Company may gain access to customers account/trading records for auditing purposes.

[Lee.Daxx]

Ninjatrader licence agreement contains the following paragraph:

g. Audits. Company may gain access to customers account/trading records for auditing purposes. Such records may be disclosed to an independent audit source. Reasonable and industry appropriate non-disclosure agreement(s) shall pertain to third party auditing sources. Some configurations of Software/Service may transmit trade execution data over the Internet to a secure database for the purpose of audit tracking.

To me it says in plain text that Ninjatrader, LLC can download from the user's computer all trading records (including those related to trades done outside Ninjatrader), store these trading records for unlimited amount of time and analyse them, including the use of third-party who'll gain access to personally identifiable trading records.

Does anyone else find it alrming? Why Ninjatrader, LLC would ever want to audit clients' trading records?

[Pete S]

I'm curious about the answer to this as well.

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

This clause is in there to comply with our requirements to collect and report Trading Technologies patent licensing fees for users that execute trades through the Static SuperDOM. This implies that we “may” gain access to this information through agreements we have in place with FCM’s that collect these fees on our behalf. If this information is requested from an FCM, the data is transmitted to a 3rd party auditing firm for auditing to ensure that NinjaTrader is accurately paying fees to Trading Technologies. We never see this data.

In the event that a user optionally chooses to trade through the patented Static SuperDOM through our TT Transaction Credit based system, transaction data is collected in real-time only. This is required to ensure that we can accurately debit the users transaction credits and maintain their credit balance in real-time. In no other situation does NinjaTrader receive transaction data nor can it at anytime download any historical transaction data form a users PC.

Information on purchasing TT credits - http://www.ninjatrader.com/webnew/su...on_credits.htm

Information on the TT Patent - http://www.ninjatrader.com/webnew/tr...settlement.htm

[Lee.Daxx]

Thanks a lot for the reply!

Is there a chance that a more specific version of the above clause will be included in the future versions of the license agreement? If the license said something like

"Company may collect information about customers account/trading records for auditing purposes. The information collected may include the time of a trade and the components of Ninjatrader used to commit a trade or a type of instrument/market (such as US equity, Forex etc) but not specific instruments or amounts involved. Such information is required to comply with the Company's own lincensing obligations. Under no surcumstances will the Company collect data regarding trade orders or trades submitted outside Ninjatrder. Such records may be disclosed to an independent audit source." etc

"We never see this data." will be difficult to incorporate in the license aggrement as Ninjatrader employees have access to the data (at least for back-up purposes).

The current version of the license agreement is an absolute NO for anyone who wishes to use Ninjatrader in a corporate set-up. The legal abviously look at what is written in the agreement and not at the best intentions.

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

I will take your suggestion into consideration. Thanks for posting it.

[behealed]

...

I would be soooo angry if I developed a ninjascript strategy and next thing I know I see someone named "NinjaTrader" selling it on eBay.

I would advise that you update your user agreement, and not to take a whole long time to do it.

[behealed]

Sorry

Sorry if I sound like a jerk some times

I know you wouldn't do what I suggested. But updating the user agreement would give me more peace about it. I actually went to bed last night worrying about something like that happening, and woke up with it still on my mind. So it's that serious to me.

[whitegun]

Hello,

Does this issue finaly got addressed??

If not is it planed?

When?

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

We have not yet ammended our license agreement. It will be ammended for NT7.

[whitegun]

Thanks Ray,

Could you please tell me if Intelectual Property issues (like comented by the poster of this tread http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showth...ighlight=ninja ) also will be addressed in the new agreement?
This bothers me a little bit, so I would feel more quiete, if this would be addressed in some way (its fine that NT phones home to verify the licence, but specialy because NT does this, there should be a point in the licence agreement addressing IP issues)