Relative Activity Filter
the cheapest improvement most intraday systems can makeNot a strategy — a gate. Compute each bar's activity relative to the same bar's own recent average, and refuse every entry that arrives while activity is below average.
Every strategy carries its exact rules, an annotated chart of the setup, the research behind why it should work at all — and the conditions under which you should not take it.
Showing 21–30 of 41 matching strategies
Not a strategy — a gate. Compute each bar's activity relative to the same bar's own recent average, and refuse every entry that arrives while activity is below average.
A sharp move ends on one enormous bar with far more activity than anything around it, and the reading offered is that the last holders capitulated into buyers who were waiting.
A two-period RSI is deliberately jumpy. It is not there to describe a trend — it is there to register, in one number, that the last two bars have been one-sided. Below 5 means almost everything recently has been selling.
Bollinger bands put a number on how unusual the current price is, in units of its own recent volatility. A close outside the lower band means price is further from its twenty-period average than it has been about ninety-five percent of the time.
Every band on this page is a z-score wearing a costume. This page takes the costume off: z = (price − mean) ÷ standard deviation, computed over a fixed lookback, and the rule is a number rather than a line on a chart.
A Keltner channel measures the same distance as a Bollinger band but with a different ruler: average true range instead of standard deviation. Range reacts to gaps and spikes differently from deviation, so the two bands disagree exactly when it matters most.
The Commodity Channel Index measures how far the typical price — the average of high, low and close — sits from its own moving average, scaled by mean deviation. Unlike RSI it is unbounded: it can read −400, and sometimes does.
Williams %R answers one question and nothing else: where did this bar close inside the high-low range of the last N bars? At −100 it closed at the very bottom of it; at 0, at the very top.
The stochastic asks the same question as Williams %R — where in the recent range did this bar close — and then smooths the answer twice. %K is the raw reading; %D is %K averaged again.
A Donchian channel is the highest high and the lowest low of the last N bars. There is no averaging, no deviation, no smoothing — it is the most mechanical measure in this book, and the hardest to argue with about what it says.
The mechanism has peer-reviewed, FX-specific research behind it.
The mechanism is sound, but at least one step of it is untested.
Practitioner literature only — no published research supports the mechanism.
It rates the mechanism — whether there is published research explaining why the market should behave this way. It does not rate profit. Strong does not mean the trade will work. None of these have been run on our own account, and no page here shows a backtest figure.
One instrument, one timeframe, every rule visible on the chart.
Several conditions have to line up, and execution starts to matter.
Needs an outside data feed, a basket, real order flow, or an unusual tolerance for lumpy losses.
The level describes what it takes to run the strategy, not how well it works. Several Beginner pages are better evidenced than several Professional ones — a basket carry trade is Professional because it needs eight currencies and a swap table, not because it is cleverer than buying a pullback.
Reading the library is free. A plan is what lets you turn one into a robot.
Trading carries risk and most retail accounts lose money. Nothing in this library is financial advice or a recommendation to trade. The charts are illustrations of the rules on constructed candles — they are not records of trades and not backtests.