What Is NinjaTrader?

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · Published 2026-09-26

NinjaTrader is a futures trading platform and a futures broker sold under one name, built for people who trade contracts such as the E-mini and Micro E-mini index futures. Platform facts below come from NinjaTrader’s own site and help guide, registration facts from the National Futures Association’s BASIC lookup, all read on 26 September 2026, and the video counts from this site’s own study of YouTube.

How it works: two firms, three screens

The name covers two companies. The disclosure at the foot of NinjaTrader’s web pages separates them: NinjaTrader, LLC owns and supports the platform “as a software development company”, while NinjaTrader Clearing, LLC provides the brokerage. On NFA BASIC, the regulator’s public register, NFA ID 0309379 is NinjaTrader Clearing LLC: an approved NFA member, registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a futures commission merchant. The same record lists three trading names for that one firm: NinjaTrader, Tradovate and Kraken Derivatives US.

There are three front ends. NinjaTrader Desktop runs on Windows PCs. NinjaTrader Web runs in a browser on a PC or a Mac, and the mobile app runs on iPhone and Android. The deeper tools, such as multiple monitors, NinjaScript code and third-party add-ons, are listed against the desktop version only.

Nothing moves until you connect. The help guide says you must connect an account, through a connection NinjaTrader provides, your broker or a data feed, before the platform receives prices, whether you trade live or in simulation. After you log in, a Trading Mode window offers a live account or a simulation account.

Orders are managed with ATM strategies. ATM stands for advanced trade management. The help guide calls an ATM strategy a set of user-defined rules that create and manage the stop loss and profit target orders around a position, much like a bracket order saved as a reusable template.

Data feeds and connections

NinjaTrader, LLC is not a market data provider. That is the help guide’s own wording. Price history comes from whichever connectivity provider you log in through, and the guide publishes a table showing what each one supplies.

The table lists 15 providers, and 9 of them carry futures. All 15 supply real-time data and minute and daily history. The gaps are lower down: 12 supply historical tick data, 11 support Tick Replay, and 10 supply historical bid/ask tick data. Among the 9 futures providers, 7 supply bid/ask tick history; BarChart and Interactive Brokers do not.

You can run more than one connection at once. Ticking Multi-provider in the options lets you connect a broker and a separate data service side by side. The guide suggests this when a broker supplies no history of its own. With Multi-provider on, the Trading Mode screen is skipped and connections are picked from a menu instead.

The platform can also record its own history. An option called “Record live data as historical” saves incoming ticks to your PC while a chart is open. The guide warns that using it alongside a provider that already supplies history “may result in data gaps”.

Order flow tools

Order Flow + is NinjaTrader’s name for its order flow suite. The help guide lists 8 parts: cumulative delta, delta bars, the market depth map, price on volume bars, the trade detector, volume profile, volumetric bars and VWAP. The same page says the suite is included for lifetime license users. NinjaTrader’s order flow page presents volumetric bars as its footprint charts.

A volumetric bar splits each price level into sellers and buyers. Trades filled at the bid or lower count as selling, and trades at the ask or higher count as buying. Buy volume minus sell volume at that level is its delta.

That split needs the right history. The BidAsk delta type only works when the provider supplies historical bid/ask tick data. Without it, the UpDownTick type counts a trade as buying when the price ticked up and selling when it ticked down, which is a different measurement.

Imbalances are checked on the diagonal. In the guide’s Diagonal mode (a Horizontal mode is also offered), the buy volume at one price is compared with the sell volume one level below. By default a side has to beat the other by a ratio of 1.5, and by at least 10 contracts, before the cell is marked. The guide adds that volumetric bars are not supported on spot forex, which has no central auction.

The market depth map needs Level II data. It plots the largest resting size seen at each price, with 10 levels per side by default. The guide says equity instruments are not supported. It shows depth of market over time rather than one snapshot.

A worked example

Take a hypothetical four-level volumetric bar, read from the top price down. Each level shows sell volume first and buy volume second, in contracts.

• Top level: 3 sold, 14 bought. Delta 14 minus 3 = +11.
• Second level: 8 sold, 240 bought. Delta +232.
• Third level: 110 sold, 300 bought. Delta +190.
• Bottom level: 350 sold, 90 bought. Delta 90 minus 350 = -260.

The bar’s delta is the sum of its levels. Buying totals 644 contracts and selling totals 471, so the bar closes with a delta of +173. Adding the four level deltas gives the same +173.

Now check the diagonals with the default settings.

• Top buy 14 against second-level sell 8: a ratio of 1.75, but the difference is only 6, below the minimum of 10. No imbalance.
• Second-level buy 240 against third-level sell 110: a ratio of about 2.18 and a difference of 130. Buy imbalance.
• Third-level buy 300 against bottom sell 350: a ratio of about 1.17. No imbalance.

One cell gets marked, and the bottom of the bar still shows heavy selling. A positive bar delta does not mean every level was bought.

NinjaScript and C#

NinjaScript is the code layer, and it is C#. NinjaTrader’s tutorial page says it “uses standard C# syntax”. You open the NinjaScript Editor from the Control Center, write or edit a script, and compile it in the same window.

