what "bar" am I on?

[jalexan1]

how do I tell which "bar" I'm on, since "the beginning of time"... (Not referring to the "barsobject") (referring to the last bar on the right on the chart). I want to use that "bar" magnitude in my indicator. If there isn't any such thing, then, is there a way to detect when I've moved from the previous "bar" to the present (last on the right) bar? I'm not sure the "FirstTickOfBar" variable is always valid... an entire 5-minute bar could elapse with no tick in a thinly-traded market.

[NinjaTrader_PaulH]

Hello jalexan1,

Thanks for your post and welcome to the forums!

The bars are number from the beginning of the days back requested (or bars back) and will start at the first bar loaded, bar 0, progressing to the bar on the right end of the chart, incrementing the bar count. The integer CurrentBar will hold the bar number. reference: http://ninjatrader.com/support/helpG...currentbar.htm

When working with price data, such as High or Close you would provide a reference to the bar to use. To make things easy the concept is to use a "bars ago" reference. For example Close[0] refers to the current bar, Close[1] refers to the previous bar, Close[2] to the bar before that, etc. Reference:http://ninjatrader.com/support/helpG...rice_data2.htm

Note that the bars ago reference does change depending on the setting of CalculateOnBarClose. If set to true, [0] will point to the last completed bar on the right edge but not the current forming bar. If set to false, then [0] will point to the currently forming bar. Reference: http://ninjatrader.com/support/helpG...onbarclose.htm

With CalculateOnBarClose set to true, your code would execute once at the end of the bar.

With CalculateOnBarClose set to false, your code would execute on every incoming tick and in this mode FirstTickOfBar will be true on the very first tick of the newly forming bar. You are correct that in a thinly traded market it may take a while to get that first tick but it will still trigger FirstTickOfBar. Reference: http://ninjatrader.com/support/helpG...ttickofbar.htm

[jalexan1]

Thanks for the quick answer. worked perfectly.