About NinjaCoding
NinjaCoding exists because one trader wanted proof. Proof that a strategy works before real money goes on it. That question turned a sound engineer into a programmer, and a programmer into the team behind thousands of NinjaTrader strategies.
Today NinjaCoding is a registered NinjaTrader vendor and fintech development team. We specialise in NinjaTrader frameworks, indicators, strategies and add-ons, custom development and consulting, and we build professional fintech software beyond NinjaTrader.
Eight chapters, three careers, and one stubborn question.
Told by Yuri Zolotarev, founder of NinjaCoding
I left university before finishing and went to work as a sound engineer in a big commercial music studio. I stayed six or seven years. It taught me to listen closely, to obsess over detail, and to keep at something until it sounds right.
It did not pay much. The music business back then was a hard place to make a living, so I left.
Next came construction. Don't ask why. For five years I ran a construction business, and it was tough in every sense. You are on call 24/7. Every morning starts on a building site. It is hard, physical, relentless work.
It paid better than music, and I learned discipline there. But I had one dream the whole time: to stop getting up every morning to go to a site.
All my life I had wanted to try trading. Brokers had started opening accounts for regular people, so I opened one.
The terminal looked confusing, but I figured it out. Then, before watching a single lesson, I bought US dollars on the spot currency market with a position far too big for someone who had no idea what he was doing. The market barely moved. I closed it, and I had made a full month of what my construction business earned. In the blink of an eye.
For about a day I was ready to shut the business down. A few trades later, every cent of that profit was gone.
So I finally watched the broker's video course. A lady in a sharp suit explained the stochastic oscillator: overbought, oversold, enter here, exit there. It sounded great. But how could I know it was true? How do you prove something like that?
I printed out charts, taped the pages together into long strips, and drew every trade by hand. Five to ten sheets glued end to end, maybe 10 or 15 trades, and it took ages. My conclusion was clear: done like this, it would never work. I needed a computer to do the testing.
I started looking for a way to test ideas properly and found someone explaining how backtesting should be done. That led me to Wealth-Lab. I downloaded it and opened it.
I was used to complex software like AutoCAD. Even so, I had never seen anything like this. Then I found a small button that said Create Strategy, pressed it, and a code editor opened.
That was the moment of choice. My construction business was slowly dying, and I could either close that window or learn to code.
"It had so many buttons it looked like the cockpit of a Boeing 747."
I took offline lessons with a tutor out of town. He went painfully slowly: "Here is a variable." I kept saying: just show me how to code this strategy. It took about a year before I could really write code.
There was no AI to walk you through every step. Information came in tiny pieces. I found a few people teaching Wealth-Lab and strategy coding, watched every course they had, and slowly it came together.
Soon I was testing and optimising strategies in Wealth-Lab, building a portfolio, and tracking every result in a spreadsheet. The more I did, the less I wanted to go back to construction.
I started coding strategies for NinjaTrader, because that is where the traders were. One client led to the next, and the client base grew. Over the years I coded thousands of strategies, and NinjaCoding became a registered NinjaTrader vendor in 2017.
That work became courses on Wealth-Lab and NinjaTrader, our own frameworks, indicators, strategies and add-ons. Alongside it, we built other software, mostly for trading and business automation.
Today we run the business from Dubai, UAE. The AI era is here, and we are using it to build faster and to build things that were out of reach a few years ago.
The biggest of them is AlgoDesk, our own algorithmic trading platform. It builds, backtests, optimises and runs strategies the way we have always tested them. It is everything I wished I had when I was taping charts together.
What the paper charts taught us
The first trade showed how fast money moves. The paper charts showed that an idea is worth nothing until it has been tested. That is still how we work on every project.
Every strategy gets backtested and optimised before anyone trades it. A sharp suit and a confident voice are not evidence.
We learned to code as traders, so we write clean, structured code that traders can follow, change and own.
Information was scarce when we started. Our courses and frameworks are the resources we wished we had back then.
Three businesses, one team, run from Dubai.
Everything for NinjaTrader traders, from a team that has been coding it for over a decade.
Our software development company. If it can be programmed, we can build it.
Our own algorithmic trading platform for building, testing, optimising and running strategies.
Tell us what you want to build. We'll code it, test it and show you the numbers before you put money behind it.