The indicator shows which cycles are present in price movement right now and which one is the strongest. It answers "how many bars does the market usually take to turn", not "where will price go".

ZECUSDT, 15m, default settings. Red crosses mark the strongest cycle. Bright vertical flashes coincide with sharp moves.

Description

The indicator is called [SF] Cycle spectrogram and is listed under Custom Indicators, in the technical analysis section. It is available on the Pro plan and above.

The range of periods from the minimum to the maximum (8–80 bars by default) is split into 30 bands, and for each band the indicator measures how strongly price is currently oscillating with that period. The result is drawn as a heatmap below the chart:

• each column is one bar;
• each row is one band of periods: short cycles at the bottom, long ones at the top;
• color is the cycle's power: dark means there is no cycle with that period, bright (red in the Turbo theme) means a strong one;
• a red cross marks the most powerful band on that bar. This is the dominant cycle.

The status line shows two numbers, both in bars:

• red: the current dominant period;
• white: the dominant period averaged over the last 20 bars. It jumps less, so it is the better one to rely on.

The scale on the right shows the band number (0–30), not the period. Bands are spaced on a logarithmic scale, so short periods are sliced finer than long ones. With default settings:

How it is calculated

Each band runs its own John Ehlers bandpass filter ("Cycle Analytics for Traders"). It passes price oscillations near the given period $T$ and damps the rest:

$BP_t = 0.5(1-\alpha)(P_t - P_{t-2}) + \beta(1+\alpha)BP_{t-1} - \alpha BP_{t-2}$

where $P$ is the bar midpoint $(High+Low)/2$, $\beta = \cos(2\pi/T)$, $\gamma = 1/\cos(4\pi\delta/T)$, $\alpha = \gamma - \sqrt{\gamma^2-1}$, and $\delta$ is the band width (Bandwidth).

A band's power is the squared filter output $BP^2$, smoothed exponentially with a factor of $1/\text{Power smoothing}$. On every bar the powers are then divided by the largest of the 30, and the resulting share from 0 to 1 is mapped to a color.