Range Bar Completion Lines for NinjaTrader 8

What it does

• Both completion prices, live — A green line at the price that finishes the bar upward, a red line at the price that finishes it downward. Both redraw on every tick as the bar's high and low move.
• Arithmetic, not a guess — Upper is the current low plus the range size; lower is the current high minus it. There is nothing to be wrong about — these are the prices, not an estimate of them.
• Refuses to mislead you — On a time, tick or renko chart it says so in red and draws nothing, rather than plotting numbers that would mean nothing.
• Readable by your own code — Both levels are exposed as transparent plots, so a strategy can read Values[0] and Values[1] without recalculating them.

The problem with range bars

A range bar does not close on a clock. It closes when price has travelled a set distance, which means you never know how much time you have — only how much distance is left.

That distance is knowable exactly. At any moment there are two prices that end the bar: one above, one below. Most traders eyeball them, or wait for the bar to print and act late.

The arithmetic

For a bar of size R, with the bar's current high and low:

upper = low  + R
lower = high - R

That is the whole calculation. As the bar develops its high and low move, so both prices move with them — and the gap between them narrows until one is touched and the bar closes.

There is no model here and nothing to tune. Either the price is reached or it is not.

What it does not tell you

Which of the two gets hit. Nothing about the next bar. Nothing about whether a trade is worth taking.

It removes an estimate from your timing, and that is all it removes. On a range chart that is genuinely useful — acting as a bar completes rather than after it has printed is often the difference between the fill you wanted and the one you got.

Range charts only

On any other bar type the indicator prints a red warning and draws nothing. That is deliberate. The completion price of a five-minute bar is not a meaningful number, and drawing one would be worse than drawing nothing.

Install

1. Download the zip. Do not unzip it — NinjaTrader imports the zip as it is.
2. In NinjaTrader: Tools → Import → NinjaScript Add-On…, then pick the zip.
3. Restart NinjaTrader.
4. Open a RANGE chart, then right-click → Indicators…, find Range Completion Lines, and add it.

Settings