It covers more than indicators. The same page lists automated strategies, alerts, drawing tools, multi-series and multi-timeframe logic, and add-on windows that use the platform’s data and order routing. For traders who do not code, the simulator page describes a Strategy Builder that makes rule-based strategies without writing any.

Third-party add-ons plug into the same framework. They are imported through Tools, Import, NinjaScript Add-On. The help guide warns that a buggy add-on can slow windows, drop data connections or shut the whole application down. Only install them “from sources you trust”.

The reference manual has moved. The NinjaScript section of the help guide now points to a separate developer site. The data table notes that options are not supported for NinjaScript use.

Simulation and playback

The default practice account is called Sim101. NinjaTrader’s simulator page says it tracks cash balance, profit and loss, and margin the way a live account does, and that simulated trading has no time limit. Live streaming data comes with the first 14 days; after that the page says the simulator runs on delayed data unless you add a live feed or fund an account.

There are three kinds of practice market. The first streams real prices into Sim101. The second, the Simulated Data Feed, generates random prices, and a trend slider lets you push them up or down. The help guide says this feed has “NO correlation to real market data”. The third is Playback.

Playback replays recorded data across every open window at once. You must close other connections first. The simulator page puts it at up to 1,000 times normal speed, going back 90 days, so a trader can rerun one morning’s open several times. The paper trading page covers what this kind of practice can and cannot show.

The original data

The platform’s name appears in the titles of 81 videos, from 56 channels, across this site’s 24,971-video study. A typical one, the median, drew 5,957 views; the study as a whole sits at 10,684, so NinjaTrader videos reach a little over half the usual audience. Six passed 100,000 views; 45 stayed under 10,000. A title qualifies when it holds the name as a whole word, and no video appears twice.

Getting the platform running is the main subject. 50 of the 81 are how-to, tutorial, guide, setup, beginner, install, walkthrough, overview or review videos. 18 cover strategies, automation, bots, algorithms, backtesting or code, and 9 cover indicators. Only 2 use order flow words such as footprint, volumetric, delta, DOM, market depth, tape or volume profile, even though the platform has a whole order flow suite. Replay, playback, simulator, demo or paper trading appears in 6 titles, and prop firms in 1. A title can fall in more than one group.

Other futures platforms show the opposite mix. Titles naming Tradovate, Bookmap, TopstepX, Sierra Chart, Quantower, ATAS or Jigsaw add up to 32 videos, with a median of 10,224. On the same word lists, 8 of those 32 are about order flow, and 7 of those 8 involve Bookmap. Only 2 are about strategies or code, against 18 of the NinjaTrader set. The peer group is small, so read these shares as a direction, not a precise rate.

The tutorial lean is partly built into the sample. Of 1,409 study searches, exactly one carried the platform’s name, “ninjatrader tutorial”, and it alone supplied 48 of the 81 videos, 42 of them setup or tutorial titles. The remaining 33 surfaced through searches about indicators, algo trading or risk. In that group, strategy and code titles are the largest theme at 13, and the median drops to 1,435 views.

The platform’s own channel is not what gets watched. Eight of the 81 videos come from the channel named NinjaTrader, with a median of 4,486. The five most-watched NinjaTrader titles are all tutorials or an automation walkthrough, led by one at 588,026 views.

The raw counts are free to download. The title and theme tallies sit in futures platform title demand. The 15-row provider grid, with real-time data for all 15 and bid/ask tick history for 10, is in NinjaTrader data by provider.

When it fails

The Rev button leaves you unprotected. With server-side ATMs, the help guide says pressing Rev exits the position and opens the opposite one “without an ATM strategy”. You are now short or long with no stop. Local ATMs attach a new stop and target on reversal, so the same button behaves differently by setting.

Two entries, zero position, orders still working. On server-side ATMs, going long one contract and then short one leaves you flat while both sets of stops and targets keep running. The guide’s fix is to click Close, which exits and cancels them together.

A stop that lives on your computer. A Simulated Stop order is held on your PC and only sent to the exchange when it triggers. The help guide lists the risks plainly: a lost internet connection or a crash stops it, and so does a pause in market data. It also warns against using one in the first five minutes of trading.

Delta from the wrong data. On a connection without bid/ask tick history, the BidAsk type cannot classify past bars, and the UpDownTick alternative measures something else. A footprint study built on one feed can read differently on another.

Practice on a market that never existed. The Simulated Data Feed is random. It is fine for learning buttons and testing code, but a setup that looks good on it says nothing about a real contract.

A funded account with a second rulebook. A futures prop firm sets its own rules on connections, platforms and position limits, and those rules sit on top of anything the platform allows. Read the firm’s list before you set up the workspace.

Related

The market NinjaTrader is built around is covered on the futures page, and the smaller contracts most new accounts start with on micro futures. The tools inside Order Flow + are explained from first principles on the order flow and volume profile pages.

If you trade with a funded account from a firm, futures prop firm explains the evaluation model. For a charting platform that runs in the browser, see TradingView, and for the forex terminals from MetaQuotes, see MetaTrader. Testing a NinjaScript strategy on past data is covered on backtesting.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.