures data, order-routing and platform provider, owned by Broadridge Financial Solutions since May 2026. It has no corporate connection to NinjaTrader, and NinjaTrader offers no CQG connection type — but some prop firms use “CQG” as the label for their Tradovate-side accounts, which issue Tradovate credentials. A firm may sell both a CQG/Tradovate track and a Rithmic track, so judge by the credentials your account was issued rather than by the label.
- Local copy trading
- Copying trades between accounts on your own machine, inside one NinjaTrader instance, with no remote server in the path. Because there is no cloud round-trip, mirroring is near-instant.
- Cloud copier
- A copier that routes orders through a remote server to mirror trades across accounts. The network round-trip adds latency compared with same-instance local copying.
- Same-instance copying
- Running every account inside a single NinjaTrader instance so a trade copier maps master-to-follower from one shared account list. This is the setup PropFirmConnector enables for multiple Rithmic prop firm accounts.
- Master and follower account
- The master is the source account whose trades are copied; followers are the accounts that replicate those trades. A trade copier handles the master-to-follower mapping.
- R|Trader Pro plug-in mode
- A mode in Rithmic's R|Trader Pro desktop app that lets multiple plug-in-capable platforms on the same machine share one Rithmic connection. It is the standard way to run several Rithmic accounts in one NinjaTrader instance, since NinjaTrader's native Rithmic adapter allows only one active connection at a time.
- Evaluation (eval) account
- A paid simulated account where a trader must reach a profit target within the firm’s rules (drawdown, consistency, time) to qualify for a funded account.
- Trailing drawdown
- A maximum-loss limit that trails account equity or balance as it grows. Prop firms use intraday-trailing, end-of-day-trailing, or static drawdown variants in their evaluations.
- Consistency rule
- A prop-firm rule limiting how much of total profit may come from a single day (often around 20–30%), to discourage one-off gambles and reward steady trading.
- Micro vs mini futures
- Two contract sizes for the same market (for example MES micro vs ES mini E-mini). When copying across accounts, a copier may need to map or scale position sizes between micro and mini contracts.