How to stop the fluctuation between bid and ask

[Instamess]

While price is unchanged the live cursor on my tick charts keeps fluctuating from bid to ask and back again depending on what price the last contract was exchanged.

This causes numerous oddities. For one, on my open trades the profit / loss figure in my DOM keeps changing even when price is not changing.

Secondly, indicators get screwed up occasionally. Example: Say price for S&P is "fluctuating" on the charts between 1905.50 and 1905.75 (bid and ask). Then price goes up 0.25 and there are selling contracts at 1905.75 but no buy contracts go through at 1906 before the price drops back to the previous 1905.50-1905.75. The tick charts never show price reaching 1906. That's an anomaly in my books and it affects proper analysis of what's happening in the market.

How does one correct for this?

[NinjaTrader_Jason]

Hello Instamess,

Can you please go to Control Center-->Tools-->Options-->General-tab and enable 'Use last price for PnL'. I suspect it is disabled, so it uses the bid and ask prices to calculate PnL.

You can configure charts to plot the bid or ask price instead of the last price. Please right click in the chart and select 'Data Series'. Set 'Price based on' to Bid or Ask.

[Instamess]

Hello Instamess,

Can you please go to Control Center-->Tools-->Options-->General-tab and enable 'Use last price for PnL'. I suspect it is disabled, so it uses the bid and ask prices to calculate PnL.

It's not disabled, the box is showing as ticked.

[NinjaTrader_Jason]

Hello Instamess,

If last price does not change, it should not change unrealized PnL in the SuperDOM.

I am not quite sure if I follow the sentence below.

"While price is unchanged the live cursor on my tick charts keeps fluctuating from bid to ask and back again depending on what price the last contract was exchanged."

Does the "live cursor" refer to the black price marker on the price axis? The black price marker should not change if price is unchanged.

Also, when you say "price is unchanged", you mean that last price stays exactly the same, correct?

[Instamess]

Yes, I mean the black price marker. It keeps moving up and down between ask and bid depending on whether the last contract was at ask or bid. It has always done this on my charts.

When I say price was unchanged I mean the bid and ask haven't changed.

[NinjaTrader_Jason]

Thank you for clarifying.

This is as expected behavior. It reports the price for the last trade taken. As per your example, if no trade occurred at 1906.00, it will not be reflected in the chart. By default, charts are build by the last traded price. However you can change it to bid or ask in the Data Series menu.

[Instamess]

Thanks, but I don't want it to change to bid "or" ask. I don't want to choose. I want to record the extremes of both.

If NT can't accurately record the extremes of price, that is a flaw in the platform, IMO.

That a contract did not happen at a price does not mean the price didn't reach that level. Recording just the lower of the bid-ask at market tops and the higher of the bid-ask at market bottoms does not represent a true picture of how price has ranged, it represents instead where contracts were taken. That makes NT charts contract charts or something rather than "price charts" and on occasion it skews interpretation of what's happening at support , resistance and channel lines. Whether a line was breached or not can be significant ...and it seems NT is happy that their software presents a false picture at these points.

Is there no way of changing this?

[NinjaTrader_Jason]

Unfortunately it is not supported to change this. If no trade happened at a certain price and the chart uses Last price, the chart will not reflect it. Last price indicates last traded price. If we would include the bid price of 1906.00 (as per your example), it would show incorrect information as there was no trade at that price.

[Instamess]

If we would include the bid price of 1906.00 (as per your example), it would show incorrect information as there was no trade at that price.

We'll have to agree to disagree. The ask is the ask whether anyone buys at that price or not.

But even IF I went along with your argument: On occasion if there are only one or two trades at that extreme before price retracts .... the chart doesn't reflect it. I've found numerous instances of this activity.

[NinjaTrader_Brandon]

Hello Instamess,

Thanks for your reply.

What may work for you is using a multi data series and adding the bid and ask plots to your last plot.
To do this you would right click on the chart and select Data Series
Select the instrument 2 more time and press New
Under Price Based On select Bid for one and Ask for the other
You then can decide what panels you want to place them on, what colors you want the bars, what chart style, and ect to be able to identify each data series and display them as you would like.

[Instamess]

That's a clever workaround, Brandon, and thanks for suggesting it, but it's neither elegant nor a proper solution given that indicators etc., would all need to be duplicated on every chart.

Also, could you please address the other concern raised in my last post i.e. about the flaw of NT not recording a price even when there HAVE been contracts exchanged at that price.

[NinjaTrader_Brandon]

Hello Instamess,

Thanks for your reply.

This comes down to personal preference of how you would like your charts set up.

NinjaTrader is not a data provider or a broker. NinjaTrader only displays the data as provided by your connectivity provider. If you are referring to where the bid and ask move to this would only be displayed if you are plotting the bid and ask data. If you are referring to the last price they ticks you are seeing could be bad ticks. Most data providers will correct their historical data to remove bad ticks. To look into this further I would need screen shots of a specific example.