Reference appendix
Bands & channels
Envelopes drawn around price or a moving average, sized by volatility, range, or regression — used to judge whether price is stretched and where a breakout begins.
How these fit together
Every tool here draws a corridor and asks whether price is inside it. What separates them is how the width is set: a fixed percentage for envelopes, standard deviation for Bollinger Bands, ATR for Keltner and STARC bands, and raw highs and lows for Donchian and price channels. That choice decides how each behaves when volatility changes — the adaptive ones absorb it, the fixed one reveals it. How you read a touch of the edge depends entirely on the market: in a range, the edges are places to fade; in a trend, price walks along them for weeks and fading is the fastest way to lose money.
- Width source: envelope = fixed % · Bollinger = standard deviation · Keltner/STARC = ATR · Donchian = raw highs and lows
- Bollinger Bands contracting inside the Keltner channel → the squeeze, the best-known combination of the two
- Band touch + ADX below 20 → fade it · + ADX above 25 → do not
- Regression and standard-error channels slope with the trend; the rest stay centred on an average
- Standard error bands invert the usual rule — narrow means trending cleanly, not quiet
- Pivot points are fixed levels rather than a corridor; they pair with VWAP and volume profile
Bollinger bands
BOLLstudiedA moving average with two bands plotted a set number of standard deviations above and below it, widening in volatile markets and narrowing in quiet ones. Price near the upper band is often read as overbought, near the lower as oversold.
Bollinger bands percent
BB%bstudiedExpresses where price sits relative to the Bollinger Bands as a single number — roughly 1 at the upper band, 0 at the lower — making “how stretched is price” easy to read as one line.
Acceleration bands
ABuntestedBands drawn around a moving average and widened using the day's high-low range, meant to highlight potential breakout zones as volatility expands.
Keltner channels
KeltneruntestedA moving average with bands set a multiple of Average True Range above and below it — similar in purpose to Bollinger Bands, but using ATR instead of standard deviation.
Donchian channel
DCstudiedThe highest high and lowest low over the lookback period, plotted as the channel's edges — a classic way to spot breakouts to new highs or lows.
Price channel
Price ChanneldefinedVery similar to the Donchian Channel: the highest high and lowest low over a chosen period, marking the range price has traded within.
Stoller average range channel bands
STARCuntestedAn SMA with ATR-based bands above and below it, used like Bollinger Bands to flag overbought/oversold extremes relative to recent volatility.
Standard deviation channel
Std. Dev. ChanneldefinedA linear regression line with channel lines offset by a chosen number of standard deviations, showing the statistical “normal range” around the trend.
Standard error bands
Std. Error BandsuntestedBands based on the standard error of a linear regression estimate — they narrow when the trend is well-defined and widen when price action is more scattered.
Pivot points
PPuntestedSupport and resistance levels calculated from the prior period's high, low, and close — used, especially by day traders, as likely turning points for the current session.
How to read the evidence tag
Every entry here carries one of three tags. The tag rates the evidence behind the claim the entry makes — not how popular the tool is, how old it is, or how confident the people teaching it sound. Close to half of the entries on this site sit on the weakest tier — including every one of the eighteen Smart Money Concepts, which are drawn here in the same ink as Wilder’s ADX and deserve to be told apart from it. That is the honest position rather than an oversight.
- defined33 entries
True by arithmetic. This entry describes a calculation or a piece of terminology, and makes no claim about what price will do next. Nothing here can be wrong except a typo.
- studied56 entries
The predictive claim attached to this entry has been tested in peer-reviewed research. Being on this tier does not mean it works — across the literature these edges are typically small, unstable between markets and periods, and often gone after costs.
- untested87 entries
Widely taught and widely believed, but no published test of the claim was located while building this page. Treat it as a description of what traders do, not as evidence that doing it pays.
The line between studied and untested is drawn by whether a peer-reviewed test of the specific claim could be found, and those tests are listed on the Sources page under “Evidence and base rates”. If you know of a published test of something tagged untested, the tag is wrong and should change — that is the point of labelling it at all.