Documentation

Before you install

Threepio runs on your own Windows machine. Nothing is hosted by anyone else, so the machine has to be able to carry it and stay awake while your strategies are trading.

On a Mac?

Threepio is a Windows application, so it does not install on macOS. The standard answer is a Windows VPS — a Windows machine in a data centre that you connect to remotely. It never sleeps, which is an advantage in its own right. You can control a VPS from a phone or a Mac; you just cannot install Threepio on either.

Do I need a VPS otherwise?

Only if you would rather not leave your own PC powered on during trading hours. On a Windows PC that stays awake, you do not need one.

Turn off sleep

Settings → System → Power. A machine that sleeps mid-session drops the broker connection. Do the same for scheduled restarts and pending Windows updates before a trading day.

Installing

1. Download the installer from the link in your delivery email.
2. Click through two security warnings. Both are expected — see the box below before you start, so neither takes you by surprise.
3. Start Threepio. It opens in its own window — no browser tab and no address bar, so it behaves like any other desktop application. Under the hood it serves itself from 127.0.0.1:8321, which is your own machine and not a server anywhere else; you never need that address unless you are troubleshooting.
4. Paste your licence key from the delivery email and press Activate. Paste it with no spaces and no line breaks.
5. Complete the guided tour. It runs automatically and walks every screen. It has to be finished before full access opens.

Connecting your account

Threepio trades your account at your broker. The money and the account stay yours throughout — it connects to a platform you are already logged into. Set up only the rows for the markets you actually intend to trade.

Futures — the step almost everyone misses

Two things people get out of order. First: start Threepio and leave it running before you add the indicator — it writes down where it is so the indicator can find it, and you never type a path. Second: in NinjaTrader 8, open Tools → Settings → Automated trading interface, tick AT Interface, click OK and restart NinjaTrader — the tick only takes effect after a restart. If NinjaTrader later rejects a Sim101 order with “Account below minimum cash value”, open Accounts → right-click Sim101 → Edit Account and set Minimum Cash Value to 0. You need one 1-minute chart per instrument the books trade, each with the logger on it: NQ, ES and YM for the Master Book, plus MNQ and MGC for the Machine Book (the bar file is named after the chart’s instrument, so an NQ chart does not feed an MNQ strategy). For history, right-click each 1-minute chart → Data Series → set Days to load to 400 or more: the bar logger writes every historical bar the chart loads, so a deep chart gives Threepio a year of history at once (reloading is safe: the logger skips bars already in your file). One setting in that same dialog matters and is silent if wrong — the contract month: use the front month as it trades, never a back-adjusted or merged continuous contract, or the logged prices are a series no contract ever traded at. Do not ask for more history than the contract has lived, and enter the instrument by its root (MCL) rather than a named expiry (MCL SEP). Days to load is a request, and NinjaTrader answers it with whatever it can find: ask a recently-listed contract for ten years and what comes back for the years before it existed was never that contract trading. The join reads as a price leap no market made, and Threepio refuses the feed — “impossible bar-to-bar move 20%… refusing to trust this feed”. Energy contracts roll monthly where the index contracts roll quarterly, so crude reaches that seam far sooner than NQ or ES. If it has already happened, close Threepio, delete that market's file from the live folder and reload with a sensible lookback; the automatic repair fixes duplicate and out-of-order bars only, and deliberately leaves a suspicious price alone rather than smoothing away something you ought to see. That enables it. Without that tick, Threepio's connection test will fail no matter what else is correct. Prop accounts on Tradovate connect through NT8 in the same way.

Crypto keys

Test the connection

Every connection card has a Test Connection button. Green means ready. Test it before you enable anything, not after. Then type your NinjaTrader account name — exactly as NinjaTrader shows it, Sim101 for practice — into the ORDER ROUTE box on that same page. Until that box has something in it the route refuses every order, because it will not guess which account is yours. After an update the setup wizard asks for it first.

Prop firms and drawdown

Threepio is automated trading, so the first question is always whether your firm permits it. Many do — Aston trades Lucid, which allows automation. Firms commonly listed as algo-friendly for futures include Tradeify, TradeDay, Take Profit Trader, Apex Trader Funding, Topstep and MyFundedFutures.

