Outsized Tick Move Counter
A single outsized tick - a stop run, a news spike, thin liquidity letting price gap several points between updates - often matters more to a discretionary trader than the bar's overall range. This indicator watches the live tick stream and counts, per bar, how many individual price updates exceeded a threshold built from the instrument's own recent tick behaviour. The threshold is InpThresholdMultiplier times a running exponential average of tick move sizes (with an absolute floor, InpMinPoints, for near-dead markets), so a fixed pip count is never hardcoded - the same setting that flags a real anomaly on a quiet pair would either never fire or fire constantly on a volatile one. The running average is deliberately not reset at each bar boundary, since a volatility regime persists across bars far more often than it resets cleanly at one. The naive version of this idea would try to read historical ticks for every bar on the chart. MT4 only exposes the tick stream live, while an indicator is attached - there is no API to recover the tick sequence for bars that already closed before that. Rather than fake a number, bars formed before attachment show no data at all (an empty histogram slot), and counting genuinely starts from the moment the indicator loads. Notes and limitations - Only counts ticks that arrive while the indicator is attached and the terminal is running - it cannot see historical tick data, and bars formed earlier show no value rather than a fabricated zero. - The threshold adapts continuously and is never reset per bar, so a sudden volatility spike takes a little time (InpAvgSmoothing worth of ticks) to be absorbed into the baseline rather than being flagged forever after the fact. - No trade or alert logic - visual analysis only.
Indicator · MT5 · v1.0 · Free
About Outsized Tick Move Counter
Outsized Tick Move Counter is an indicator for MetaTrader 5. It has 4 settings, such as Threshold multiplier, Min points and Avg smoothing. MQL source code included.
Files in the download: OutsizedTickMoveCounter.ex5, OutsizedTickMoveCounter.mq5, OutsizedTickMoveCounter.txt.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Threshold multiplier | 4.0 | Move must exceed this multiple of the running average tick move |
| Min points | 5.0 | Absolute floor for the threshold, in points (guards a near-zero average) |
| Avg smoothing | 50.0 | EWMA smoothing period for the running average tick move |
| Min samples before flagging | 20 | Ticks to observe before the average is trusted enough to flag anything |
How to install
- Download the ZIP from your PolyMaria library and unzip it.
- In MetaTrader 5 open File → Open Data Folder, then go to MQL5 → Indicators.
- Copy the .mq5 file(s) there. Put any .mqh files in MQL5 → Include.
- Open the .mq5 file in MetaEditor and press Compile (F7) if MetaTrader does not show it.
- Drag the indicator from the Navigator onto a chart and adjust the settings.
Tags: News Trading · MT5 Indicator · MQL5 Source Code