I mostly see MT4/MT5 talk here, but for anyone also running NinjaTrader against a futures-cleared FX or CME account, it is worth a two-minute sanity check before spending an evening hunting for free NinjaTrader indicators.
NinjaTrader 8 already includes, at no extra cost:
- Volumetric bars (a chart bar type, not an add-on) that split each price level's volume into bid vs ask, mark imbalance against a ratio you set, and print delta per bar. This is the thing usually sold separately as a "footprint chart."
- A genuine Volume Profile indicator - volume by price over a session or a custom range, with point of control and value area, not an approximation of one.
- Cumulative delta, a trade detector and the SuperDOM ladder with volume, depending on your license tier.
What those built-in tools do NOT do for you:
- No automatic flagging of absorption or exhaustion. Imbalance is marked against a fixed ratio, but that ratio does not adapt per instrument, and nothing tells you when it has drifted out of range.
- No alerts on order-flow conditions. You either watch the bar as it prints or you miss it.
- No easy session-to-session comparison. Stacking today's profile shape against the last 20 sessions works, but it is manual.
- Historical footprint bars need Tick Replay, since the bid/ask split has to be rebuilt from the raw trade stream - the more history you ask for, the longer that takes to load.
Most of what shows up when you search for "free NinjaTrader indicators" is a reimplementation of one of the above (another volume profile, another delta display) with no real gain, plus the usual caveat that it is compiled code running inside your platform, from an author you often cannot verify, that may stop being maintained the day NinjaTrader ships an update that breaks it.
Practical suggestion if you have not tried this: turn on Volumetric bars plus the built-in Volume Profile and trade with just those for a few weeks first. It tells you fast whether you actually need anything on top, versus buying or downloading a nicer-looking version of what is already switched on.
ICF Market has a longer breakdown of this (what is built in, where it stops, and where third-party tools genuinely add value) here for reference:
https://icf-market.net/blog/free-ninjatrader-indicators-what-you-already-haveCurious if anyone else here trades NinjaTrader alongside MT4/5 and has settled views on whether the built-in order-flow tools are enough, or where they fall short in practice.
Linkback: https://www.forex.zone/forex-education/29/ninjatrader-already-has-footprint-bars-and-a-real-volume-profile-built-in/5125/
