Cup And Handle Scanner

A cup and handle is easy to describe in words and genuinely hard to define in code, because "rounded, not V-shaped" is a shape judgement, not a single number. This indicator pairs a swing high (the left lip) with a later swing high near the same price (the right lip, within a tolerance band) and requires the low point between them to clear several concrete tests rather than just "looks like a bowl": the bottom's depth relative to the lips must fall inside a configured range; the bottom itself must sit away from both lips, not hugging either edge, so both a real decline and a real recovery exist; and a minimum number of bars between the lips must have their low within a band of the bottom price - the roundedness check, which is what actually distinguishes a shallow bowl from a sharp V-spike that happens to have the right depth and duration. Once a cup validates, the right lip becomes the handle's ceiling. The indicator tracks the running lowest low reached after the right lip bar by bar: if that pullback ever exceeds a configured fraction of the cup's own depth, or runs on longer than the maximum handle duration, the setup is dropped and scanning starts fresh. A close back above the right lip, after the minimum handle duration has passed, is the breakout - it draws a dashed target line at the breakout price plus the cup's own depth, the standard published measured-move target for this pattern, and fires an alert. Being honest about the hardest part: roundedness here is a bar-count threshold against a price band around the bottom, not a curve fit or any kind of shape-matching algorithm. It reliably rejects a single-bar V-spike and accepts a base that genuinely spends time near its low, but it does not score how "rounded" a passing cup looks beyond that one threshold - two cups that both clear InpMinBaseWidthBars can still look quite different by eye. Only one candidate cup is tracked at a time (the nearest lip pairing that passes every check), so nested or overlapping candidate cups on the same stretch of chart are not all evaluated - the scanner takes the first valid one and moves on. Notes and limitations - Roundedness is a bar-count-in-band threshold, not a curve fit; see the full description above for exactly what it does and does not guarantee. - Only one candidate cup is tracked at a time; a second, independently valid cup forming elsewhere on the chart while one is already pending is not evaluated until the first resolves or expires. - The right-lip price is used as the handle's breakout trigger level directly - no separate handle-high is tracked if the handle's own high during the pullback is meaningfully below the right lip. - Depth, duration and retrace thresholds are read from configurable inputs with no built-in defaults claimed to be "the" correct textbook cup and handle - published descriptions vary, and these defaults are a reasonable starting point to tune per instrument and timeframe. - This is a structure-identification tool, not a trade signal; the breakout is reported as a shape completing, not as a recommendation.

Indicator · MT4 · v1.0 · Free

Tags: Breakout · Dashboards & Scanners · Buy/Sell Arrows · Alerts · MT4 Indicator · MQL4 Source Code

MetaTrader 4 & 5 indicators · PolyMaria