This innovative technical indicator was created to detect quiet market period before the beginning of the high volatile market. Like many good technical indicators, this Market Activity Index is very stable and it is widely applicable to many financial and non financial instruments without too much restriction. The Market Activity Index can be used best to visualize the alternating form of low and high volatile market. It is very useful tool to pick up the quiet market but ironically this is the most powerful tool to predict the highly volatile market. Greatest thing about the Market Activity Index is that the reading of this indicator is bounded by its top (1.0) and bottom (0.0) limit but for the bottom limit will never diverge from actual price movements. It means that for the reading of 0.08 Market activity Index can't be calculated from highly volatile price movement. To visualize how important this concept is, imagine that price can still go even further up even after the RSI reading indicates over 70 overbought signal (This can happen to 99% of oscillators.). The same thing can happen to ADX or most of technical indicators. For example, 25 reading of ADX can be still calculated even if there were quite extreme price movement before. One might say that these are false signal or lagging signal. Market Activity Index is not a magic indicator but it will do its job reliably notifying the quiet or sideways market period to traders most of time. This tool can help you to understand and learn the market rhythm.

Operation Principle of Market Activity Index

The Market Activity Index is designed to oscillate between 0.0 and 1.0 theoretically. Level 0.0 indicate theoretically dead quiet period and Level 1.0 indicates theoretically maximum volatility. However both 0.0 and 1.0 will never reach in practice. Instead, use can choose 0.05 or 0.1 to detect sideways or low volatility period. Level 0.05 or 0.1 also corresponds to the common 95% or 90% critical value used in statistical hypothesis testing. According to our observations, some currency pairs works better with 0.05 critical value and for some other currency pairs, 0.1 critical value works better. Choice of critical value should be made accordingly to the price data itself.

Input Variable for Market Activity Index

User may want to adjust the Market Activity Index setting for different currency pairs. Here is brief explanation to each input variable:

• Use White Background Chart: true or false only
• Calculation Period: period to calculate Market Activity Index
• Average Period: period to smooth out Market Activity Index
• Use Weighted Average: true or false only (weighed average is more responsive than non weighted average)
• Index Critical Level value: Critical level 0.05 or 0.1
• Index Critical Level Width: line width of Critical level
• Index Critical Level Color: line color of Critical level

Practical Consideration for Real World Trading

Market Activity Index can be best used to spot the quiet period of the market, which is also called sideways market or low volatile market. In practice, this quiet period is followed by highly volatile period in cyclic manner. The indicator itself represents the alternating picture of the market volatility in the quantitative form. This indicator can successfully spot the start of high volatile market period. In spite of the fact that Market Activity Index often spot the turning point accurately, the Market Activity Index is not meant to predict the market direction from its design stage.

Further Note about Market Activity Index

Market Activity Index is the tool to detect low volatility or sideways market. However it is not the tool to predict the market direction. If your trading strategy is based on direction, then you may need to combine with other technical indicators. If you prefer to monitor multiple currency pairs at the same time, you can use our Market Activity Index Panel here: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/16224.