Spring & Upthrust Analyzer
Price poked through the edge of your range and came back inside. Paste the bars around the break, with volume if you have it, and the analyzer finds the break, measures how deep it went and how long price stayed outside, reads the volume, and grades it the Wyckoff way: a #3 spring is a buy on the reclaim close, a #2 wants a secondary test first, a #1 is supply and you stand aside. Upthrusts at the range high get the same 3 grades as the mirror image. The numbered springs follow Richard Wyckoff's method as Robert Evans taught it in the 1940s and Hank Pruden wrote it up in The Three Skills of Top Trading (2007).
3 to 12 bars. Volume is the 5th column and it's optional. Put 2 or more bars from before the break at the top so the volume has something to compare against.
Depth reads in ATR. Stop buffer = 0.25 ATR. Blank uses % of the range.
No grade yet
Enter the range and the bars around the break, then hit Grade. Or load an example to see what each Wyckoff grade looks like.
How it grades. Score = 25 points depth + 20 speed + 30 reclaim close + 25 volume. Depth: 0.25 ATR or under scores 25, over 1.5 ATR scores 0. Speed: 1 bar outside scores 20 and each extra bar costs 4. Reclaim close: half from where the reclaim bar closed inside its own bar, half from how far back inside the range it closed, full marks at 8% of the range. Volume: the heaviest bar of the break against the average of the bars before it. 0.8x or under scores 25, over 1.8x scores 3. No volume column: the score is scaled up from 75. Hard no-trades: the last bar closed outside the range, or the poke went 30% of the range or deeper.
Wyckoff grade. #3: depth 0.5 ATR or under, volume 1.2x or under, back inside within 2 bars. Buy the reclaim close. #1: volume 1.8x or more, or depth 1.5 ATR or more, or 5 or more bars outside. Stand aside. #2: everything in between. Wait for the secondary test, a pullback toward the spring low on lighter volume that holds, then buy the first close back above the range low. With no ATR, depth uses % of the range: 3% stands in for 0.25 ATR, 6% for 0.5, 12% for 1, 18% for 1.5. The stop goes 0.25 ATR beyond the spring low, or 5% of the range with no ATR. T1 is the midpoint, T2 the far edge. Al Brooks (Trading Price Action Trading Ranges, 2012) puts the failure rate of breakout attempts inside a range near 80%, which is why a live breakout gets a no-trade here and not a fade. Keyboard: Enter grades, 1 to 4 load the examples.
Educational tool only, not financial advice. Springs fail. A #3 grade is a read, not a promise, and the stop is the one part of the plan the market can't argue with.
Built by Jason Parker, founder of Trading Ranges.
Built by Jason Parker, founder of Trading Ranges.