How to Customize Candlestick Colors in NinjaTrader 8
NinjaTrader lets you recolor candles in a couple of clicks — and there’s a lot it doesn’t let you do. Here’s the built-in way, its limits, and how to go further.
Can you change candlestick colors in NinjaTrader 8?
Yes — the basics are built in. Right-click the chart, choose Data Series, and in the panel on the right, under Chart style, you’ll find colors for the candle body outline, the wick, and separate colors for up bars and down bars. Change them, click OK, and the chart updates.
NinjaTrader also ships a chart style called CandleStick++ that adds a custom outline brush, custom wick brush and adjustable opacity, if you want a little more control than the standard candles. For a lot of traders, that’s enough.
Where the built-in options stop
The defaults cover color, but not much beyond it. A few things you can’t do natively:
- Save and switch styles. There’s no way to save a look and flip to it in one click. Every change means digging back through Data Series — mid-session, that’s friction you won’t bother with.
- Color candles by context. Native colors are fixed: up is one color, down is another. You can’t shade candles by a moving-average trend, by volume, or light up only the outsized bars.
- Separate up and down outlines. Up and down candles are forced to share a single outline color — a small thing that bothers a lot of people who want cleaner contrast.
How to customize candlesticks beyond the defaults
To go further you add a candle-styling add-on — a NinjaScript tool that takes over the presentation layer of the chart without touching your data. The good ones turn styling into something you control from the chart header instead of a settings panel: a row of preset buttons, each a saved look, one click away.
Beyond plain colors, a proper tool lets you style candles by what the market is doing: color bars by a moving-average trend, shade them by volume so heavy participation stands out, highlight only bars that move more than a set number of points or ATR, or give overnight bars their own color. And it fixes the split-outline limitation — separate up and down outline colors, finally. One thing it should never touch is your data: same bars, same prices, same width and spacing, only the presentation changes.
How to install a candle-styling add-on
- Download the add-on’s .zip file — leave it zipped.
- In NinjaTrader, open the Control Center and go to Tools → Import → NinjaScript Add-On…
- Select the .zip. NinjaTrader imports and compiles it.
- Open a chart — a styling add-on that lives in the chart header will show its buttons there; an indicator-based one you add via right-click → Indicators…
The honest part
Restyling your candles won’t make you money — it makes the chart readable, which is a different and smaller thing. The point is to strip away what distracts you and keep what you actually read, so your eyes go straight to the information. Set it up once, keep it clean, and get back to trading.