Setup, and what to do when an alert does not arrive.

SECTION 01Before you start

Shogun runs entirely on your own Windows PC. It places real orders on your own broker accounts with your own sizing. Nothing of ours executes anything, and nothing you set up here can reach anyone else's accounts — or theirs yours.

A Windows PC

Shogun is a single .exe of about 16 MB. No installer, no Python, no admin rights. It has to stay running to act on an alert.

Edge or Chrome installed

Both broker connections are browser-driven, so Shogun opens and drives one browser window per firm you connect. Edge ships with Windows, so this is almost always already true.

Your licence key

A long string, shown on screen immediately after you pay. Save it then — it is displayed once and we keep only a hashed copy. Lost it? Tell us and we will issue a new one.

A broker account

On Rithmic (R|Trader Pro web — how Bulenox and Apex clear) or TopstepX. Those are the two platforms Shogun drives today; ask us before buying if yours is elsewhere.

Your own TradingView strategy

With an alert you can fire, on a paid TradingView plan (Essential or higher) with two-factor sign-in turned on — TradingView only sends webhook alerts then. Shogun does not include strategies or signals — you bring them.

SECTION 02Install

Download Shogun — that page carries the SHA-256 to check it against. It is a single Shogun.exe, with no installer and nothing to unpack. Save it into a plain local folder of its own, for example C:\Shogun\, and run it from there.

Failed to extract _tcl_data\encoding\cp860.enc: failed to open archive file!

Windows will warn you. That is expected.

Shogun is not code-signed yet, so Windows treats it as an app from an unknown publisher. You will see one or both of these, and neither means anything is wrong with the file:

We tell you up front so a red warning does not make you think you have been sent something dodgy. There is no way around it short of a code-signing certificate, so we publish a checksum instead — verify the file rather than trusting us:

Get-FileHash .\Shogun.exe

Check it against the SHA-256 shown on the download page — that is the authority, not any file that arrived alongside it. It is the checksum of the Shogun.exe you downloaded. If it does not match, stop and tell us.

SECTION 03First run

Double-click Shogun.exe. It opens its own window on the console — the running view, which on a fresh install is mostly empty because nothing is configured yet. Click the gear in the left rail to open Setup, then work top to bottom.

The Accounts and Signals tabs are empty on a fresh install. That is correct — accounts are read from your broker and signals are yours to name.

SECTION 04Activate your licence

1. Open Setup → the Licence tab.
2. Licence server — already filled in. Leave it alone.
3. Licence key — paste your key. This is the only thing you type. It is masked as you type, on purpose: a screenshot of this page is the most common way a key escapes. Press Show if you need to check it.
4. Press Activate this machine.

It confirms your plan and expiry, and the status turns ACTIVE. Then restart Shogun — it tells you to. The running copy keeps its old answer until it does, which is normal and not a failure.

Your key is never sent back to us after activation and is never written into your config file. It is exchanged once for a signed token, and only that token is stored.

SECTION 05Connect your broker

Shogun drives two broker platforms today:

Tradovate, NinjaTrader and The Futures Desk appear in the app's list but are not wired — Shogun will refuse to add them rather than put a connection on screen that can never connect. If your firm clears somewhere else, ask us before you buy.

Open the console, add your broker connection, and switch it on. Switching it on is what opens the broker's own login window for you to sign into. Both platforms are browser-driven, so each connection runs its own browser window alongside Shogun.

Then open Accounts: Shogun reads the account list from the broker itself. Tick the ones you want traded and set the size for each.

SECTION 06Create a signal

A signal is how Shogun knows which of your accounts a given strategy trades. Setup → Signals → + Add signal.

1. Rename it from Signal1 to something you will recognise. Write that name down exactly — it goes in the alert message in the next section, and case and spaces count.
2. Tick the accounts this strategy should trade, and set the size for each. A signal with no accounts is reported as unroutable and places no order.
3. Save.

You do not need to press Generate. Adding a signal already mints what it needs; that button is there to rotate those values later.

SECTION 07Point TradingView at your webhook

TradingView sends alerts from its own servers, and your PC at home has no public address, so something has to bridge the two. We host that for you. When you activated, your Shogun was given its own webhook on our licence server.

There is no tunnel, no Cloudflare account, no router setting and nothing open on your machine. Go to Setup → Licence → Your webhook — hosted for you. There are two boxes to copy, and they are a pair:

Webhook URL

Paste into the TradingView alert's Webhook URL field. It is already a public https:// address.

Alert secret

Paste inside the alert message, as the secret field below.

The alert message

Paste this into TradingView's Message box:

{
  "name": "YOUR SIGNAL NAME",
  "secret": "YOUR ALERT SECRET",
  "trade_type": "{{strategy.order.action}}",
  "quantity": "{{strategy.order.contracts}}",
  "sentiment": "{{strategy.market_position}}",
  "price": "{{close}}",
  "timestamp": "{{timenow}}"
}

The alert must be fired from a strategy, not an indicator — the {{strategy.*}} placeholders only render on a strategy alert.

The four things that break it

1. Do not retype the {{ }} parts. They are TradingView placeholders — copy them character for character. If you type real numbers there, every alert sends the same values.
2. The name must match a signal you saved. An alert whose name you have not configured is reported as unroutable on the health screen.
3. Use the two boxes from the Licence tab together. The URL and the alert secret are a pair; one without the other is refused.
4. Do not share your webhook URL or alert secret. Anyone with both can place trades on your accounts.

