Every indicator in ORBIT, animated

SMA 20

simple moving average, 20 bars

The plain average of the last twenty closes. Every bar counts the same, so it turns late and it turns smoothly — which is exactly what you want from a line whose job is to say where the middle is.

SMA 50

simple moving average, 50 bars

The same average over a longer window. Slower to turn, harder to shake, and widely watched — a lot of desks are looking at this one line, which is part of why price reacts to it.

SMA 200

simple moving average, 200 bars

The long-horizon average. On an intraday chart it barely moves; it is there to tell you which side of the bigger picture you are trading on. Note how much later a longer window starts — that lag is the cost of the smoothness.

EMA 9

exponential moving average, 9 bars

Weights recent bars far more heavily, so it hugs price. Fast enough to ride an intraday push, twitchy enough to whip you around in chop. The usual fast leg of a crossover pair.

EMA 21

exponential moving average, 21 bars

The middle setting most intraday traders settle on: responsive enough to matter inside a session, slow enough that it is not reacting to every candle. In a real trend, pullbacks tend to rest on it.

EMA 50

exponential moving average, 50 bars

The slow leg. Crossing it is a regime statement rather than a signal, and it works best as a filter — take longs above it, shorts below it, and let a faster study pick the entry.

WMA 20

weighted moving average, 20 bars

Weights fall off in a straight line rather than a curve. The result sits between an SMA and an EMA: faster than the simple average (drawn dashed behind it for comparison) without an EMA's long tail.

Session VWAP

volume-weighted average price

The average price everyone actually paid today, weighted by size. Institutions are measured against it, which makes it the day's true centre of gravity — above it buyers are winning, below it sellers are.

Ichimoku 9-26-52

conversion, base, and the cloud

Five lines that give you trend, support, resistance and momentum in one read. The cloud between the two span lines is the zone the market has to chew through; thick cloud is hard ground, thin cloud gives way.

Parabolic SAR

stop and reverse, 0.02 / 0.2

A dot that trails the move and accelerates as the move extends. When price touches it, the dot flips to the other side. It is less an entry signal than a mechanical, unarguable trailing stop.

Supertrend 10·3

ATR-banded trend line

An ATR band that flips from below price to above it when the trend changes. Green line under price means the trend is up and the line is your stop; red above means the opposite. Volatility sets the distance, so it breathes with the market.

TRIX 15

triple-smoothed rate of change

Price smoothed three times over, then measured for rate of change. The triple smoothing strips out the noise that makes ordinary momentum unreadable; the zero line is the trend flip.

RSI 14

relative strength index

Measures how one-sided the last fourteen bars have been, on a 0–100 scale. Above 70 buyers have been in charge; below 30 sellers have. In a strong trend it can stay pinned — extreme is not the same as wrong.

Stochastic 14·3

%K and %D

Where the close sits inside the recent range: at the top of the range, or at the bottom. Crossing back out of an extreme zone is the classic turn signal, and the slower %D line keeps you from acting on every wiggle.

Stoch RSI

stochastic applied to RSI

The stochastic formula run over RSI instead of price. Far more sensitive than either alone — it reaches its extremes early and often, which makes it a timing tool, not a trend tool.

MACD 12-26-9

moving average convergence / divergence

The gap between a fast and a slow average, with its own signal line and a histogram of the difference. The histogram flipping through zero is the moment momentum changed hands — and it flips before the averages themselves cross.

ADX 14 (+DI / −DI)

trend strength and direction

The white line is how strong the trend is, regardless of direction; the green and red lines are which side is winning. Above 25 the market is trending and breakout tactics work. Below it, they do not.

CCI 20

commodity channel index

How far price has strayed from its own statistical average, in units of typical deviation. Beyond ±100 the move is unusual by its own recent standards — which is a breakout signal to one trader and a fade signal to another.

Williams %R 14

range position, inverted

The distance from the recent high, on a −100 to 0 scale. Near zero you are closing at the top of the range; near −100 at the bottom. A fast, blunt read on who has the upper hand right now.

Rate of Change 12

percent change over 12 bars

Pure speed: how far price has travelled in twelve bars, as a percentage. The zero line separates advancing from declining, and the height of the bars is the thrust behind the move.

Momentum 10

raw 10-bar change

The simplest momentum measure there is — today's close minus the close ten bars ago. No smoothing, no scaling, nothing to misread. When it is rising and price is not, something is about to give.

