NinjaTrader 8 Basics: Workspaces, Charts, Orders and ATM Strategies
Why your NinjaTrader 8 workspace never saves, how to place orders from the chart, and how to set up ATM strategies with automatic stops and targets. No coding.
Installing NinjaTrader 8 is documented everywhere. What happens in the twenty minutes after that is not — and that is where most people get stuck.
This is the first entry in a new run of the Do It Yourself series covering platform fundamentals. We start with NinjaTrader 8, and Quantower and TradingView follow. Everything below is in the video, with chapter markers if you want to jump to one section.
1. The default workspace cannot be saved
Open the platform for the first time and you get a preset layout with a few charts and a SuperDOM. You rearrange it, add your indicators, set your timeframes. Then you close NinjaTrader, reopen it, and everything is back the way it was.
This is not a bug. The default workspaces that ship with the platform are protected — you cannot modify or delete them, and any change you make is discarded when you close the program.
So the first thing to do, before configuring anything, is create your own workspace. Go to the Workspaces menu and select New. You get an empty layout, and from there every change you make is yours to keep.
A workspace is a set of windows plus their positions, including which monitor each one sits on. When you save it, all of that is stored. Position your Control Center wherever suits you — it is where you see your account, open positions, running strategies, executions, orders, and the log with warnings and reports.
To keep a variation of an existing setup, use Save As with a different name rather than overwriting. Many traders keep one deliberately empty workspace to switch to when they need the desktop visible.
The part that catches people
You can have several workspaces loaded at once, but you only ever see one. In the Workspaces menu, the active one appears in green; others may be loaded and running behind it.
Loaded means running. The charts keep updating, the indicators keep calculating, and any strategy attached to them keeps placing orders. If you have ever wondered where an order came from, this is usually the answer: a chart on a workspace you forgot was open.
2. Creating your first chart
From the Control Center, click New and select Chart. Pick your instrument — with a futures data connection you will find the current contract, for example the September 2026 NASDAQ contract — then the bar type and interval.
Five-minute bars are a reasonable starting point. Set how much history to load, say the last fifteen days, and leave the rest at default until you know what you want to change. There are more exotic bar types available, UniRenko among them, but they need more configuration than a first chart deserves.
If your chart looks frozen, it is not broken
Open a chart on a weekend and the last bar sits there doing nothing. New users conclude the data feed has failed.
The cause is the session template. The default one excludes weekends and holidays, so outside market hours nothing moves. Right-click the chart, go to Data Series, and switch the session template to Default 24/7. Now the chart is live around the clock, which is what you want for testing.
While you are there, it is worth knowing about range bars. A ten-tick range bar closes when price has covered ten ticks, whatever that takes. Unlike time-based bars, a quiet market produces no new bars at all.
3. Placing orders from the chart
Chart Trader is the panel that lets you trade directly from the chart. You can enable it, disable it, resize it, or hide it while keeping it active. If Chart Trader is off, right-clicking gives you no order options at all.
With it on, where you put the mouse decides which orders you are offered:
- Above the current price — Sell Limit or Buy Stop
- Below the current price — Buy Limit or Sell Stop
That is not an arbitrary rule. A limit order sits where price has to come to you; a stop order sits where price has to run away from you. Above the market, selling is the limit and buying is the stop. Below, it reverses.
Orders go to whichever account is currently selected, and only the orders belonging to that account appear on the chart. If you run several accounts, live and simulated, check which one is active before you click.
Practice without risking anything
Disconnect your live connection and connect to a simulated account instead. The simulator lets you push price up and down manually, which is how you test trailing stops and order behaviour without waiting for the market to cooperate.
Once you are in a position, the P&L shown by Chart Trader defaults to currency. Right-click, open Properties, and you can switch the display unit to ticks, points, or price — or just click the P&L figure to cycle through them. Four ticks down and fifteen dollars down are the same information; which one you want to see depends on how you think about risk.
4. ATM strategies: stops and targets that place themselves
A naked position has no protection. ATM — Automated Trade Management — is how you attach a stop and a target that go in the moment you get filled.
There are no ATM strategies by default; you create each one. Select Custom and set the stop and target in ticks, twenty and twenty for a first example. You can express these in ticks, points, price or currency, whichever you prefer to think in.
Where it gets useful is multiple targets. Add a second position with the same stop and twice the target, and the ATM now handles two contracts: target one takes the first off, target two runs further. Save it as a template with a name you will recognise.
One difference from other platforms: you do not see a preview of the stop and target before entry. They appear once you get filled. From there you can drag any of them — in a real market you would put the stop a few ticks below the last swing low and target one below a nearby pivot.
When target one fills, the stop automatically resizes to cover the one remaining contract. That is the whole point of the setup.
Never move a stop to the wrong side of the market
Dragging a stop through the current price is the one action to avoid. Depending on your broker and connection it is either blocked outright or rejected — and a rejected stop leaves you holding a naked position without protection.
If you want out fast, use the Close button, or drag your target through the price so it fills immediately. Both are faster than fighting with a stop.
5. Indicators and order flow tools
Right-click the chart and select Indicators to see what ships with the platform, which is a great deal. The VWAP included with NinjaTrader 8 is more complete than most.
Beyond the standard indicator list, the drawing tools include order flow instruments worth knowing:
Volume profile can be drawn over any section of the chart you select, and moved or extended afterwards. At one tick per level it looks noisy; widen it to eight ticks per level and the picture smooths out, showing where volume actually traded.
Anchored VWAP works the same way. Instead of the session VWAP, you anchor it from a point you choose to the current price, and it updates in real time as you extend the area, standard deviation bands included.
What to do next
If your layout is now set up the way you want it, the next thing worth learning is how to save it as a template and move it to another machine — covered in NinjaTrader 8: Master Templates & Copy Your Pro Setup to ANOTHER PC. [acá va el enlace]
After that, the Strategy Builder videos take you from a configured chart to a backtested strategy.
Quantower and TradingView are next in this series. If there is a specific platform or feature you want covered, leave it in the comments on the video.
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