Description
Bar Balance extracts the number of up, down and neutral intrabars contained in each chart bar, revealing information on the strength of price movement. It can display stacked columns representing raw up/down/neutral intrabar counts, or an up/down balance line which can be calculated and visualized in many different ways.
Intrabar inspection
Intrabar inspection means the indicator looks at lower timeframe bars (intrabars) making up a given chart bar to gather its information. If your chart is on a 1-hour timeframe and the intrabar resolution determined by the indicator is 5 minutes, then 12 intrabars will be analyzed for each chart bar and the count of up/down/neutral intrabars among those will be tallied.
Bar Balances and calculation methods
The indicator uses a variety of methods to evaluate bar balance and to derive other calculations from them:
- Balance on Bar: Uses the relative importance of instant Up and Down counts on the bar.
- Balance Averages: Uses the difference between the EMAs of Up and Down counts.
- Balance Momentum: Starts by calculating, separately for both Up and Down counts, the difference between the same EMAs used in Balance Averages and an SMA of double the period used for the EMAs. These differences are then aggregated and finally, a bounded momentum of that aggregate is calculated using RSI .
- Markers Bias: It sums the bull/bear occurrences of the four previous markers over a user-defined period (the default is 14).
- Combined Balances: This is the aggregate of the instant bull/bear bias of the three main bar balances.
- Dual Up/Down Averages: This is a display mode showing the EMA calculated for each of the Up and Down counts.
Interpretation of neutral intrabars
What do neutral intrabars mean? When price does not change during a bar, it can be because there is simply no interest in the market, or because of a perfect balance between buyers and sellers. The latter being more improbable, Bar Balance assumes that neutral bars reveal a lack of interest, which entails uncertainty. That is the reason why the option is provided to interpret ratios of neutral intrabars greater than 50% as divergences. It is also the rationale behind the option to dampen signal lines on the inverse ratio of neutral intrabars, so that zero intrabars do not affect the signal, and progressively larger proportions of neutral intrabars will reduce the signal's amplitude, as the balance calcs using the up/down counts lose significance. The impact of the dampening will vary with markets. Weaker markets such as cryptos will often contain greater numbers of neutral intrabars, so dampening the Line in that sector will have a greater impact than in more liquid markets.