Market DNA Passports for Comparing Currency Pair Price Behavior

Summary

This article proposes a Market DNA Passport: a summary of historical price behavior intended to help compare currency pairs and detect shifts in their market regimes. Its metrics cover candle shapes and closing locations, ATR-normalized volatility, spike frequency and clustering, fractal swings, breakout follow-through, retracement depths, trading-session range shares, and price smoothness. The passport presents these measurements in an on-chart display and can log them for further inspection. The author suggests using the metrics to inform regime selection, breakout bias, stop placement, trade filtering, and comparison across instruments.

The implementation computes the measures from historical bars, can compare a second symbol, and flags a mutation when the current metric profile differs sufficiently from the prior one using cosine or normalized L2 distance. The article shows example EURUSD and GBPUSD profiles, including swing, retracement, session, and breakout-follow-through measurements. Such summaries depend on the selected sample, timeframe, thresholds, and metric definitions, so they may not represent future conditions. The author frames the tool as educational and supportive of existing strategies, and advises against using it for live trading with real money.

Key ideas

• The passport summarizes price structure through volatility, candle, fractal, retracement, and session metrics.
• Metrics such as smoothness and breakout follow-through are intended to help characterize market regimes.
• A mutation alert identifies a sufficiently large change between current and prior metric profiles.
• Example currency-pair profiles illustrate comparisons but do not show that the metrics predict future returns.
• The author positions the tool as educational support rather than a live trading system.

Tags

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.