Trader Dale’s

ORDER FLOW

Quick Guide

Installation & Activation 1. After you have made the purchase send me an email to contact@trader-dale.com and ask for

your unique License key. Please make the email subject line: “LICENSE KEY”.

*Also if you are using a different email than the one you used for the purchase, then let me

know. I will send you the key ASAP.

2. Download the TDOrderFlow.zip and TDCumulativeDelta.zip from the website (Downloads

section in Members area). Do NOT extract the files!

3. Run NinjaTrader 8 platform. Go to Tools→Import→NinjaScript Add-On…

4. Locate the TDOrderFlow.zip and TDCumulativeDelta.zip on your hard drive and press Open.

5. Restart NinjaTrader 8

6. Go to Tools→Options→Market data and enable “Show Tick Replay”. Press OK.

7. Open a new chart and make sure you have the Tick replay on.

8. Right-click your chart and go to Indicators

9. Click the TraderDale file at the top of the list of Available indicators. It will show both indicators.

Double-click TD CumulativeDelta to add it to the “Configured” list of indicators (those are your

active indicators).

10. To activate the indicator, you need to enter your unique License token which you received from

me.

11. Press OK and the indicator will load on your chart.

12. Repeat steps 6 to 10 on a new chart (another one) and add the TDOrderFlow. Don’t have Order

Flow and Cumulative Delta in the same chart.

TD Order Flow – Properties There are a lot of settings you can tweak. Some of them are only visual, like color changes, text font

changes etc… I won’t cover those minor settings here and I will only focus on the most important ones.

Right click the chart → Indicators. You can edit the properties there.

Bar Opacity: Determines shades of the colors of the OF. If you set it to high numbers like 255 (max), then

heavy volume places will be better visible because the OF will print in darker shades (this change is most

apparent when you use Volume cell content)

Cell text: Determines what the OF shows in every cell. It can either show Bid x Ask, Delta, Volume, or

Diagonal Delta.

Cell text: BidAsk: Prints volumes traded on Bid and volumes traded at Ask.

Cell text: Delta: Prints volumes traded on Ask minus volumes on Bid. This represents who dominates the

market. Positive delta represents strong buyers, negative delta represents strong sellers.

Cell text: Volume: Prints sum of volumes traded on Bid and on Ask.

Cell text: Diagonal Delta: The same as Delta, but this one compares Bid/Ask diagonally. This gives you

more accurate information than standard Delta.

Content above and below bar: Determines what gets printed above and below each footprint. It can be

Delta, Min/MaxDelta, or Volumes. This number represents a sum of the whole footprint

Contract size: Some trading instruments will show a really big volume numbers. You can make this easier

to read if you set the Contract size to a higher number. For example: EUR/USD will show 500.000

contracts traded (with Contract size = 1). If you set Contract size to 1.000, then it will show only 500

contracts traded (1.000 times less).

Ladder Type: Bar/Candle: Visual setting. I prefer using the Bar because it allows me to see different

shades of the color depending on volumes traded.

POC settings: Place where the heaviest volumes in the footprint were traded is called the Point of

Control (POC). The software highlights it by putting it in a black frame. If there are more POCs next to

each other at the same price level then those will get highlighted in yellow.

TickSize: This is a special feature which allows the OF to be used with Forex. Set this depending on which

instrument you trade. If you trade Forex instrument which does not have JPY in it (EUR/USD, AUD/CAD,

AUD/NZD, … ) then use the FxNoJpyPairs. If you trade an instrument which has the JPY (USD/JPY,

CHF/JPY,… ), then use the FxJpyPairs.

Summary content: Select what info you want to see in the summary bar below the chart. I don’t

recommend using everything but only a few that you use with your strategy. I personally only use the

Delta, Cumulative Delta and Volume.

The summary is calculated from each footprint.

You can also access this from the top menu of each OF chart:

Trades filter: A special feature which allows you to filter out smaller trading orders and show only the big

ones. If you set it for example to 25, then the OF will only show trades where the volumes were bigger

than 25. This is a great tool for tracking big trading institutions. I prefer to use this with Cell content =

Bid/Ask and with Candle Ladder Type. Like here:

Unfinished business: Detects Unfinished businesses (failed auctions) and prints a line there. The line will

print until the price tests it.

Volume Imbalance: Imbalance is when Bid is 300% (default) bigger than Ask, or Ask 300% bigger than

Bid (diagonally!). This shows aggressivity and dominance of Buyers over Sellers or the Sellers over

Buyers.