Ultimate Osc 7-14-28

three timeframes, one line

Blends buying pressure across three windows at once, weighted toward the shortest. Built specifically to cut down the false divergences that single-period oscillators throw off.

Bollinger 20·2

average ± 2 standard deviations

Bands that widen when the market gets loud and pinch when it goes quiet. Watch the pinch: a squeeze is stored energy, and the first close outside the band after one is what breakout traders are waiting for.

Keltner 20·1.5

EMA ± 1.5 ATR

The same idea as Bollinger but measured in average true range rather than standard deviation, which makes it smoother and less prone to false pinches. A close outside is a genuine push, not a statistical artefact.

Donchian 20

highest high / lowest low

The simple, brutal channel: the highest high and lowest low of the last twenty bars. It steps rather than curves, and a close above the upper step is the oldest breakout rule in futures trading.

ATR 14

average true range

How much this market actually moves in a bar, including gaps. It is not a direction signal at all — it is the number that should be setting your stop distance and therefore your position size. Watch it contract through the squeeze, then expand.

OBV

on-balance volume

Adds the whole bar's volume on an up close and subtracts it on a down close. The running total is a crude but effective read on accumulation. When it climbs while price stalls (dashed), someone is buying quietly.

Accum / Dist line

close location value × volume

Like OBV, but it cares where in the bar the close landed rather than just up or down. A bar that rallies hard and closes on its low contributes negatively even though it was green.

Chaikin MF 20

money flow over 20 bars

Accumulation/distribution normalised by volume over a rolling window, so it oscillates around zero instead of drifting forever. Above zero, money is flowing in; the histogram is how hard.

MFI 14

money flow index

RSI with volume in it. A price extreme reached on real volume reads differently from one reached on air — MFI is the study that knows the difference.

Volume spikes

bars above 2.5× the 30-bar average

Every bar measured against its own recent normal. The bars that light up are the ones where something happened; the rest is background. The dashed line is the average being measured against.

Relative volume

this bar vs the 30-bar average

The same comparison drawn as a ratio line. Above 1.0× means this bar is busier than typical — the single fastest way to tell a real session from a dead one.

Big-trade bubbles

every print above your minimum

Each large print drawn as a circle at the price it actually traded. Size and glow carry the contract count, colour carries the aggressor. This is the raw material every other order-flow study is built from.

Absorption marks

aggression that went nowhere

Big prints hammering a bar's extreme, on a bar that closes back away. Effort with no result: somebody large is sitting there filling everyone who wants out. Rings mark where it happened, so the level has a name before price leaves it.

Stacked imbalance

one side, laddering

Three or more same-side big prints climbing through consecutive prices. A single lopsided print is noise; a ladder of them is a crowd leaning the same way at any cost — the aggression that starts moves rather than chases them.

Iceberg watch

hidden size, refilling

The same-size print appearing at one price again and again and again. The book shows a small offer; the offer keeps coming back. Diamonds mark suspected hidden liquidity — a wall you cannot see in the depth.

VWAP σ-bands

session VWAP ±1σ and ±2σ

Volume-weighted average price with statistical bands around it, reset every Globex day. The bands turn VWAP from a line into a map of how stretched the session is from what everyone paid.

Cumulative big-print delta

signed contracts, running total

Buys minus sells across every big print, accumulated from the feed floor up. When this rises and price does not (dashed), aggression is being absorbed. When price rises and this falls, the move is walking on air.

Big-print delta / bar

net aggression, per candle

The same signed contracts, but reset each bar. A green candle sitting on a red delta bar is the most useful disagreement on the chart: price went up while the aggressive orders were selling.

Buy / sell pressure

0–100, 50 is balanced

The share of recent big prints that were buys, smoothed into one line. Fifty is a balanced tape. Persistent departures from fifty are what a trend looks like underneath the candles.

Opening range

the session's first N minutes

The high and low of the opening window, drawn the moment the window closes and extended across the rest of the session. Everything the ORB engine does is measured against these two lines — and up to six sessions can be armed at once, each with its own range.

Break & retest

the setup the engine trades

Price closes outside the range (circled), then comes back to the level it broke and holds it (arrow). The retest is the whole point: it is the difference between a breakout and a trap, and the engine will not fire without one.

Volume profile

POC, value-area high and low

Volume redistributed by price rather than by time, built live from real order flow. The point of control is where the most business got done, and the value area is the range holding roughly 70% of it — magnets and boundaries, drawn on the price axis of every chart.