Are You Using NinjaTrader 8 Yet?
Its been a while since I posted, I spend most of my time making videos and posting them to our YouTube channel. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do that here: Subscribe To YouTube Channel
Its just a more efficient use of time. But one of my goals for 2018 was to write more in addition to making videos.
I will admit I was a slow convert over to NinjaTrader 8. When it was first released I was all for it. This was in the last quarter of 2016. However, I still found it buggy. Our Orderflows Trader has been available since then. But during 2017 they guys at NinjaTrader kept on working on it and improving it and I finally made the switch full time to NT8.
If you are still an NT7 devotee and haven’t made the switch the NT8 you should seriously consider making the switch.
The big difference between NT7 and NT8 is the way data is handled. This is super important when dealing with a footprint chart because with NT7 you couldn’t load historical bid and offer volume correctly. Some software used the up/down tick way of constructing the volume footprint but the footprint was only about 80% correct. What you really need is the bid offer volume to be recorded so your historical footprint chart is accurate when you reload it.
The point I am trying to make is this: if you close your chart and then reopen it, the volume footprint on NT7 would not be 100% accurate because the data is not saved by NT7 correctly, it will look correct for the most part but when you compare it to the actual footprint chart for that time period you will see the glaring differences. But with NT8, when you reopen your chart the volume data is handled correctly and the footprint is correct.
Does this really matter? Well, with order flow you aren’t really looking at what happened 6 hours ago or whatever, you are really watching the market from when you start trading. You don’t base many trading decisions based on yesterday information. So its not a big deal. I very rarely look at the previous day’s footprint during the current trading day. I know the previous day’s references that I may trade around on the current day, but I don’t analyse the previous day’s footprint for trading decisions today.
What else do I like about NT8?
1. I find it easier to make chart adjustments such as making the fonts bigger. It may not sound like much but to me its important because I look at footprints and sometimes I want the fonts smaller so I can see more.
2. I find it easier to switch chart types. For example, to go from a 1 minute to a 4 range chart.
There is a learning curve for users to overcome, especially if you have been using NT7 for years. I would spend an hour a day or so just getting used to it before I became comfortable with it.
Here are some charts from the NT8 version of Orderflows Trader:
