01
The time it eats
Every morning you read the report and key in or adjust dozens of orders by hand. Time spent on data entry instead of your actual business, every day it runs.
Project Proposal, Prepared for Devin Brady
Your Turtle commodities orders arrive in a PDF every morning, and your desk keys them into NinjaTrader by hand: one execution account, with Dorman allocating the fills to your ~50 client sub-accounts. This builds a system that does that daily routine for you, and never touches an order without checking the live account state first.
You approve. It executes. It re-prices the stop in place, and stops to ask when anything is unclear.
The system
Reads the daily turtlealerts PDF, reconciles it against the live state of your execution account, and executes only after your desk's one-tap approval, with a working stop on every position.
The plan
Proof of concept first (30–40 hours), then the production system (150–200 hours, supervised). Your Dorman allocation to sub-accounts stays untouched. Go/no-go at each step.
The investment
Proof of concept: ~$3,600–4,800. Production system: ~$17,900–23,800. Hourly with an agreed cap: you only pay real hours.
01 · The Problem
Your report is software-generated, so reading it is the easy part. The real work is everything after: keeping the right orders working at the right prices, every single day, with a working stop on every position.
Every morning you read the report and key in or adjust dozens of orders by hand. Time spent on data entry instead of your actual business, every day it runs.
One stop you forget to update, one fat-finger on a price, one order on the wrong side. And because the fills are allocated to your clients' sub-accounts, one wrong order in the execution account becomes every client's wrong fill. That is why the build below is safety-first and supervised.
The stops trail. Most days the prices change, so you are not placing orders once, you are constantly cancelling, replacing, and re-pricing the ones already working.
02 · The Daily Flow
This is the system at work, end to end, on real numbers from your June 24 report. It plays on its own, or you can step through each stage at your own pace.
Watch a real day run through the system.
Every contract, price, and action below is taken from your actual 06-24-2026 turtlealerts report, including the 32nds on treasuries (112^31) and a manual order the system refuses to touch. The middle step, Reconcile, is the engine: it is where most of the value lives.
THE DAILY ROUTINE, IN 5 STAGES
The walkthrough starts automatically. Use Back and Next anytime, or replay it from the beginning.
Illustrative walkthrough built on your real 06-24-2026 report, on the exact setup it runs in production: your execution account, with Dorman's allocation staying on your side. Not a live trade or a performance claim.
03 · The Principle
Before it touches a single order, the system reads the real state of your account, your positions, your working orders, the fills since the last run. It never acts on assumptions. A script that just fires the PDF's orders would be cheap and dangerous; this safety-first reconciliation is the engine, and it is most of the work.
It modifies a working stop in place instead of cancel-then-recreate, to avoid the gap where a position sits without a stop. After the daily restart it re-identifies each working order by account, contract, and side before touching it (proven in Phase 0). If a modify is rejected or the state is unclear, it stops and alerts you instead of guessing.
An unknown symbol, a price that fails a sanity check, the broker disconnected, the email missing: all of these make it pause and tell you, rather than do something wrong. It fails closed, not open.
You operate the same account from your phone. If an order you placed by hand overlaps with what the system expects, it flags that instrument for your review instead of acting on it. It runs twice without ever doubling an order.
04 · Multi-Account
Your desk trades one execution account, and Dorman allocates the fills to each client's sub-account at the same average price, the regulated CTA standard (bunched orders + Average Price System). That process works today, and this system does not touch it.
05 · The Roadmap
Start small, validate, and grow with confidence: you control the spend and the risk at every step. The reliability work (reconnection, watchdog, recovery) is part of the production build from day one: for a system trading client capital, that is foundation, not polish.
30–40 hours. It tests the critical points on your real setup before anything big is built: re-pricing stops after NinjaTrader's daily restart, stop protection living on CQG's servers (verified with NinjaTrader fully closed), reading the complete account state including manual orders, treasury tick handling (full, half and quarter 32nds), and the parser on your real PDFs.
Deliverable: a written feasibility report + a working parser demo + a firm quote for the build.
GATE · IF ANYTHING FUNDAMENTAL FAILS, YOU FIND OUT HERE, FOR THOUSANDS, NOT MID-BUILD
150–200 hours. The full daily workflow on your execution account: the reconciliation engine, execution with a confirmation check on every instruction, server-side entry+stop brackets and the every-position-has-a-stop watchdog, reliability from day one (connection monitoring, auto-reconnect, verified daily restart, redundant alerts, recovery runbook), your sizing (total per market), the secure dashboard, approval mode end to end, hard risk limits, and a full audit trail.
Deliverable: the system working supervised: it preps the day's plan, your desk approves with one tap.
APPROVAL GATE · NOTHING EXECUTES WITHOUT YOUR APPROVAL
Once you've run it supervised and trust it: real-time state and live P&L in the dashboard, full automation switched on gradually with hard limits and escalation rules, and the optional AI format-drift detection, which never produces an executable price.
Deliverable: real-time dashboard + automation, on your terms.
OPTIONAL · ONLY IF AND WHEN YOU WANT IT
06 · Investment
The smart way to spend here is in order: the proof of concept (30–40h, ~$3,600–4,800) proves, on your real setup, everything the build depends on, and ends with a firm quote for the rest. Every phase is a go/no-go gate: you never commit to the larger number blind, and you can stop at any point with something usable.
30–40 hours
~$3,600–4,800
Every make-or-break test on your real setup, a working parser demo, and a firm quote for the production build.
150–200 hours
~$17,900–23,800
The reconciliation engine, execution with confirmations, server-side brackets, reliability from day one (reconnect, watchdog, runbook), dashboard, approval mode, audit trail.
40–70 hours
~$4,800–8,300
Real-time P&L, gradual full automation with hard limits, optional AI format-drift detection.
About the difference vs the first proposal: the production number now includes the reliability work (reconnection, watchdog, recovery) and the safety findings of a full technical review; for a system trading client capital, those should not be optional. Same project, better information. Hourly with an agreed cap per phase: if it takes fewer hours, you pay less, and the proof of concept delivers a firm quote before you commit to the rest. Not included (you provide): the VPS (~$60–100/mo) or Windows machine, your NinjaTrader license, broker accounts, market data, and any platform, broker or FCM fees. Your Dorman allocation process needs no changes.
07 · Next Step
Green-light the proof of concept
Confirm the numbers work for you, and set up the daily turtlealerts email forward: it is the input to everything.
The proof of concept runs (30–40 hours)
Every critical behavior proven on your real setup, documented in a short feasibility report, with a firm quote for the production build.
The production build, supervised
The system preps each day's plan; your desk approves it with one tap. Nothing executes without approval.
Every phase ends at a checkpoint. Nothing moves forward until you approve the step before it, and nothing executes, ever, without you.