Connection Resilience
This page describes the NT8 model, where the copier runs on your machine. The Tradovate Copier runs in CrossTrade's cloud, so your own connection is not in the path and there is nothing local to reconnect. What matters there is the copier's connection to Tradovate: execution-mode fills that land during an outage are not replayed afterwards, and reconnect runs a bounded catch-up pass when drift correction is enabled. See Tradovate Copier.
Two different connections can drop, and the copier treats them very differently. Getting them straight is the whole point of this page.
If CrossTrade goes away
The copier executes inside NinjaTrader. It reacts to NT8's own order and execution events, not to instructions relayed from our servers, so losing the connection to CrossTrade does not stop it copying. It keeps running on the last configuration it received.
What you lose during an outage is changes: edits you make on the web dashboard cannot reach the add-on until it reconnects. The copier that was running keeps running, with the settings it already had.
If a leader's broker connection drops
This one does stop copying, deliberately, and it is the behavior most people are surprised by.
When a leader account's broker connection is not in a Connected state, the copier puts that connection into quarantine and suppresses copies from it. Reconnecting is not enough on its own: after the connection comes back healthy, quarantine stays active for a grace period before copying resumes.
The reason is that NinjaTrader replays a burst of order and position events while it re-syncs its internal state after a reconnect. Those look exactly like real trading activity. Copying them would duplicate entries and move follower positions that never actually moved.
Each blocked copy is logged with the reason and how long the connection has been in that state:
| Reason | Meaning |
|---|---|
disconnected | The leader's connection is down, disconnecting, or lost. |
connecting | The connection is mid-handshake and not trusted yet. |
grace-period | The connection is healthy again but still inside its post-reconnect window. |
The grace window is whichever is longer: your Reconnect Delay setting, or the copier's own minimum quarantine duration. Setting Reconnect Delay to zero does not remove the quarantine on a genuinely disconnected leader; it only removes the extra post-reconnect wait.
If you see copies being suppressed repeatedly, read the reason before changing settings. disconnected and connecting point at connection stability, which no copier setting can fix. Only grace-period is tuned by Reconnect Delay.
Recovery once the connection is back
- Order mapping survives. Leader-to-follower order relationships persist through disconnects and full NinjaTrader restarts, so a cancel or change still finds its copied orders afterwards. This is independent of Stealth Mode.
- Auto-Sync corrects the drift. Whatever the follower missed while quarantined is reconciled by the Auto-Sync Engine rather than by replaying the missed orders one at a time.
- Everything is in the log. Connection transitions, quarantine blocks, and sync corrections are all written to the copier log with timestamps.