Volume Clock Progress Bar
Wall-clock time tells a trader how many hours have passed, not how much has actually happened. A quiet pre-holiday session and a busy news day reach 3pm at the same point on the clock but very different points in their actual trading activity. This indicator answers "how used up is today, volume-wise" with a single panel: today's tick volume so far, divided by the average of the last InpLookbackDays completed daily bars, shown as a percentage progress bar and a text readout. The "typical day" baseline skips any daily bar with zero volume, so a run of weekend or holiday bars some brokers still print cannot quietly drag the average down and make an ordinary day look like it is running ahead of pace. Today's own figure is read directly off the still- forming D1 bar's tick volume, which MT4 already accumulates live tick by tick - no manual intraday summation across smaller timeframe bars is needed, and the indicator works correctly regardless of what timeframe chart it happens to be attached to. The naive version of this idea would just compare today's volume to yesterday's, which is noisy - one unusually quiet or busy prior day skews the whole reading. Averaging several recent days, and discarding zero-volume ones, is the specific fix. Notes and limitations - Every volume figure is MT4 tick volume (price update count), never real traded contracts or lots. - Requires at least a few days of D1 history with non-zero volume to produce a baseline; on a freshly added symbol with no history yet it shows "no history yet" rather than a misleading number. - The percentage can exceed 100% on a genuinely busier-than-usual day; the panel's own fill bar is visually capped at 100% width but the text readout still shows the true, uncapped figure. - No trade or alert logic - visual analysis only.
Indicator · MT5 · v1.0 · Free
About Volume Clock Progress Bar
Volume Clock Progress Bar is an indicator for MetaTrader 5. It has 8 settings, such as Lookback days, Corner and X offset. MQL source code included.
Files in the download: VolumeClockProgress.ex5, VolumeClockProgress.mq5, VolumeClockProgress.txt.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Lookback days | 20 | Completed daily bars averaged to build the "typical day" baseline |
| Corner | 1 | Panel corner: 0 top-left, 1 top-right, 2 bottom-left, 3 bottom-right |
| X offset | 12 | Panel offset from the chosen corner, in pixels |
| Y offset | 20 | Panel offset from the chosen corner, in pixels |
| Panel width | 200 | Panel width in pixels |
| Bar color low | clrSteelBlue | Fill colour while below InpHighFillPct |
| Bar color high | clrOrangeRed | Fill colour once at/above InpHighFillPct |
| High fill pct | 100.0 | Progress percentage at which the bar switches to InpBarColorHigh |
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: Volume · Trading Sessions · News Trading · MT5 Indicator · MQL5 Source Code