A bar counter is the simplest piece of price-action context that a chart can have — every Brooks trader knows the bar 12 reversal feels different from the bar 47 reversal, and every scalper wants to know whether the current move is bar 3 of a fresh leg or bar 19 of an exhausted one. The free options on NinjaTrader either drift visually at zoom, only work on US sessions, or hide the inside / outside / H / L classifiers most readers actually want. This one fixes all of that. Numbers stay locked to their bar at any chart scale. Eight session presets cover Daily, RTH_US, Globex, London, Tokyo, Sydney, UTC midnight, plus a Custom mode that takes your own reset hour, minute, and timezone. Five visual presets — Default, Brooks, Minimal, Focus Mode, Advanced — let you pick a complete look in one click, then customize anything from there. Inside, Outside, new-session-High and new-session-Low bars get their own markers (Circle, IB / OB text, Triangle, or Arrow) with full color, font, and opacity control. Auto-contrast handles light and dark chart themes. Free, fully audited, modern NT8 thread-safe code, built by a trader who uses it daily.
"Been using the free NT8 BarCounter for years and switched to this on day one. The big thing is the labels don't drift when I zoom out — on the old one bar 47 would slide two bars to the left at 60 percent zoom and you stop trusting any of the labels. This one stays locked. Inside and outside markers are something I used to draw by hand, having them auto-classified saves me real chart time. Brooks preset matches the books exactly so the transition was zero friction. Auto-contrast on light theme charts is a touch I didn't expect — pure black numbers on a white chart instead of the washed-out grey the default would have given. Easily the cleanest bar counter on NinjaTrader right now."
"I read Al Brooks. Brooks-preset literally matches the book layout — small white numbers below the bar, inside bars circled. Saves me from configuring anything. Free is icing."
"Works well. I trade London open so being able to pick London_Open as the session reset instead of being forced into US RTH is a real win. Would love a multi-timeframe overlay in a future version."
"Most bar counters on NT8 give you bar numbers and stop there. The new-session high and low markers in this one let me see at a glance how many higher highs and lower lows the session has printed without having to scan the whole chart. Combined with the inline info box showing the current session totals, this replaces a chunk of the mental bookkeeping I used to do. Default preset is balanced — visible without being noisy — and tweaking opacity ladders to my taste was a 30-second job."
"Installed it, set Days to show labels to 3 so I can see this morning plus yesterday and the day before, and that was the entire configuration. Auto-skip handles zoom levels for me. Info box was off by default which I appreciate — clean first impression. Once I turned it on the 'As of' timestamp is a nice touch when I'm reviewing weekend charts."