Use end-of-day drawdown accounts

We recommend EOD drawdown only. Intraday trailing drawdown moves against you tick by tick during the session, so a strategy sized against a daily loss cap can be healthy on the day and still breach a trailing limit intraday on a position that later recovers. Check which model your specific account uses — many firms offer both.

Everyone running the same strategies

What firms prohibit is copy trading and group trading: shared logins, trading someone else's account, or an external signal service firing into your funded account. Threepio is none of those — it runs locally, there is no shared login and no copier, and your position sizes follow your account and your risk settings.

But firms judge by outcome. Their surveillance looks for near-identical fills across supposedly independent accounts, and uses IP fingerprinting. Sensible precautions: do not share an IP with another Threepio user, do not all use the same firm, and set your own risk numbers. We will never ship a feature designed to hide automation from a firm — that would put you in breach rather than protect you.

Full detail, including launch timing and licence transfers, is in the FAQ.

Risk settings

You enter your risk limits once and RiskGate sizes every position from them. Decide these numbers before the setup wizard asks for them.

• Account size — the number every position size is derived from.
• Daily loss cap — for a prop account, match the firm's rule exactly. Otherwise pick a number you can genuinely stomach on a bad day.
• Maximum position size — a hard ceiling, applied regardless of what the sizing maths asks for.

Risk per trade

The one figure that does the sizing. Set it in execution settings — the setup wizard asks for it after every update — and RiskGate works the contracts out from each strategy's own stop: contracts = your risk ÷ what one contract would lose at that stop. That keeps the money at risk steady whether the market is at 18,000 or 29,000. Where a full-size contract is too big for the figure you set, it trades the micro instead (NQ → MNQ, ES → MES, YM → MYM) and tells you why in plain money. Leave it at zero and every strategy trades one contract, whatever that happens to be worth, with no micro substitution — the old behaviour, unchanged. This is a sizing figure, not a limit: the caps above still apply on every order, and a stop too wide to afford even one micro is refused rather than quietly traded anyway.

Running the ORB inside NinjaTrader — this is what trades

Two files, two lists. JarvisBarLogger is an Indicator and ORBV19Multi_Threepio is a Strategy, so NinjaTrader shows them in two separate lists. If you compile and see only Jarvis in the Indicators list, nothing has failed — the ORB is one list over, under Strategies. Add the logger via right-click → Indicators and the ORB via right-click → Strategies.

Your NinjaTrader 8 folder also holds ORBV19Multi_Threepio.cs — the Master Book’s ORB as a native NinjaTrader strategy. It decides and places orders inside NT8 for speed and fill fidelity, but before every entry it asks Threepio’s RiskGate on your own machine and trades only on an explicit yes. If Threepio is not running, is slow, or says no, it does not trade and prints the reason in NinjaTrader’s output. The gate applies your risk per trade, drops a full-size contract to its micro when it will not fit, and honours the kill switch, daily loss limit, max trades and your LIVE TRADING switch exactly as the normal route does; its fills appear in the Journal and on LIVE ROUTE. Paste it into the NinjaScript Editor like the logger, press F5, add it as a Strategy to an NQ 5-minute chart, set the front-month instrument names in its inputs, and leave “Ask Threepio’s RiskGate” on. Strategy Analyzer backtests never call out and are unchanged.

Importing your own strategy

You can give Threepio a Pine or NinjaScript strategy of your own. Drop the file (.pine, .cs, .ps or .txt, under 512 KB) into data\inbox_strategies inside your Threepio folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\MillenniumFalcon), or paste it on RESEARCH → IMPORT SCRIPTS. Every file is previewed before anything is committed, and the preview says what that file can honestly become: rebuilt exactly, translated into a strategy this machine can test, mined for its ideas, or refused — and a refusal names the exact construct it could not represent, so you can fix it and drop it again. Nothing imports until you press IMPORT ALL.

