Why the first 20 bars don't show any indicator's plot?

[jjhou]

Open a chart with any bar count, and attached any indicator, take SMA(1) for example, the plot doesn't show on the first 20 bars, why is that?

[NinjaTrader_PaulH]

Hello jjhou,

Thanks for your post.

The default behavior of BarsRequiredToPlot is set to 20. This was set to 20 as a compromise in recognition that some indicators will require a number of bars to be processed before their accuracy is reasonable.

You can override this in the code of the indicator with: http://ninjatrader.com/support/helpG...iredtoplot.htm

[Harry]

In fact threre is some possible improvement here for the default indicators that come with NinjaTrader.

Setting "BarsRequiredToPlot" to 20 bars for all indicators is actually a bad solution. When you have a SMA(5), you would only need 5 bars to make an accurate calculation. For a SMA(100) you would rather want to wait for hundred bars.

Inserting a code line "BarsRequiredToPlot = Period" in "State == State.Configure" would fix the problem.

But then there will be more requests, why the indicator does not plot anything for the first hundred bars, when the indicator period is set to 100.