Making sure you are on the "front month with most volume is required when trading futures.
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Ninja Trader's upcoming events calendar will tell you when a particular futures market will roll over. Please check the dates for the contracts you trade and double-check that the trading volume is higher in the month you will trade.
The NinjaTrader Desktop platform allows batch rollover of the contract expiry of all instrument lists and windows on all open workspaces. To perform this batch rollover, please see the steps below:
Select Tools > Database Management from the Control Center window of NinjaTrader Desktop:
The grid under Rollover Futures Instruments will show each instrument that is eligible for rollover. A contract becomes eligible to be rolled over when today's date is greater than or equal to the rollover date defined for the instrument's next contract month:
Clicking Rollover will update each instrument with a checkmark next to it to the next contract month.
Please note:
Rolling over futures instruments will update the expiry of the instruments across all instrument lists and windows using the instruments on all open workspaces. These changes in workspaces will need to be saved, should you wish to preserve them. If there are areas on NinjaTrader Desktop where you wish to still use the old expiry, please be sure to switch them back to the old expiry or do not roll over at this time.
NinjaScript strategies are not rolled forward and must be manually rolled over.
If you are trying to load a Chart in NinjaTrader Desktop and are not seeing the next contract month, you can simply type in the symbol for the next month and it will load the data series and populate the drop-down menu in your chart with the new month.
Manually rolling over the contract is done by typing in the next contract expiry in the window's instrument selector and hitting the Enter key. For example: ES 09-24 to ES 12-24.
To check the volume, you must build a market analyzer from within Ninja Trader. Select FILE> NEW > MARKET ANALYZER from the Ninja Trader Control Center. Then you will want to right-click on it and apply the Nexgen "default template". Add the current future month and the next expiration month.
The process is the same for Ninja 8 as well as Ninja 7. There is one difference, the future contract will not be readily available in your list of markets. To populate the "next" contract you will have to build a new chart manually, typing in the date of the next contract.
Build a blank new chart.
You can delete that chart, and when you right click on the market analyzer, the new contract will be available to add to your list.
Once you have created the window, you will right-click on the instrument column and add in the contracts you wish to track.
To add a new month or symbol in Ninja 7 - Select TOOLS INSTRUMENT MANAGER from the control panel.,
You will then use the NAME section to type the symbol, CLICK SEARCH, then HIGHLIGHT it and move it to the active list on the left.
Once the symbol is in your list, to "roll" your contract months, simply use the drop-down menu on your existing workspace charts and select the new month.
