Session Pulse Hourly Volatility and Spread Map

See every hour against its own past

Session Pulse measures how each hour of the week usually behaves. It reads the symbol's H1 history on your broker and builds a weekday by hour fingerprint, Monday to Friday, hour by hour. For each hour of each weekday it stores the usual range, the usual spread and how often that hour produced a spike. Then it puts the live market next to that fingerprint.

Main features

1. Weekday by hour fingerprint. Monday 09:00 and Friday 09:00 are different hours, and Session Pulse keeps them apart. The fingerprint is drawn as one heatmap across the full panel width, with a tooltip on every cell (range, usual spread, spike frequency) and a one line legend: darker means quieter, brighter means more movement.

2. This hour against its normal, live. The panel shows the current hour range as a percentage of the normal range for this weekday and hour, today's range as a percentage of a normal day for this weekday, and how much of the typical day move is left. An optional alert tells you when the hour or the day goes above the exhaustion level you set. Alerts fire only on a new crossing after the indicator has finished loading.

3. Spread trap warning before it happens. Hours whose usual spread is well above the symbol's normal spread are marked as traps; on raw spread majors these are usually the rollover hours. You get a warning a set number of minutes before a trap hour starts, and the panel shows the live spread against the usual spread for this hour.

4. Best hours and spikes. The panel lists the hours with the best range to spread ratio (trap hours excluded) and how often the current hour produced a spike in past weeks.

5. Clear units. Forex in pips (0.0001, 0.01 on yen quotes), gold with a pip of 0.10, silver with a pip of 0.01, and indices, energies, crypto and other CFDs in points ("pts", 1.0 of price). The unit in use is printed in the Units row.

6. Panel. The current cell is outlined on the heatmap and trap cells are outlined in red. On a chart too short for the full panel the heatmap is hidden and the text rows stay. The minimize button keeps only a small DEMETRA tab, and the choice is remembered for that chart.

Inputs

History depth, spike and trap sensitivity, warning time, exhaustion level, each alert and its channel (popup, sound, push notification, e-mail) and the panel position are adjustable. Values outside the allowed range are refused at start with a clear message.

For EA developers (buffers)

Buffer 0: Range of the current hour so far, in % of the normal range of that weekday-hour. Empty value: EMPTY_VALUE.

Buffer 1: Bar spread / normal spread of the symbol (floored at InpSpreadFloorPts) - the same baseline as the trap flag, so trap bars show a high ratio; latest bar: live spread; max 99.9; empty only when the hour has no data. Empty value: EMPTY_VALUE.

Buffer 2: Trap flag: 1 inside a trap hour or within InpTrapLead minutes of the next one, else 0. Empty value: EMPTY_VALUE.

Charts up to H1: filled on the last 5000 bars. Above H1: latest bar only. On weekend bars and on hours without enough samples, buffers 0 and 1 stay empty and buffer 2 reads 0 (except within InpTrapLead minutes before a Monday trap hour). Historical buffer values are recalculated with the newest fingerprint every hour, so use the latest bars for decisions. When you pass custom inputs through iCustom/IndicatorCreate, remember that MQL5 counts each "input group" line as a string parameter.

Any symbol and timeframe with enough history: forex, gold, silver, indices and crypto. Broker server hours, Monday to Friday only.

Display and alerts only. It does not trade, uses no DLL and no web requests. In the Strategy Tester the panel builds its fingerprint from tester history and refreshes on every new tick or bar, and the demo input keeps it running by itself.

Trading involves a high risk of loss. Session Pulse shows statistics from your broker's past and current data; past behaviour of an hour does not guarantee its future behaviour.