Computer Selection Guide

What computer you need for NinjaTrader, BloodHound and BlackBird depends on how hard your trading style works the CPU. Find out whether you’re a high-impact or low-impact user, then pick hardware to match.

NinjaTrader 8

NinjaTrader 8 is multi-threaded, to make full use of modern CPUs, and uses the graphics card (GPU) to draw charts and its other windows. It benefits most from CPU speed (GHz). More cores also help, depending on your trading style’s impact (below).

Also see Performance Tips for NinjaTrader & BloodHound and NinjaTrader’s own performance tips.

Trading style and indicator impact

Here, trading style means the indicators you use and how many charts and instruments your workspaces usually have.

	High CPU impact	Low CPU impact
Indicators	Order flow, volume profile, volume footprint, any bid/ask volume analysis, and Fibonacci or support/resistance confluence-zone indicators. Bid/ask indicators calculate on every tick; confluence indicators analyze large amounts of data. Generally, anything that needs Calculate set to On each tick.	Moving averages, oscillators, momentum, and trend-versus-consolidation indicators. Most of NinjaTrader’s own indicators are simple formulas that calculate quickly, usually only when the bar closes (its Order Flow indicators are the exception).
Workspaces	Several charts of the same instrument for higher-timeframe trends, especially with order flow or volume profile indicators on them, plus 8 or more instruments across your workspaces (including those open in the background).	With only low-impact indicators, even many instruments don’t add much.

Tick Replay

Tick Replay has a very high impact when a workspace starts or a chart with many days of data reloads: processing the historical data loads the CPU heavily. Real-time data doesn’t, but the memory use stays high. High-volume instruments such as ES futures have a far bigger impact than low-volume ones such as RTY. A typical workspace uses 1–2 GB of RAM without Tick Replay; with it on one or two charts, NinjaTrader can easily use 6–8 GB. See RAM.

Strategy Analyzer optimization

Optimization uses many cores and a lot of memory, to run its iterations as fast as possible. The memory use is temporary and returns to normal when it finishes.

Desktop or laptop

We strongly recommend a desktop for trading. Laptop CPUs are slower than desktop CPUs of the same name and speed, because they’re designed to save energy. Laptops also can’t get rid of heat as well. On volatile days, indicators calculate far more to keep up with the market, the CPU gets hotter, and a laptop slows the CPU down to protect it, which slows NinjaTrader.

High-impact users should use a desktop when trading live accounts.

Computer components

In order of importance.

CPU

NinjaTrader 8 runs each instrument on its own CPU thread, when there are enough threads. An instrument can only be processed on one thread, so its ticks are processed in the right order. For example, with 16 threads and 10 instruments, each instrument gets its own thread and 6 are left for Windows and other programs, which is ideal. With 4 threads and 6 instruments, instruments have to share threads with each other and with Windows, which hurts on volatile days.

So choose a CPU with more threads than the instruments you run, leaving a few spare for Windows and other programs. The number of cores and threads changes with every generation of CPUs, and some have two kinds of cores (performance and efficiency), so check the thread count carefully before you buy.

User	Suggested CPU
High impact	A fast desktop CPU, 4 GHz or faster, with plenty of threads to spare (16 or more).
Low impact	3 GHz or faster, with a few threads more than the instruments you run.

Backtesting, optimization and Market Replay. Backtesting (on a chart, in the Strategy Analyzer or with the Playback connection) depends on raw CPU speed, not on more threads. Optimization uses both speed and cores: it’s thousands of backtests, run a dozen or more at a time.

RAM (memory)

For a trading workspace NinjaTrader usually uses about 4 GB of RAM or less, and up to 8 GB in extreme cases.

Use	Suggested RAM
Low-impact trading	8 GB: 4 GB for NinjaTrader, 4 GB for Windows and other programs.
High-impact trading	16 GB: 8 GB for NinjaTrader, 8 GB for Windows and other programs.
Tick Replay	16 GB or more.
Research (backtesting lots of data)	16 GB.
Light optimization (10,000–30,000 iterations on 6–9 months of 1-minute data)	12 GB at the very least.
Optimization (a few hundred thousand iterations on a year or two of 1-minute data)	16 GB.
Bigger optimizations	32 GB.

Drive

Drive speed matters mainly when NinjaTrader loads historical data into memory: at startup and when a workspace first opens. Once a chart is running on real-time data, that happens in memory, not on the drive. The exception is data recording (in Options): on extremely busy days with many instruments open, a slow hard disk may not keep up.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are many times faster than hard disk drives (HDDs) and are now standard; use one for a trading computer.

Graphics card

NinjaTrader 8 uses the GPU for simple 2D drawing, not 3D, so an expensive gaming card adds nothing. An entry-level card is all it needs. What matters is how many monitors the card supports, and its memory: about 1 GB per monitor (at least 2 GB for two monitors).

Motherboard

Usually not important for traders, with two exceptions:

• RAID. A motherboard with a RAID controller (RAID 1 or RAID 5) keeps your system running if a drive fails.
• Clock accuracy. Windows gets the date and time from the motherboard’s clock, and NinjaTrader timestamps data with Windows’ time. If accuracy to fractions of a second matters to your trading, consider it, although clock accuracy is hard to find out. (NinjaTrader’s forum has a discussion of timestamp issues.)

Disclosure

SharkIndicators hasn’t tested any hardware. This guidance comes from our 20+ years of experience with NinjaTrader, NinjaTrader’s documentation, and decades of computer hardware knowledge. It’s general information.

Glossary

Term	Meaning
Clock cycle	The smallest unit of CPU work, like a tick is the smallest price move. A faster CPU does more clock cycles per second.
CPU	Central Processing Unit: the main chip that runs Windows and your programs.
GPU	Graphics Processing Unit: NinjaTrader uses it to draw charts and its other windows (Control Center, SuperDOM, Market Analyzer and so on).
High impact	Indicators that need many clock cycles for complex calculations, typically order flow, volume profile and volume footprint. NinjaTrader’s Order Flow+ indicators are medium impact; third-party ones usually do far more complex analysis and are high impact.
Low impact	Indicators with simple calculations that need few clock cycles, like most of NinjaTrader’s own.
Thread	A stream of work a CPU core runs. Many cores run two threads each.