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Heiken-Ashi in NinjaTrader: It Replaces Your Data

The short version

Heiken-Ashi does not just draw differently. It replaces your data.

On a Heiken-Ashi chart in NinjaTrader, every indicator, strategy and backtest is computing from an open and a close that never traded. We fixed that by making it a drawing instead.

What Heiken-Ashi is

Heiken-Ashi (“average bar”) smooths a candlestick chart by averaging. Runs of colour become cleaner and trends easier to hold. It is deservedly popular.

The smoothing works like this: each bar’s close becomes the average of that bar’s open, high, low and close, and each bar’s open becomes the midpoint of the previous Heiken-Ashi bar’s open and close.

The problem is where that happens

In NinjaTrader, Heiken-Ashi is a bar type. Choosing it does not change how your chart is drawn — it changes what your chart is. The averaged values are stored as the bar’s actual open and close, and everything downstream reads them:

Your indicatorsA moving average of the close becomes an average of averages. Every oscillator is reading a value that was computed, not traded.
Your strategies“Enter at the close of that bar” refers to a price that never existed in the market.
Your backtestsFills are computed against synthetic prices, which is a quiet and very flattering source of error.

To be fair and precise, because this is usually overstated: the wicks on a standard Heiken-Ashi bar are largely real — the true high and low survive unless the synthetic open exceeds them. It is the body, the open and the close, that is fabricated. Those are also the two values most strategies actually use.

Our version is a chart style, not a bar type

Same smoothing in the picture. Your data left completely alone.

We compute Heiken-Ashi at the moment the chart is drawn and paint it, while the chart underneath keeps ordinary bars. You get the calmer picture you wanted, and your indicators, strategies and backtests keep reading prices that actually traded. Switching it on and off changes nothing about your data — only what you are looking at.

The wick is drawn from the real high to the real low, so the true excursion stays visible even where the smoothed body would hide it.

Speed

Drawing this cheaply matters, because the Heiken-Ashi calculation is a chain in which each bar depends on the one before it. Computing from the beginning of history on every frame would make a long chart crawl. Instead it starts the chain a couple of hundred bars before whatever you are looking at, which is mathematically indistinguishable from starting at the beginning — each step halves the influence of the one before, so it vanishes within a few dozen bars. A chart with two hundred thousand bars costs about what a five hundred bar chart costs.

Get the TrueWick bar types free

Create a free account and download them. That is the whole price — no card, no trial clock. One package: Renko, Reversal, Range, plus two chart styles.

Create a free account & download →

One NinjaTrader install note: newly added add-ons trigger an authorisation prompt the first time NinjaTrader compiles them. You must answer Yes. Answer No and they silently never compile and simply will not appear — with no error telling you why.

Common questions

Will my Heiken-Ashi strategy still work?

Read this one carefully. If your strategy was written against the Heiken-Ashi bar type, it was reading averaged opens and closes, and on real bars it will see different numbers and behave differently. That is a correction rather than a regression — it was trading synthetic prices — but do not expect identical results. Re-test before trusting it.

Can I still use NinjaTrader's built-in Heiken-Ashi?

Of course, and nothing we install removes it. If you specifically want the averaged values in your data — some people genuinely do — the built-in bar type is the right tool.

Does this work with any bar type?

Yes. It is a chart style, so you can put it on time bars, tick bars, or our Renko, Reversal and Range types.

Why do the wicks look different from the built-in version?

Because ours are the real high and low. NinjaTrader’s version takes the greater of the real high and the synthetic open, so its wick is sometimes stretched to meet an invented body. Where the real extreme sits inside the smoothed body, we draw no wick rather than inventing one.

The rest of the family

Renko barsFixed-size bricks. What the standard version hides in its wicks.Read it →Reversal barsA new bar only when price actually turns. Not the same as Renko.Read it →Range barsWhy the standard ones invent bars that never traded.Read it →All bar types comparedWhat each one hides, side by side, and which to use when.Compare →

What else we make

Enhanced Chart TraderOrder entry on the chart — brackets, breakeven, trailing stops and a real PnL readout without leaving the chart.See how it works →Trade CopierTrade one account, have the rest follow — evaluations, funded accounts and your own, with per-account sizing.See how it works →Key Levels ConfluenceSupport and resistance that agrees with itself — where several methods land on the same price.See the levels →Support & Resistance SuitePrior session levels, opening ranges, session boundaries. Pairs naturally with bar types that respect real levels.Browse the suite →

Also worth a look: all our NinjaTrader indicators · prop firms that work with NinjaTrader.

Provided free by Affordable Indicators, Inc. Nothing here is trading advice. Derived bar types hide time, and the bar currently forming is never final until it completes — understand both before trading from them. Not affiliated with NinjaTrader. All product and company names are the trademarks of their respective owners.