Using Intraday High-Low Ranges to Find Active Trading Hours

Summary

The document explains an intraday volatility indicator that identifies times of day with greater or lesser price activity. It scans chart bars and uses each bar’s high minus low as its activity measure, highlighting higher-activity periods in blue and lower-activity periods in pink. The stated use is to find suitable windows for intraday strategies, particularly when trading an unfamiliar instrument or when a strategy requires active price movement.

The indicator has a configurable calculation timeframe and can be applied on different chart timeframes. The material provides a description rather than performance tests or evidence that the highlighted periods improve strategy returns. High-low range is only a proxy for activity: it does not establish direction, liquidity, execution quality, or whether volatility is favorable for a particular strategy. The document also identifies the indicator as originally written in MQL4 and published in 2014.

Key ideas

• The indicator measures activity using each bar's high-low range and displays more active periods distinctly.
• Use the displayed time-of-day pattern to help filter strategies that require substantial intraday movement.
• The calculation timeframe is configurable for use with charts at different timeframes.
• High-low activity does not indicate price direction or guarantee that a time window is profitable to trade.

Tags

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