What translates losslessly. Define your indicators in the script itself rather than calling a compiled or external one — the machine reads the definition and rebuilds it exactly, and remembers it for the next script. Keep to the shape the machine simulates: one instrument, one timeframe, one position at a time, a market entry with a stop and a target (trailing targets included). Multi-timeframe logic, pyramiding and limit entries are not represented today; if your strategy depends on them, do not simplify it — instead export its trade list from TradingView or NinjaTrader and let the machine judge the series, tagged with how many fills it could confirm. Your own sizing rules are never carried across: every imported strategy is sized by RiskGate from your risk per trade.

An imported strategy is a candidate, not a trade. It faces this machine's own validation like everything else, its own backtest is never evidence here, and an outside source raises the bar rather than lowering it. The full guide, with file references and a scaffold that has been proven to import exactly, ships in your Threepio folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\MillenniumFalcon) as IMPORT_GUIDE.md, next to README.txt.

The kill switch

Visible on every screen. One click flattens every open position and halts trading. It is the control to reach for first if anything looks wrong — you can always investigate afterwards.

Welcome

HELLO. I AM THREEPIO.

Welcome aboard The Millennium Falcon, and might I say — excellent taste in trading machinery. I shall walk you through every screen, every button, and every safety rail. Click NEXT to proceed, BACK to revisit, and EXIT if you must — the TUTORIAL button in the top bar restarts me any time, from any chapter.

WHAT THIS MACHINE IS

A research brain with a guard at the door. It reads trading research, invents strategies, and tests them brutally — most die, and that is the point: what survives has earned trust. It NEVER trades real money without your explicit say-so. You are always the final signature.

PICK YOUR COLOURWAY

First, how would you like me to look? Four schemes, and the whole machine repaints the moment you click one, so do try them. This is purely cosmetic — nothing about how I trade or what I warn you about changes — and you can switch again whenever you like from the top bar.

The Cockpit

THE VITAL SIGNS

These pills are the machine's pulse, visible on every screen. CORE: is the engine running. GATE: is the RiskGate armed (it always should be). LIVE: whether real-money trading is enabled — it ships OFF. INCIDENTS: problems needing attention. MODE: what the machine is doing right now.

THE KILL SWITCH

The big red lever. One click halts ALL trading activity instantly — every order path stops, everywhere, and the whole interface washes red so there is no mistaking the state. Halting is always safe; un-halting is your deliberate act. When in doubt, halt.

VISUAL PROTOCOL

Four looks: Indigo, Crimson, Emerald, Onyx. Purely cosmetic — with one deliberate exception: green/amber/red status colours NEVER change, in any theme. Danger always reads as danger.

THE EXCHANGE CLOCK

New York time — the clock the markets in this machine trade on. All sessions, cutoffs and reports follow it, so you and the machine are never talking about two different 3 o'clocks.

Choose Your Market

FOUR MARKETS, ONE TEMPLATE

The top bar carries a tab per market: FUTURES, FOREX, STOCKS, CRYPTO. Each is a self-contained trading desk — its own account connection, its own RiskGate, its own book of strategies. Pick the one that matches the account and platform YOU trade with.

FUTURES — via NinjaTrader 8

The first-class desk. If you trade CME futures (micro or full size) through NinjaTrader 8 — including prop-firm evaluation accounts — this is your tab. Everything in chapters 10–12 happens here.

FOREX — via MetaTrader 5

The FX desk, for MetaTrader 4/5 accounts — a full working desk mirroring the futures template exactly: learn one desk and you know them all. An empty book here reads honestly empty until its members arrive.

STOCKS — via MultiCharts

The equities desk, connecting through MultiCharts. Same full template again: book, account, positions, RiskGate, journal, sessions, settings.

CRYPTO — via exchange APIs

The crypto desk, connecting to exchanges through the standard ccxt bridge — trade-permission-only API keys, never withdrawal. The same seven screens as every other desk.

RESEARCH — the shared brain

One tab is not a market: RESEARCH is the brain all desks share. Papers go in, strategies come out, and the next six chapters live here.

Command Center

THE COMMAND CENTER

The home screen. Everything the brain did lately: strategies born, tests run, survivors, kills, reports written. Numbers here are never decorative — every figure is a real count from the database underneath.

THE CONTROL PANEL

The switchboard on the rail: pause or resume the research loop, trigger a reading pass (READ NOW), or SUPERCHARGE a night to run harder. Each control says what it does before it does it.