A Buying Imbalance is shown on Ask and represents strong Buyers. Selling Imbalance is on Bid and

represents strong Sellers. Imbalances are printed in blue color (default).

Imbalance cluster box draw mode: Draws a highlighted box from place with Stacked Imbalances (= more

imbalances at top of each other). Such places represent S/R zones. You can get this box drawn Until

Tested or just in the next few bars.

Imbalance cluster size: Determines how many Stacked Imbalances there need to be in order to print the

highlighted box. The default setting is 3, so when there are 3 or more Stacked Imbalances, then the box

will get drawn:

Imbalance Trigger In Percent: This is a rule where you set how much bigger the Bid or Ask needs to be in

order to get marked as an Imbalance. I prefer to use the Default setting (300%).

Volume Profile: Gives you an option to add Daily Volume Profile into the OF chart.

The rest: there are some settings at the bottom of the Properties panel. Those are NinjaTrader settings

which need to be there. Don’t change them!

TD Cumulative Delta – Properties There is not really anything you would need to change apart from the colors maybe. Everything else is

best left on “Default”.

I prefer to use the Cumulative Delta with 1 Minute line chart: Create a new 1 Minute chart (make sure

you have the Tick Replay turned ON). Then load the TD Cumulative Delta indicator there. It will look like

this:

TD Custom Workspaces You can download and use Custom Workplaces which I made for you. This way you won’t need to tweak

the settings too much and just use the pre-made Workspaces.

How to do this:

1. Download the Workspaces (from Members area→Order Flow). They are in .zip file, so you need

to extract them first. Then copy those extracted .xml files into: Documents\NinjaTrader

8\workspaces

2. Start NinjaTrader 8

3. Go to Workplaces and select a workplace that suits you best. Then it will automatically load up.

I made workspaces for 1 Screen, and also for 2 Screens. They look like this:

Custom workspaces:

OF Futures (1 Screen)

OF Forex (1 Screen)

OF Forex JPY pairs (1 Screen)

OF + VP Futures (2 Screen)

OF + VP Forex (2 Screen)

OF + VP Forex JPY pairs (2 Screen)

I wish you a lot of profitable trades with your new trading software!

-Dale

Common problems & solutions #1 PROBLEM: Order Flow does not show, or the chart looks like this:

SOLUTION: Enable Tick Replay (step 6 and 7 of the Installation & Activation part of this guide)

#2 PROBLEM: When you open OF this pops up:

SOLUTION: Your token is not inserted in the indicator settings (step 10 of the Installation & Activation

part of this guide).

#3 PROBLEM: OF chart looks somehow like this and NinjaTrader gets super slow/freezes.

SOLUTION: You are using wrong settings. This usually happens with forex pairs and spot indices. Right

click the chart and go to Indicators. There in the Order Flow Properties search for setting called TickSize.

TickSize is a special feature which allows the OF to be used with Forex. Set this depending on which

instrument you trade. If you trade Forex instrument which does not have JPY in it (EUR/USD, AUD/CAD,

AUD/NZD, … ) then use the FxNoJpyPairs. If you trade an instrument which has the JPY (USD/JPY,

CHF/JPY,… ), then use the FxJpyPairs. If you trade futures, the set it to “Futures”.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION #1: Download the latest version of my Order Flow: https://www.trader-

dale.com/td-software-downloads/

Import it over the older version you are using now and restart your NT.

Then right-click the chart where you have the Order Flow loaded and go to Indicator settings. In there,

scroll down to find the "Tick aggregation". Set the above cell to say "custom" and set the aggregation to

10 (or even more). This will merge the Order Flow cells, make it all faster and also easier to read.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION #2: Use correct workspace. You are probably using Futures workspace, where

you should be using Forex Workspace. Read about workspaces in TD Custom Workspaces section of this

document.

#3 PROBLEM: Chart freezes, won’t load, crashes NT8 platform

SOLUTION:

Download the latest version of my Order Flow: https://www.trader-dale.com/td-software-downloads/

Import it over the older version you are using now and restart your NT.

The Order Flow is set for the most common trading symbols. If you are using something other than that,

then you will need to adjust the Order Flow settings.

Open a new chart of some “safe symbol” – for example 6E (EUR futures). Load Order Flow there.

Then go to indicator settings and change the Tick size to “Custom” and Tick aggregation to 10 or higher.

After you have done this switch to your trading instrument (the one which caused the problems).

This solution will merge the cells and make it all much faster, and easier to read. It will also shorten the

load time dramatically and won’t cause NT8 to crash.