Add Text Boxes and Check Boxes to a NinjaTrader Chart for Manually Changing a Strategy’s Trading Rules in Real-Time (Point-and-Click NinjaTrader® Strategy)
Original Trading Strategy
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Trading Strategy Summary
This strategy demonstrates how to add text boxes and check boxes to a control panel the NinjaTrader® chart upon which a strategy is applied that will allow you to manually change variables that the strategy uses as part of its trading rules in real-time by changing the values in the text boxes and checking or unchecking the checkboxes, then pressing an “Apply Changes” button.
The control panel that this strategy adds to the NinjaTrader® chart upon which it is applied has the following text boxes and check boxes:
The “Allow New Automated Entries?” Check Box
The “Allow New Automated Entries?” check box allows you to enable or disable new automated entries for a strategy. Even if new automated entries are disabled, the strategy will continue to exit its currently open positions, and the strategy will continue to do everything else it normally does, like calculating information and drawing on the chart. This allows you to do things like disable new automated entries directly before a major economic announcement or planned speech by a world leader, then re-enable new automated entries a few minutes after the potentially market moving event is over and the odds of a massive and unpredictable price spike have decreased.
You can also use this “Allow New Automated Entries?” check box in the opposite way by starting the strategy with new automated entries being disabled by setting the strategy’s “Allow New Automated Entries?” input parameter to False by unchecking its check box in the NinjaTrader® user interface, and then only enabling new automated entries by checking the check box and applying the changes when you see an opportunity arise for which you believe your strategy has an edge. Once the opportunity has passed, either with or without your strategy entering a new position, you can disable new automated entries again until the next opportunity arises.
Note that even if automated entries are disabled, you will still be able to enter long positions manually by clicking the “Enter Long” button if the strategy is not already in a long position and so long as there is no other reason why your strategy is not allowed to enter a new long position.
The “Use Additional Exit Criteria?” Check Box
This “Use Additional Exit Criteria?” check box allows you to enable or disable the custom exit rules toward the bottom of the “When Bar Updates” section. The stop losses and profit targets used by this strategy are always applied regardless of the value of the setting that this check box’s checked state controls.
The “New Auto Entries Allowed Start” and “New Auto Entries Allowed End” Text Boxes
The “New Auto Entries Allowed Start” and “New Auto Entries Allowed End” text boxes allow you to specify a time range in which new automated entries should be enabled.
Note that this strategy uses the current bar end time for the time stamp of price bars when determining if automated entries are allowed or disallowed based on this time of day filter.
Set the values of these two text boxes to be equal to not use any time of day filter for when new entries are allowed.
Set the value of the “New Auto Entries Allowed Start” text box to a time of day that is greater than the time of day in the “New Entries Allowed End Time” text box to make the allowable time of day span midnight, for example starting at 17:00:00 (5 PM) and ending at 16:00:00 (4 PM) the next day.
The “Stop Loss in Ticks” Text Box
The “Stop Loss in Ticks” text box allows you to set the approximate number of ticks away from the average fill price (or each fill price separately) of the entry order to place a stop loss. The minimum allowable value for this field is 1.
The “Risk to Reward Ratio” Text Box
The “Risk to Reward Ratio” text box allows you to set the value that the “Stop Loss in Ticks” value will be multiplied by to determine the “Profit Target in Ticks” value for the profit target, which is the approximate number of ticks away from the average fill price (or each fill price separately) of the entry order to place a profit target. This field must be greater than 0. The profit target will be calculated by rounding “Stop Loss in Ticks” multiplied by “Risk to Reward Ratio” to the nearest Whole Number, or 1 if the calculated value is less than 1.
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How to Get the Quagensia Strategies
This point-and-click trading strategy is built into Quagensia N Edition (for NinjaTrader®).
Customize Quagensia Strategies with Your Own Ideas
Tweaking Quagensia Trading Strategies using point-and-click with the Quagensia Desktop Application is easy for non-programmers. If you get stuck you can usually find the answer you need in our online help documentation or you can ask a question in our friendly Discord community.
If you don’t want to tweak a Quagensia Trading Strategy with point-and-click to add your own proprietary trading logic, you can still download a Quagensia Trading Strategy file, open it up in the Quagensia Desktop Application, and generate its code, then backtest and optimize the trading strategy on different instruments, different bar periods (weekly bars, daily bars, hourly bars, 15-minute bars, etc.), or different bar types (time-based bars, volume-based bars, tick-based bars, etc.), and use different start and end dates.
Some tweaks you can make to the Quagensia Trading Strategies you download include:
Modify the entry & exit logic.
- Add more conditions, remove conditions, or change them by choosing from among a very large number of components, including many exotic indicators.
- Add or modify stop losses, trailing stops, and profit targets. Make them tighter, less tight, or based on an entirely different calculation.
- Add or modify time stops. For example, exit after a certain number of bars either unconditionally or only if the post-entry price action did or did not exhibit certain characteristics.
Enhance the output of the strategy to go beyond simply placing orders.
- Draw lines, shapes, and text on the chart. For instance, you can mark times or prices where each entry or exit condition of a multi-condition entry or exit was true, even if all the necessary entry or exit conditions were not true at the same time so an entry or exit did not occur.
- Write information to NinjaTrader®’s NinjaScript® Output window or TradeStation®’s EasyLanguage® Print Log window.
- Write information to a file. You can even output a report that can be opened in Microsoft Excel or consumed by another application that reads comma-delimited, semicolon-delimited, or otherwise character-delimited tabular data files.
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