The Vault

THE VAULT — THE LONG-TERM MEMORY

Every paper, book chapter, idea card and report the machine has ever digested lives here as linked notes — a knowledge graph you can literally fly through. The more it reads, the smarter its strategy ideas get.

HOW TO ADD MATERIAL

Feed it: drop a PDF (a paper, a book chapter, an article) into the Inbox on this screen. The machine quarantines it, checks it, proposes a proper name for your one-click confirmation, and queues it for reading. Legal sources only — it will refuse pirated material.

THE 3D BRAIN

The Brain Vault view renders the whole vault as a living neural web — every note a node, every link a strand. It is the same data as the library list, worn as a galaxy.

Deep Reading

WHAT A DEEP READ IS

A skim finds titles; a DEEP READ extracts substance. The machine reads a document page by page and distils testable claims — 'momentum persists overnight in small caps' — into hypothesis cards, each linked back to its exact source page.

HOW TO START ONE

READ NOW in the control panel starts a reading pass immediately; otherwise the nightly loop reads on its own schedule and within its monthly budget. Every claim it extracts becomes raw material for new strategies — nothing is read and forgotten.

Strategy Factory

LIFECYCLE — EVERY STRATEGY'S STORY

Each strategy is born from research building blocks, tested, and either advances or dies. This screen shows the whole population and where each one stands. Most are dead — that is quality control, not failure.

THE STAR MAP

The population as a constellation: families cluster together, survivors burn brighter. One glance shows where the machine has been exploring and which families keep earning their place.

BREEDING

Winners get bred: successful strategies cross their rules to produce children that inherit both parents' strengths, and promising ones get their settings tuned. Every child is tracked and honestly counted — no idea sneaks in twice under two names.

FAMILY DRAFTS & BUILD REQUESTS

Where brand-new strategy families are proposed — drafted from fresh research, reviewed, then built into the generator's vocabulary. You can watch an idea travel from a paragraph in a paper to a tradeable rule set.

The Gauntlet

THE GAUNTLET — WHY A PASS MEANS SOMETHING

Every candidate faces the same ordeal: unseen data it never trained on, walk-forward tests, Monte Carlo shuffles, inflated trading costs, and a statistical luck-tax that asks 'would this look good by chance alone, given how many things we tried?'

REJECTION IS SUCCESS

A 99% kill rate is the feature. Every backtest on this screen shows its full verdict — which test killed it and why. The machine cannot quietly lower the bar to let a favourite through; the thresholds are locked in signed configuration.

Approvals & Review

THE APPROVAL QUEUE

The machine researches alone, but PROMOTION toward money always stops here for a human. Anything on this screen is waiting for your judgment — approve or reject, every decision recorded permanently in a ledger nobody can edit.

THE REVIEW QUEUE

Lighter-weight confirmations: renamed inbox files, proposed calendar entries, batch decisions. The rule of the house: the machine proposes, you dispose.

Riskgate

RISKGATE — THE GUARD AT THE DOOR

Every order — paper, demo or live — must pass this gate. It checks position size, daily loss, order rate and a dozen other limits BEFORE anything reaches a broker. There is no code path around it, by construction.

SETTING YOUR LIMITS

Limits live in per-account profiles: a prop-firm evaluation profile enforces the firm's rules (daily loss cap, trailing drawdown, flat-by-close); a live profile enforces yours. Profiles here are read-only by design — edits happen in the config file and take effect on restart, so limits are never one careless click away.

PROP MODE VS LIVE MODE

Run both at once if you like: a prop evaluation account and a live account each get their own gate, their own limits, their own book. A breach on one halts that account alone — accounts never share fate.

Connect Your Account

YOUR LICENSE

The key you entered at the gate lives here — licensee, tier, expiry. Verification is offline: the key never leaves this computer, and nothing about your trading ever phones home.

CONNECTING A PLATFORM

Each connector card states what it needs — futures wants NinjaTrader 8 running with the bundled indicator; forex, a MetaTrader 5 terminal; stocks, MultiCharts; crypto, an exchange API key with TRADE permission only (never withdrawal). Credentials stay in your local environment file — never typed into this app, never stored by it.

