NC Opening Range Description
NC Opening Range is an opening range indicator for NinjaTrader 8, and it comes with the full C# source code. The opening range is one of the simplest ideas in trading: mark the high and low of the first part of a session and watch what price does when it leaves that box. I kept it simple and flexible: any start and end time, including windows that run overnight, plus a signal a strategy can pick up. It doesn't trade for you and has no filters; it gives you the levels and the breakout signal.
How it works. You set Opening Range Start and Opening Range End (9:00 and 9:30 by default). Every bar with a time stamp after the start and up to the end belongs to the window, and the range is the highest high and lowest low of those bars. If the start is later than the end, the window runs overnight, for example 18:00 to 9:30. When the window is over, the levels stay flat until the next window begins and a new range starts. Signal is 1 on a bar that closes above the range high while its open or the previous close was still at or below it, -1 on the same kind of break below the range low, and 0 otherwise.
What you see. Range High and Range Low as thick dashed orchid lines on the price chart, growing while the window is open. The Signal plot is invisible on the chart but shows in the Data Box, and a strategy, Strategy Builder or a tool like Bloodhound can read it. It calculates on each tick, so the range builds live and the signal can appear before the bar closes.
How to use it. Set the window to your market's open, for example the first 30 minutes of the cash session, or an overnight window for the overnight high and low. Since a bar counts by its time stamp, pick a bar size that fits evenly into the window, like 1, 5 or 15-minute bars for 30 minutes. The signal fires on every new break, not only the first one of the day, so add your own rule if you only want one trade.
Make it yours. Use it as is, learn from the code, or change it yourself or with AI like Claude. You could add an alert on the breakout, allow only the first break of each day, or plot targets at multiples of the range size. The code is short, with the range and the signal in separate methods, so it's an easy base to build on. Have some good trades!
