What is A NinjaTrader 8 ATM Strategy?
NinjaTrader 8 ATM Strategy is a way of automating your trade management. And that’s exactly what Automatic Trade Management stands for, and for short, we’ll call it ATM too. This is useful if you trade using our XABCD pattern suite to manage your trade to break even if that interests you.
Who Should Use ATM Strategies?
Anyone who wants to automate their trade management because they might not be around or available all the time but still wants to have certain actions defined and performed automatically.
How to Create Your First NinjaTrader 8 ATM Strategy
ATM strategies can be set up and created in several different ways where you would enter your order.
1. Open up your order window. You will see a drop-down arrow where the ATM Strategy is listed. If no ATM Strategy is listed, it will say “None.”
2. Hit the down arrow and click “Custom” to create the ATM Strategy.
You will see the following ATM window open up, below each number will be explained.
Breaking Down the ATM Window
Shadow Strategy: This is a way of comparing ATM strategies to another to reach the outcome of a single trade. Think of this as a way of testing future ATM strategies.
Order Quantity: This is the size of the order that will be placed when you use an ATM Strategy
Targets: You can have multiple targets or just a single one (which is shown by default). It will include profit targets and your stop loss and stop strategy. This will change depending on the Parameter type used for the order (e.g. a percentage vs a pip count etc.)
Stop Strategy: We’ll dive into this in a section below, but this will allow you to define when your Stop gets moved up to breakeven or if you want to trail your stops (or not) and how close you want to follow them. These options are all set up in different stop management ATM templates.
TIF (Time in Force): This is how long the order is good, which is set to Good Till Cancelled (GTC). You can also have this expire at the End Of The Day (EOD).
Parameter type You can set this to options like pip, point, Percent etc., which you would probably use in most trading patterns. Especially patterns since with our filters, you can look at ways that only have a 2:1 risk vs rewards and use your percentages.
Reverse at Stop Unless your strategy has this built-in, most of these options under More will probably be used elsewhere.
Chase if Touch This will enable an auto chase if the limit price is touched (but not filled) on your entry orders. This means your stops will be brought up to breakeven once the price reaches the entry order price (but only filled once the chase limit is reached.
Target Chase This will enable an auto chase if the limit price is touched (but not filled) on your profit target orders up until the chase limit is reached.
MIT for profit means that MIT orders will be used for the targets
Adding The ATM Stop Strategy
The ATM Stop Strategy is a neat tool for creating more advanced ATM Strategies inside NinjaTrader 8. The whole goal here is to reduce the risk
Profit Trigger: This is the amount you have to be profitable for the auto breakeven would happen. So if you have this setup to 25 pips, the Stop will move to breakeven once you are up 25 pips.
Plus: This is the amount added to the breakeven that can be used if you’re scaling and using averages.
Targets: You can have multiple targets or just a single one (which is shown by default). It will include profit targets and your stop loss and stop strategy. This will change depending on the Parameter type used for the order (e.g. a percentage vs a pip count etc.)
Volume Trigger: The volume amount that will simulate the stop movement.
Simulated Stop: This is for forward walking testing similar to the shadow order.
Want to Download NinjaTrader 8 ATM Templates?
Below we’ll add some ATM templates you can use with your trading. You can find some installation instructions below, so please read them carefully.