Standard range bars invent bars that never traded — and the platform’s own source code calls them phantom bars.
Range bars are a genuinely good idea: every bar represents the same amount of movement. The implementation is where it goes wrong.
What a range bar is
A range bar closes once the distance from its high to its low reaches the size you set. Time is irrelevant and so is direction — only the span matters. Every bar covering the same distance makes momentum easy to compare, which is exactly why people like them.
Two things the standard implementation fabricates
Phantom bars
When price jumps further than one range — a news tick, a rollover, an illiquid open — the standard implementation manufactures a staircase of bars carrying zero volume, at prices assembled from “previous close plus one tick”. Those bars did not happen. They exist so the chart cannot gap. Every indicator then averages them, and a backtester will happily fill orders inside them.
The close is forced onto a boundary
Rather than closing at the price that broke the range, the close is set to the range boundary. So on a standard range chart, the close of nearly every bar is a computed number rather than a trade.
What we do instead
A bar closes at the real price that broke the range, and a jump bigger than the range produces one honest bar that is bigger than the range — because that is what happened.
Bars on this chart are not all the same height. If you use that uniformity as a visual ruler, you will notice immediately.
That uniformity was always purchased with invented data. An oversized bar here is a real event — a gap, a spike, a thin open — and it is worth seeing rather than smoothing into a tidy staircase.
If perfectly uniform bars matter more to you than knowing where the gaps were, the built-in range bars are the right choice and we would rather say so.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Range (ticks, 1 = auto) | 1 | How far the bar must span before it closes. Auto measures the first 90 minutes of market data and aims for about twelve bars across it, roughly sixty a session. |
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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.
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Common questions
Why can standard range bars never gap?
Because they fill the gap with manufactured bars rather than leaving it. It keeps the chart visually continuous at the cost of adding data that did not occur. Ours leaves the gap as a single larger bar.
Will my range-bar strategy behave differently?
Possibly, and it is worth checking. A strategy that implicitly relied on every bar being exactly N ticks — or on the extra bar count that phantom fills produced — will see different inputs. It will also see fewer fabricated fills, which is the point.
What range size should I use?
Start on auto. If you set it by hand and it is obviously wrong for the instrument, it tells you in the NinjaTrader log instead of leaving you to conclude the bar type is broken.
Do range bars hide time too?
Yes. Like Renko, a range chart says nothing about how long a bar took. Twelve bars might be four minutes or four hours. If session timing matters to your edge, keep a time-based chart alongside.
The rest of the family
What else we make
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.