Category: Trading Operations | Last Updated: April 2026

A naked trade is an open position where the strategy's Take Profit (TP) and/or Stop Loss (SL) orders failed to place — leaving the position unprotected and exposed to run against you without an automatic exit. Naked trades are uncommon but can happen, and the consequences can be serious — real losses on cash accounts and potential drawdown breaches on prop accounts.

What Causes Naked Trades?

Naked trades typically result from one of a few scenarios:

• Slippage on the SL placement — In fast-moving markets, the stop-loss can arrive at a price that's already through your entry, which the broker may reject. The entry fills but the protective orders don't.
• Broker-side API glitch — Occasional API disconnections between NinjaTrader and the broker can cause the TP/SL orders to not register, even though the entry does.
• Strategy-side issue with a specific release (very rare) — We test strategies thoroughly before release, so this is an infrequent cause. On rare occasions, however, a newly released version can produce naked trades under certain conditions. When it does happen, we announce it immediately in Discord #announcements so clients can take appropriate action.

In all of these cases, the entry order executes normally — it's the protective orders that fail. The position is left sitting in the market with no built-in exit.

How to Protect Against Naked Trades

Because the root causes are broker-side or release-specific, there's no setting you can toggle in your strategy to eliminate them entirely. What you can do is build good operational habits and add safety layers:

1. Check your accounts at the end of every trading day. This is the single most important habit. Confirm that all positions have closed correctly and that nothing was left open overnight. It's not mandatory, but no one has a bigger stake in the health of your accounts than you do — and a quick end-of-day review is the most reliable way to spot a naked trade before it becomes a bigger problem.
2. Optional: configure a broker-level max daily loss. Both prop and cash clients can set a broker-side daily loss limit (covered in detail in the "Why Didn't My Strategy Fire Today?" article). This won't prevent a naked trade from appearing, but it caps the damage if one runs against you.

What to Do If You Spot a Naked Trade

If you see an open position on your account without corresponding TP and SL orders resting at the exchange:

1. Manually close the position — or set a manual stop — to stop the bleeding. Don't wait to investigate first.
2. Verify the outcome and check the Executions / Log tabs to see what happened on the strategy side.
3. Open a support ticket and let our team investigate from the VPS. We can review the strategy-side behavior and confirm whether this was a broker hiccup, a known issue, or something else.

Don't try to troubleshoot the strategy logic yourself or alter settings in response — the goal in the moment is to close the exposure, then let the team investigate the cause.

Bottom Line

Naked trades happen when an entry places but the protective TP/SL orders don't — usually because of broker-side slippage or API glitches, and only rarely because of a specific strategy release (which we test thoroughly and announce in Discord the moment an issue is identified). You can't prevent every case, but the single best habit is checking your accounts at the end of every trading day to confirm every position closed correctly. Optionally, a broker-level daily loss cap adds a second safety layer. If you find a naked trade mid-session, close it manually first, then open a support ticket so our team can review it.