PnF Chart Accuracy

[StockJock]

One of the advanced members of another forum has made a surprising remark about the reliability of NinjaTrader's PnF charts and I would appreciate your statement in regards to this.

Wyckoff Trading Method post #649

StockJock
be careful with NinjaTrader P&F intraday charts. They are wrongly constructed by Ninja. They know it but don't care. The session end starts a new P&F Box , which is wrong. P&F charts based on daily are OK as far as I know.

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Hello,

Yes this is in fact the case as we do start a new bar at the start of a new session. This is the same with all tick based charts (Tick/Range/PnF/ etc.).

Basically with building bars you have to choose one way or another with an approach to building these bars.

How the chart looks depends on where you start the chart and how much data is loaded.

For example lets us consider a Range chart, a range start loading 2 days back of data compared to a range chart loading 3 days back of data will give completely different results for the current day that is the same in both charts. The reason is the start price being different completely changes all the reference points for the range chart moving forward.

What we did so that everyone charts look the same is reset the charts every day, this normalizes everyone's charts and gives everyone the same start point at the beginning of the day so that each day the charts look the same.

This was a design decision we made and we had to essentially take the lesser of two evils if you will and that's what we decided to implement.

NinjaTrader is of course flexible enough that you can code in your own bars if you do not like this via custom programming.

We are looking into adding an option for this in our next major release however that is still sometime down the road and I cannot confirm at this time if this feature would be added.

-Brett