Explosive momentum
A 0–100 burst score; volume and range spikes lift it more than price moves, so it rarely gets high.
Each minute it adds up four parts: price above where it was fast, mid and slow bars ago (up to 30), that momentum speeding up (up to 25), volume above its recent average (up to 25), and the bar's high-low range growing compared with the previous bar's (up to 20). The total is capped at 100 and has no direction. On SPY one-minute bars with default settings, the median bar scored 0.1, the top 5% reached about 44, and the peak was 48.
How to read it
- The line sits in its own pane below the price, from 0 to 100.
- It stays near zero most of the time: the median bar scores 0.1.
- A reading of 40 or more is the top 5% of bars, so it marks a burst in activity.
- The score adds up for sell-offs as well as rallies. Check the candle direction at the spike before reading it as upside.
What it outputs
- Burst score
- Sum of four burst parts each minute, from 0 (quiet) to 100 (maximum). It carries no direction.
Settings
- fast
- Bars back for the short price comparison, also used for the speed-up check. Lower reacts to single-minute moves and scores more often; higher needs a move that has built over more bars.
- mid
- Bars back for the middle price comparison. The speed-up part needs both fast and mid momentum to be picking up. Raising it demands a longer build; lowering it lets short bursts qualify.
- slow
- Bars back for the long price comparison. The aligned-rise part (up to 30) needs price above all three lookbacks. Raising it demands a sustained rise and lengthens the warm-up before the first score.
- vol_window
- Bars in the average volume the current bar is compared with. Lower makes the baseline follow recent bars, so one heavy minute can look like a surge. Higher gives a steadier baseline with fewer volume spikes.
Pitfalls
- Volume and range terms ignore direction, so a fast sell-off can score as high as a rally. Only the first two parts look at price direction, and both reward rises.
- Price terms are percentages, so on one-minute bars they add little: a 0.5% rise over the fast window adds about 1 point. Volume and range do most of the work.
- The range term compares each bar's high-low with the previous bar's. A bar 20% wider adds the full 20 points, so single noisy bars spike it.