Relative Volatility Rank Board
Sorting a watchlist by raw ATR mostly just sorts it by typical price scale. Gold's ATR dwarfs a JPY pair's, which dwarfs a USD pair's, regardless of which one is actually behaving unusually today - a plain ATR board tells you almost nothing about which symbols are RIGHT NOW more active than normal for themselves. This board measures each symbol's current ATR against its own trailing history of ATR readings and expresses it as a 0-100 percentile: 90 means today's ATR is higher than 90% of the last InpHistoryLookback readings FOR THAT SYMBOL. Because every symbol is ranked against its own distribution, a 90th-percentile reading means the same thing no matter which instrument it belongs to, which makes cross-symbol comparison meaningful in a way raw ATR values are not. The watchlist is displayed sorted by percentile, highest first, so the symbols worth a trader's attention right now surface at the top of the board rather than requiring a manual scan down a table. Notes and limitations - The percentile is measured on the CHART'S timeframe for every watched symbol, so a lower timeframe chart ranks a shorter-duration volatility history than the same lookback count on a daily chart. - A row shows "n/a" if that symbol's history has not synced far enough yet (common right after attaching to a chart with a freshly added Market Watch symbol) rather than a fabricated percentile. - Every percentile is recomputed from a full scan of the lookback window on every rescan, not tracked incrementally - the honest way to avoid drift, at the cost of a rescan taking proportionally longer as the watchlist and lookback grow. - This is a snapshot board refreshed on a timer, not a plotted historical series - scrolling the chart back does not change what the board shows. - Purely descriptive of current standing within recent history; it does not predict whether elevated volatility will persist or fade. - Sorting is a simple O(n^2) insertion sort, which is intentional: the symbol cap is small enough that this is simpler and just as fast as a general-purpose sort.
Indicator · MT4 · v1.0 · Free
About Relative Volatility Rank Board
Relative Volatility Rank Board is an indicator for MetaTrader 4 based on ATR. It has 9 settings, such as Watchlist, Symbol suffix and Atr period. MQL source code included.
Files in the download: RelativeVolatilityRankBoard.mq4, RelativeVolatilityRankBoard.txt.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Watchlist | EURUSD,GBPUSD,USDJPY,USDCHF,AUDUSD,USDCA | Comma-separated symbols |
| Symbol suffix | Broker suffix appended to every symbol, leave blank if none | |
| Atr period | 14 | ATR period each volatility reading is measured with |
| History lookback | 200 | Number of past ATR readings each symbol's current ATR is ranked against |
| Refresh seconds | 20 | Seconds between automatic rescans |
| Corner | CORNER_LEFT_UPPER | Panel corner |
| X | 10 | Panel horizontal offset, pixels |
| Y | 20 | Panel vertical offset, pixels |
| Font size | 9 | Panel font size |
How to install
- Download the ZIP from your PolyMaria library and unzip it.
- In MetaTrader 4 open File → Open Data Folder, then go to MQL4 → Indicators.
- Copy the .mq4 file(s) there. Put any .mqh files in MQL4 → Include.
- Open the .mq4 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: Gold (XAUUSD) · ATR · Trailing Stop & Break-even · MT4 Indicator · MQL4 Source Code