NinjaScript Development

“I have a jittery calculation and I want to smooth it.” The answer is almost always “call one of NinjaTrader’s built-in moving-average indicators on your existing Series.” NinjaScript ships SMA, EMA, WMA, HMA, TEMA, DEMA, VWMA, and several others as indicator objects you instantiate and call the same way you’d call SMA on Close. This…

“Three consecutive higher closes.” “Five bars without a lower low.” Pattern rules like these depend on a run counter — a small int that tracks how many bars in a row share a direction. The logic looks trivial but the corner cases are real: what counts as up, what to do with doji bars, how…

“How many bars since the last cross?” “How many bars has price been above the SMA?” Bars since a condition was met is one of the most-reused small patterns in NinjaScript — a single int field that increments every bar and resets to zero whenever the trigger fires. This post covers the pattern, the corner…

Running highs and lows are the building blocks of breakout indicators, pivot detection, stop placement, and risk sizing. “Highest high of the last 20 bars” is one function call. “Highest high of this session so far” is a loop. “Highest high since the last SMA cross” is a reset-on-trigger pattern. Different problems, different tools —…

You have an SMA. You want to know when price crosses it — that’s a signal. You also want to know when the SMA itself changes direction — that’s a different signal, same class of problem. Both come down to comparing current and previous values, and NinjaScript has built-in helpers for the common case plus…

When you call AddPlot, NinjaScript creates a Series<double> behind the scenes that you access through Values[i]. That’s a custom Series with nothing special done to it — it’s the same type you can create for your own use when you need per-bar tracking that doesn’t belong on a plot. This post covers when to reach…

An SMA cross that fires at 3 a.m. on overnight NQ is rarely useful. A reversal setup at 11:58 during the lunch chop is worse than useless. Most trading logic belongs in specific windows, and NinjaScript has simple tools for keeping it there — a couple of integer comparisons and a helper method you write…

Tooltips live in two places in a NinjaScript indicator. The first is the settings dialog — the small hover text that explains what a property does. The second is the chart itself — labels and annotations attached to drawn objects that show context when a trader hovers over them. Both are cheap to add, both…

A polished indicator hides settings that don’t apply to the current state. When a ShowLabels bool is off, the LabelColor, LabelSize, and LabelFont properties should disappear from the grid — they’re irrelevant unless labels are enabled. Standard NinjaScript attributes don’t give you that directly. There’s no [Display(EnabledWhen = “ShowLabels”)]. Three workarounds do it. Each has…

A three-property indicator fits fine in NinjaTrader’s default “Parameters” bucket. A fifteen-property indicator doesn’t. Once an indicator has ATR inputs, confirmation thresholds, display toggles, color choices, and alert settings, the property grid needs real structure — otherwise users scroll past the setting they actually wanted to change. Last week’s post introduced [Display(GroupName, Order)] and [Gui.CategoryOrder]….