POSITIONS & BROKER VIEW

Once connected, this screen mirrors the account: positions, orders, fills, equity. Read-only — a window onto the broker, not a trading panel. The machine trades through the gate or not at all.

Books & Elections

WHICH BOOK YOUR DESK TRADES

Two choices, on every market's BOOK page. The MASTER BOOK is the same book used in Aston's Threepio — when it changes on his machine it changes on yours, checked and verified each night. The MACHINE BOOK is the one your own Threepio builds from its own research, which starts empty on a new machine and fills as the nights pass. You start on the Master Book, and you can switch either way, per market, any time. Whichever you choose, every order still passes RiskGate, your own limits still bind, and nothing trades real money until you sign for it yourself.

THE BOOK

A book is the team of validated strategies an account actually runs — chosen to complement each other across market conditions, not just to look good alone. This screen is the book's health: members, exposure, performance.

ELECTIONS — HOW A BOOK IS CHOSEN

Survivors of the gauntlet stand for election: combinations are judged as a TEAM on combined risk-adjusted return, correlation and regime coverage. Prop and live books hold separate elections under identical standards — only the account envelope differs.

BOOK SETTINGS

The book's envelope, read-only: which account profile it runs under, session cutoffs, per-book portfolio rules. Change requests follow the same signed-config path as RiskGate limits.

Reports, Incidents & Safety

REPORTS & INCIDENTS

Every night the machine writes a Daily Brain Report — what it read, built, killed and learned. Anything that went wrong becomes an INCIDENT that stays on this screen until genuinely fixed. Amber means look when convenient; red means look now.

SESSIONS & LOGS

The unedited flight recorder: every session, every event, every decision with its timestamp. When you wonder 'why did it do that?', the answer is on this screen.

THE SAFETY FINALE

Do remember the three iron rules, sir: LIVE trading ships OFF and only you can arm it. Every order passes the RiskGate — no exceptions, ever. And promotions toward real money wait for your signature. The machine is brilliant, but YOU are the captain. That concludes the tour — the TUTORIAL button replays me any time. Good luck, and do try to keep us out of an asteroid field.

Alerts & Safeguards

ARM THE RESEARCH ENGINE

This switch wakes the machine's brain: while armed, it runs the full research loop every night — reading sources, generating candidates, backtesting, validating, and writing your morning report. Leave the app running overnight and it works while you sleep. It never trades live and never promotes a strategy past paper without your approval — arming the brain and arming the money are two very different switches, and only this one is on this page.

PHONE ALERTS — SET UP IN 3 MINUTES

The machine can message your phone through your OWN Telegram bot: trade placed, trade closed, connection lost, safeguard fired, daily report ready — every alert type has its own on/off switch on this screen. Setup takes about three minutes (the instructions are right here, and the copilot can walk you through it). Nothing is shared with anyone — your bot, your phone, your machine.

SAFEGUARDS — THE MACHINE'S REFLEXES

Protective automations, all armed by default: if a platform connection goes silent for 60 seconds while positions are open, everything is FLATTENED and that account halts; if live data goes stale, new orders pause until it returns; when daily loss approaches your limit, your phone hears about it. Each safeguard can be disabled here — but disabling is recorded, and the kill switch and RiskGate limits are deliberately NOT on this page.

GIVE THE MACHINE ITS OWN MIND

One download makes the whole brain self-sufficient: the local AI model (a few GB, one click in the COPILOT drawer if you skipped it at install). With it on board, the copilot answers questions offline AND the research engine reads books and papers by itself overnight — no account, no cloud, nothing leaves this machine. Without it, those two abilities simply wait, and say so.

YOUR MACHINE — MOVING ME TO A NEW COMPUTER

Your licence runs one active machine at a time, and you move it yourself from right here — no ticket, no waiting on anyone. Press RELEASE THIS MACHINE, then activate on the new computer. If the old one is dead, stolen or wiped, the new machine can take the licence over once you confirm the old one is no longer running me. Do copy your data folder across; your journal, vault and settings travel with it.

Troubleshooting

Getting help

Open a ticket in the Discord — that is the main support route. If you are not in the Discord, or cannot find the link, email aston@threepio.xyz and it reaches Aston directly. Nobody should be stuck because they lost a link.