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, sent to you separately from the download. It activates the machine.

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. Shogun does not include strategies or signals — you bring them.

SECTION 02Install

Unpack the whole folder to a plain local path, for example C:\Shogun\.

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 and byte size published with your download, in the START-HERE.txt and quickstart inside your folder. Check the Shogun.exe, after unpacking — not the zip. If either value does not match, stop and tell us.

SECTION 03First run

Double-click Shogun.exe. It opens its own window. On first run it has no settings, so it opens the Setup page. 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 received and then correctly ignored.
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 ignored — safely, but quietly.
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

In TradingView, use the alert's Test button, or fire it once manually. Then open this address in a browser on the same PC:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/health

Look at the bus block. routed going from 0 to 1 is the pass. It is the only honest witness that the alert crossed TradingView → our relay → your machine. The main screen says the same thing in words, under Fleet Control: "the relay has DELIVERED 1 signal(s) to it — the path from TradingView to this machine is PROVEN working."

There is also a read-only diagnostic that checks the right instruments in the right order, and names which ones your build actually has, so a missing reading cannot be misread as a zero:

python tools/did_it_land.py

Give it a few seconds. Your Shogun collects alerts from the hosted webhook rather than being called directly, so an entry arriving a second or two after it fires is normal, not a fault. Exits are never dropped for being late.

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 spaces count. A name Shogun does not recognise is dropped on purpose and quietly, which looks identical to nothing arriving.

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 the relay handing over any signal — including exits. Panic Close still works; 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 only sees alerts while it is open, and it does not restart itself if your PC sleeps or reboots.
• 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. Shogun re-checks each position it opened against the size it intended, and trims a genuine excess. It only ever reduces — never past flat, and it will not top a position up to a target, because opening risk is a decision, not a repair.
• It never touches a position it did not open. A trade you placed by hand has no record with Shogun, so it is reported and left alone.
• It never acts on an unreadable account. A position it cannot read is skipped, not guessed at.
• A full exit is never refused by anything. One case can refuse a partial scale-out: when your broker positively reports no position to reduce, because that order would open a new trade in the opposite direction rather than trim one. You keep the full position, and your strategy's own exit still closes it.
• 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.