Hey everyone,
I just published Phoenix v2.0.0 and wanted to give you a heads up on what changed and why.
This is a major update. The short version: I completely rewrote the order management engine from the ground up. The trading logic is identical — same entries, same exits, same settings — but the way Phoenix talks to your broker is fundamentally different and significantly more reliable.
Why the rewrite?
Previous versions of Phoenix used a custom order management system inherited from the original strategy builder. It worked, but it had some ugly edge cases that would bite people at the worst possible times:
- Phoenix could stop taking trades after the first trade of the day with no obvious warning (especially on Rithmic-based brokers like Apex and Bulenox)
- The daily loss limit kill switch could fail to close your position when it should have
- Stop loss or profit target orders could silently fail to place on slower connections
- Restarting the strategy with working orders could create orphaned or duplicate orders
Every one of these bugs lived inside that custom order management code. Rather than continuing to patch individual issues, I ripped it out entirely and replaced it with NinjaTrader's built-in order management system. This is NT8's most battle-tested code path — it's what the platform was designed to use. The result is a simpler, more reliable strategy that's also easier for me to maintain going forward.
What does this mean for you?
If Phoenix has been working fine for you: It will keep working the same way, just more reliably under the hood. Update when you get a chance.
If you've experienced Phoenix not taking live trades, randomly stopping or throwing errors: This update should fix these problems. Please update as soon as possible but follow the upgrade instructions in the change log!
Bonus: Zero dependencies
Phoenix is now a single self-contained file. Previous versions required four additional support files that all had to be installed correctly. If any one of them was missing, outdated, or got corrupted during an update, Phoenix would fail to load. That entire problem is gone. One file, everything built in.
Backtesting note
If you run v2.0.0 in the Strategy Analyzer, your numbers may differ slightly from v1.2.5. This is expected — it's a simulation artifact from the change in order management, not a change in trading logic. The overall profile (win rate, profit factor, equity curve) will look very similar. Live trading is not affected.
How to upgrade
There are a few extra steps for this update because of the architecture change. I wrote up detailed instructions in the changelog. Please follow them carefully — the key steps are deleting old template files and old support files before importing the new version.
If you run into any issues, submit a support ticket and I'll get you sorted out.
Thanks,
Tom