Donchian Trend Ribbon MTF
- Indicators
-
Evgenii Sutulov
Premium components
1. https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/201632 - Rotation Manager Console - Version: 1.3
Eight Donchian channels reduced to one honest number: how many of them price is above, minus how many it is below. Donchian Trend Ribbon MTF publishes that signed score as a buffer, changes side when the majority does, and draws the slowest channel so you can see the level the score is built around. Any higher timeframe on any chart, closed senior bars only. It is free: no trial, no locked features, no upgrade page.
A set of Donchian channels is built with growing windows, the base length and then its multiples. The ribbon score is how many of their midlines price stands above minus how many it stands below, which is a whole number running from minus the band count to plus it. The signal is the majority changing, which is the score crossing zero.
The original paints this as a ribbon of stripes. Here the score is published as a number instead, and it is that number which grades every cell on the board, because the size of the majority is the information and the stripes were only ever a way of showing it. Nothing in the arithmetic is changed by the difference in drawing.
What is on the chart
Drawn in the price window: the midline of the slowest channel as the trend line, coloured by the side the score is on and unbroken across the change, that channel's own high and low as thin bands, two shades between them, and arrows on the bar where the majority changed.
The panel
A canvas panel on the price chart, draggable, collapsible, closeable. It shows the timeframe in force and the setting values actually being used. It says what the last closed bar was: a BUY signal, a SELL signal, or neither. And it says whether the numbers on screen came from the properties dialog or from the panel, and how many of them were changed by hand.
Below that sit the settings the panel can move, with their current values. The gear opens a three-tab sheet.
Values covers the timeframe, the base length that sets the shortest Donchian window, twenty by default, and the number of bands in the ribbon, eight by default, whose windows are multiples of the base. Styles covers the palette, the line and its width, the arrow size, the slowest channel and the two shades. Every Values row has steppers, a range and a sentence of help.
The Alerts tab covers the master switch, the per event switches, the channels, the cooldown in minutes and a test alert.
Three colour schemes: dark, light, and a colour-blind safe one that uses blue and orange rather than red and green. Everything about the panel, including every value changed on the sheet, is stored per chart and survives a timeframe change and a terminal restart. The interface is English.
Alerts
Off out of the box. Three events: a BUY signal, a SELL signal, and a touch of the midline of the slowest Donchian channel, which is the pull back event rather than a flip. Each has a switch of its own.
Channels: a popup window, a sound, a push to the mobile terminal and e-mail. There are per-event and per-channel switches, and a cooldown that defaults to two hours.
Alerts fire on the last closed bar. Two further alerts, off by default, speak on the forming bar within a chosen number of seconds of its close, and they are labelled early because a flip that exists mid-bar can un-happen. Telegram is not part of this product.
Signals on the forming bar
There is one switch that matters more than the others, and it is in the Values tab as well as in the inputs: whether buffers and arrows are allowed on the bar that is still forming.
With it on, which is the shipped default, you see a flip as soon as the market makes it. Sometimes that flip is undone before the bar closes and the arrow disappears. With it off, nothing is written on the forming bar at all: there is no repaint of any kind, and every signal arrives one bar late by construction.
Both behaviours are legitimate. The product does not pick for you and it does not hide which one it is doing: the panel and the setting name both say so.
Multi-timeframe
The Timeframe setting computes on a higher timeframe and draws the result here. Only closed senior bars are read: a chart bar shows the newest senior bar that had already closed by that chart bar's own close, so the flip lands on the bar that closes together with the senior bar, and nothing is drawn that could not have been known in real time.
The foreign series is built in the background. The first read of it can come back empty, the indicator retries, and the panel says whether it is waiting for a download or looking at a genuine shortage of history. It never fails initialisation over missing bars.
Reading it from an EA
Sixteen buffers, all readable through iCustom and CopyBuffer. Buffer 0, Buy, carries the arrow price on a BUY bar and EMPTY_VALUE otherwise, and is not drawn; buffer 1, Sell, is the same for a SELL. Buffers 2 to 5 belong to the two fills and are display plumbing, not for reading. Buffer 6 is the midline of the slowest Donchian channel while the trend is up and buffer 7 is the same line while it is down; on the turning bar both hold a value, which is what keeps the drawn line unbroken. Buffer 8 is the high of that slowest channel and buffer 9 is its low. Buffers 10 and 11 are the drawn copies of buffers 0 and 1. Buffer 12, Signal, is +1 on a BUY bar, -1 on a SELL bar and 0 otherwise. Buffer 13 is Override, buffer 14 is the midline of the slowest Donchian channel as one unbroken series, and buffer 15 is the trend itself, 0 while up and 1 while down.
Buffer 16 is added by this port and sits after the whole shared map: the ribbon score itself, a whole number from minus the band count to plus it. No index of the shared contract moved, so an expert written for any other port of this family reads the same buffers in the same places.
Buffers 0 and 1 are the contract: never painted, filled on every pass whatever the Styles tab says, and present in the Data Window. Hiding the arrows on the display cannot starve a strategy of the signal, because hiding is done by changing how a plot is drawn and never by emptying a buffer.
An instance created by iCustom is read only and always uses the parameters you passed. The Override buffer lets a strategy detect that a chart instance is running on numbers changed by hand from the panel.
Provenance
This is a port of "Donchian Trend Ribbon" by LonesomeTheBlue, an openly published TradingView script under MPL 2.0, which makes a port by formula admissible. Two deviations are declared, both about drawing rather than arithmetic: this line's layout gives one line and two boundaries instead of a stack of stripes, so the slowest channel is drawn and the strength of the ribbon goes into a number and into the grade; and the highest and lowest windows are progressive on the first bars where Pine returns nothing.
The product is called Donchian Trend Ribbon MTF because that is the name of the method, not because authorship of the method is claimed here. The original work belongs to its author.
Honest limits
The score counts channels, not probability. Eight midlines agreeing means eight overlapping windows of the same series agreed, which is one observation looked at eight times.
Donchian windows react to the extremes leaving the window as much as to new ones arriving. A score can change because an old high aged out, with nothing new having happened at all.
The base length and the band count together move every signal the product will ever give, because they define all the windows. Two settings give two different sets of arrows and neither is the correct one.
No profit figure, win rate or backtest result is claimed here.
