What determines when Plots start plotting on far left of chart?

[neoikon]

As the title suggests, what determines when Plots start plotting on far left of chart? Even if I have a SMA(2), the plot does not begin plotting until many bars later.

It would make sense if I had a SMA(30), then it would need at least 30 bars, but that's not the case with something small like a SMA(2).

Here is an example:
GBPUSD (Daily): http://i.imgur.com/ZLyjaEY.png

I can't seem to determine what is going on behind the scenes, since this is a mid-month and mid-week bar (so it's not as if it waits till the start of the first week/month, for example).

There is similar behavior intra-day as well.

I took a look at @SMA and nothing stood out.

Is there a "Minimum bars to plot" setting somewhere? I couldn't find one in the chart properties, data series properties, or indicator properties (but I could be blind).

What's also odd is that if I bring up the Data Box and hover over those non-plotted bars, there IS an SMA(2) value... it's just not plotted on the chart.

Any help is greatly appreciated!


EDIT: To answer my own question, it seems BarsRequiredToPlot is what I'm looking for. This seems to default to 20 (behind the scenes). It would be nice if the built-in objects would default this to 1 or 0. What is the rationale for it not being universally 0 or 1?

[NinjaTrader_Jesse]

Hello,

Thank you for the post.

It appears that you did locate the problem, the BarsRequiredToPlot.

This property is simply to prevent Plotting until the number of bars has elapsed, but is not associated with the amount of Bars needed to process.

This property would mainly be used if you did not want to display a visual until a point in time where the Visual aspect would be accurate.

I.E., the script needs 20 bars of data processed to display the visual correctly, but it starts calculating immediately on bar 0. This may lead to a jagged start to the visual aspect which can be removed by using this property.


I look forward to being of further assistance.