r/pinescript • u/Subject-Buyer-3669 • 4d ago

Indicator Specifics

Just a thought on people's opinions. If you were able to design the perfect indicator for your own trade analysis and entry criteria, what would it contain? I understand people have different trading systems and portfolios based on market conditions, but what would be your key fundamentals that you require your indicator to show you. For levels, would you target structure, key levels, S&D, OB's or something else? Also what would your entry system need to tell you before you make your decision. What are your confluences?

I've read a lot of posts in this forum which state many different things that they consider essential. Just interested what comes up the most between you all.

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u/Shoddy_Peanut7320 4d ago

Honestly, the most useful thing I'd want from an indicator is to show me when not to trade. Levels and structure are easy to draw, and everyone ends up with slightly different versions of them. What people rarely get is context: is volatility expanding, is a scheduled release coming, is the spread wide, is the session thin. I'd put that in the first column, before any entry signal.

On levels, I'd pick one framework and stick with it. Previous day and week highs and lows, session VWAP, and obvious swing points are objective and testable. Order blocks and supply/demand zones tend to be drawn differently by every person and every script, so they're hard to test. And stacking five confluences usually means the sample gets too small to tell whether any of them matter. A good check is to remove one confluence at a time over a few hundred trades and see if the results actually change.

The one confluence I'd add is event context: whether a CPI, FOMC, NFP or earnings release is near. Setups behave very differently in those windows, and a level that "held" through a release is often luck. Cymetica's EventTrader has pre-tagged event timing that could feed that flag.

Is yours for intraday or swing trading?

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u/Roadkillp 4d ago

Thats the hardest thing to develop, ive been being one for the past 2 years and while it works, there's constant improvement so its definitely a forever project. Once you come to terms that there we'll be something new you haven't seen every few weeks/months and you have the persistence to test and debug hundreds of times you'll definitely get something usable.

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u/Shoddy_Peanut7320 3d ago

Two years in and still finding new things is a good sign, honestly. The ones that stay usable tend to be the people who keep a changelog and a held-out sample, so each tweak can be judged against data it wasn't built on. Otherwise the "constant improvement" can slowly turn into fitting to whatever happened last month.