SECTION 08Fire a test — you are not set up until you see this

On a practice or evaluation account, fire one strategy alert using the message from section 7. Then open this address in a browser on the same PC:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/health

For first setup on a fresh Shogun run, look at the bus block after the test: require routed >= 1 and unroutable == 0, with polling: true and stale: false. On an existing run, the new test must increase routed; check that unroutable_channels is empty. A previous routed alert does not prove that this test worked.

The phone panel (the phone icon in the left rail, or /panel) explains delivery, routing, paused connections and clock problems in words. A routed alert proves transport and routing; check the broker's position or fill separately.

Shogun waits three seconds between completed poll passes by default, fetching up to 50 alerts per batch. A backlog can delay delivery. Non-flat alerts older than the configured entry-age limit are dropped; the default is 180 seconds. Full exits bypass freshness checks, but cleanup can remove queued alerts. Do not rely on replay after downtime. Delivery is separate from a broker-confirmed close.

SECTION 09Nothing arrived

This is the common one, and it is silent. Check these in order — the first two account for most of it.

1. Is Shogun actually running?

   It collects the alert itself, so nothing arrives while it is closed. This is the single most likely cause after an overnight — see section 10.

2. Does the "name" in your alert exactly match the signal you saved?

   Case and internal spaces count. A name Shogun does not recognise appears in bus.unroutable_channels and the panel's warning. It arrived, but it could not be routed. Correct the name and tick its accounts in Setup.

3. Did you paste the Licence tab's webhook URL and its alert secret — both?

   They are a pair. A wrong or missing secret is refused at our server, so nothing ever reaches your machine. And check the URL is the hosted https:// one, not a localhost address.

4. Is your licence still active?

   Setup → Licence, or "lapsed": true on the health screen. A lapsed subscription stops entries and partial scale-outs; flat-marked exits remain eligible for delivery. Delivery and closure are not guaranteed. Panic Close remains available; see section 14.

5. Is the alert still live in TradingView?

   TradingView alerts expire, and can be paused. If Shogun has been running and has simply heard nothing for longer than a normal overnight or weekend, this is usually why.

None of this involves a tunnel, a router or a firewall — the webhook is hosted for you, so there is nothing of that kind to check.

SECTION 10Is Shogun running?

A stopped Shogun and a quiet market look identical: no error, no warning, just no trades. So the panel tells you in a sentence, right under Fleet Control.

Nothing about that check is sent to us. It is read by your own panel, on your own machine.

SECTION 11Error messages, and what each one means

These were rehearsed against the software, not guessed.

SECTION 12If you are in a trade and worried

Use Panic Close — FLATTEN ALL. It sends a flatten to every account Shogun manages, and it does not need your licence to be valid — it never asks our server anything, it talks straight to your broker.

Then tell us three things:

• What you expected, and what happened.
• The time, and whether it was a TradingView alert.
• The Trade Log line, if there is one.

SECTION 13Day to day

• Leave Shogun running. It must be open to act on alerts. Reopen Shogun after a PC reboot, then turn paused broker connections back ON. A close on a paused connection may need its broker window reopened — if you have not saved the broker login in Shogun, you may have to sign in by hand before the close can go through.
• Keep the PC awake. A sleeping PC trades nothing, and closing a laptop lid or pressing the power button sleeps it. On the PC you trade from, set Settings → System → Power so the screen may turn off but the PC never sleeps, and set the lid and power button to Do nothing.
• Keep the clock right. Alerts delivered by the hosted webhook are dropped if they are more than 60 seconds ahead of your PC's clock or older than the entry-age limit (180 seconds by default); full exits are exempt from these limits. Keep Settings → Time & language → Date & time → Set time automatically on.
• Glance at the liveness line before each session — section 10.
• Check the Trade Log at the end of a session. It shows what filled and at what price — it is a record of broker fills, not of alerts arriving.

The price your strategy expected and the price you actually got are shown separately, and they will differ. That gap is the real cost of the trade, and seeing it honestly is a large part of why Shogun exists.

SECTION 14What Shogun will never do

• It never adds size. On an account one strategy trades, Shogun re-checks the position against the size it sent, and trims a genuine excess. The trim is bounded by the observed position, which can change before execution. It will not top a position up to a target.
• The watchdog leaves your own trades alone. A trade you placed by hand on an account where Shogun holds nothing has no record with Shogun, so the over-fill watchdog never touches it. Panic Close is different: it flattens the whole account, trades you placed by hand included.
• The watchdog does not trim an unreadable position. It reports explicit unreadable readings; an account absent from the snapshot may be skipped without a finding. A full exit or Panic Close can still attempt a flatten without a readable position; check its result.
• The local licence check allows full exits and partial scale-outs. Other controls can still refuse an alert, including an exit attributed to another strategy or a connection locked after a hedge. A partial scale-out is refused if the broker reports no position to reduce. Check every close; use Panic Close or the broker's own platform if your strategy's exit is not confirmed.
• Nothing of ours places an order. We hold a message on the way through; every decision, every guard and Panic Close stay on your PC.

Still stuck? Tell us what you expected and what happened — "that seemed odd" is a useful report. Bugs are the point at this stage.