Chart is missing historical bars, or only shows today in NinjaTrader 8

What is causing it

The history has not been downloaded for that instrument and interval, your provider limits how much history it will serve, or the chart's data settings are asking for less than you think.

Why this happens

NinjaTrader stores historical data locally and fills gaps by requesting them from your provider. If the provider will not serve that range, or the chart never asked for it, there is nothing to draw.

Futures make this worse than other markets because each contract month is a separate instrument. A continuous-looking chart is assembled from several underlying series, and history for each has to exist.

The fix, step by step

1. Open the chart's data series settings and check how many days or bars it is set to load, since a low value looks identical to missing data.
2. Check the session template on the chart. If it is set to regular trading hours only, overnight bars will legitimately be absent.
3. Use the platform's historical data tools from the Control Center to reload the data for that instrument, then reopen the chart.
4. Confirm your data provider actually supplies historical data for that instrument. Some order-routing connections provide live data only, and history comes from a different source.
5. For tick or volume-based charts, expect far less history than for time-based charts, because the raw tick data required is much larger and often not kept as far back.
6. If history is missing only for older contract months, note that expired contracts are a separate data series and may need loading individually.

How to confirm it is fixed

Scroll the chart back to the period you need and confirm bars are present and continuous, with no unexplained gaps inside a trading session.

Stopping it happening again

Set a sensible days-to-load value on your chart templates, and reload historical data after any long period offline or any feed change.