April 2, 2011
- in Uncategorized by schooloftrade
How to Get the “Accurate” Open Time on Ninja Trader 7 charts for futures contracts
How to get the CORRECT open of the day for Ninja Trader 7 Charts
Here’s how to set-up the charts so that the correct open and close times are used for the CurrentDayOHL and PriorDayOHLC indicators.
The short answer:
assign the globex session template to each instrument in the Instrument Settings and then use the “use instrument settings” on the chart’s “data Series” definitions.
a “session template” is a template of start and stop times and days ( a trading calendar as it were)–not a chart template. (I’ve attached a screen clip of each step)
1) In Control Center>Tools>Session Manager:
Identify the exact name for the electronic globex session template. (I created my own globex session template to make sure I knew the name).
This should be the start/stop times as defined on the contract specifications page for each contract.
Gold and Crude run from 6:00 PM to 5:15 PM the next day, Sunday through Friday (Eastern Times)(see GC Globex Template screen clip)
So pick the template that matches this-or create your own.
2 In ControlCenter>Tools>Instrument Manager:
Edit the Gold contract (as an example) and under the “Session Template” drop-down box, select the template named in step 1. This defines the instrument’s default session template for all charts or strategies, etc for this instrument.(see Editing the GC Contract and Assigning the Globex Template screen clips)
3) To assign a session template to a particular chart, start by right clicking on the chart and select “Data Series”. (see GC Chart DataSeries settings screen clip)
on the right hand side of the “Data Series” window, about half-way down is “session template”–this is where we select which session template to use for this chart–and the base indicators on this chart (the indicators which use the primary data series on the chart) (the primary series is always the 1st one listed in the lower left panel of the ‘data series’ window)
Select “<use instrument settings>” — this will use the template assigned under the Instrument Manager in (step 2) — of course you can select any of the session templates here-but by using the “<use instrument settings>” selection, we can make universal changes in session start/stop times in just one place (Instrument Manager) and know that all dependent charts will adhere to the changes.
The day/times of the current day and the prior day are determined by the settings in the session template—thus if the globex session template is selected, the “current day” open will be at 6:00 PM the prior day, the “Prior days close” will be the last trade yesterday at 5:15 PM.
FYI: by using the globex session template–no (new) live data will be displayed on the chart during the 45 minute shutdown between 5:15 and 6:00 PM–of course-there are no trades during this time either
Thanks to Jim E. for the help with this post!
