Hi All:

I have been battling the dreaded all screens turn white and no bars paint when I make a symbol change. It's been very intermittent but I feel I found the offending indicator and some of the data sensitive conditions that cause the problem. I realize NT 6.5 is at End of Life as far as changes and updates go but I am still trading with it and still don't know when a stable version of NT7 will be available. Just want to leave this for others that might be having this frustration while trying to trade with NT6.5. I was using this indicator on stock charts only which gave me the clue as my futures charts were not causing the problem on symbol change.

The offending indicator is the Pivots indicator that comes with NT6.5.

What conditions cause it to white screen?

Linking two or more charts with one chart having 2 instances of Pivots. Normally one is set to daily and the other is weekly. See example below.

If you do the symbol change on the chart with the 2 Pivot instances the charts, it will white screen 1st change almost every time, second change for sure.

If you do the symbol change from the linked chart that does not have the Pivot indicators on the chart it does not white screen. I've tried as many as 20 consecutive changes without a white screen.

If the chart with the Pivots indicator is unlinked from the other chart or charts, it appears to functions fine when changing symbols with no problems. Again 20 changes in a row.

I've been able to replicate this on 3 different computers and with all three having a different version of NT6.5. The operating system on all 3 computers was Vista 32bit.

Since removing the Pivots indicator from all stock charts I haven't had a white screen in a week. I use the CMI pivots from the Ninja Trader forum for futures charts so I'll have to come up with a replacement for stocks.

Hope this helps someone from having the same frustration it caused me.

Hi TraderJesse,

I use charts with a dark background, so I am not getting white screens but blue screens, LOL. I know them from my earlier days in front of MS-DOS PCs. The only difference is that Microsoft's Blue was somewhat brighter than NinjaTrader's.

So there are two conditions that favour white or blue, let us say empty screens.

(1) The pivot indicator loads daily data, when set to DailyBars. This means that it accesses intraday data and daily data at the same time. This may create a deadlock within NinjaTrader. So if you use NT 6.5., simply set the Pivot indicator to "CalcFromIntradayData" mode and it will be more stable. If the Pivot indicator is not in DailyBars mode, it should not create any problems. The same applies to the SessionPivots indicator. Please note that both pivot indicators may display inaccurate pivots with "CalcFromIntradayData" , if the wrong session is chosen or if they are applied to range bars.

For NT7 initially the same problem occured, but if you check the code for the latest NT7 pivots indicator you will find that the loading of daily data is now done via a separate threading. So NT7 first will load intraday data, and only after loading of intraday data is complete, will proceed to load daily data. This causes the pivots indicator to be displayed with a delay of a few seconds but the process is stable and does not produce empty screens.

(2) You may also create deadlock in a similar way, if you change the symbol for connected charts. Since I started loading my charts one by one, I have reduced the number of NT 6.5 crashes on loading historical data from about 20 per day to 1 or nothing.

Again this does not occur on NT7. NT7 is quite stable on backfilling historical data. The only exception that I noticed with NT 7.0.0.10 is a red cross following data throttling of Interactive Brokers. This bug was addressed by NT development staff and should be removed with NT 7.0.0.11 So far I have not tested this.

For stocks you can either use CMIPivots (set LOCAL SESSION = true) or NT pivots. Both will work flawlessly, if you do not use DailyBars mode. As noted above, there could be a problem with range bars (pivots may be off up to 1/3 range).

TraderJesse 

Hi All: Since removing the Pivots indicator from all stock charts I haven't had a white screen in a week. I use the CMI pivots from the Ninja Trader forum for futures charts so I'll have to come up with a replacement for stocks. Hope this helps someone from having the same frustration it caused me.

Fat Tails 

For stocks you can either use CMIPivots (set LOCAL SESSION = true) or NT pivots. Both will work flawlessly, if you do not use DailyBars mode. As noted above, there could be a problem with range bars (pivots may be off up to 1/3 range).

Ahhh. That's why I couldn't get CMI pivots to work with stocks. I was setting local session time but not the local session flag. I have pivots now...

Fat Tails 

So there are two conditions that favour white or blue, let us say empty screens.

Agreed

Thanks Fat Tails....