Currency Strength Meter

Currency Strength Meter

The idea behind it

A single pair only tells you how two currencies are doing against each other, which can be misleading — EURUSD can be flat simply because both currencies are weak (or both strong) together. This indicator solves that by looking at every currency pair the broker offers among the 8 majors (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CHF, AUD, CAD, NZD), measuring each pair's percentage change over a lookback window, and averaging each currency's contribution across all the pairs it appears in. The result is a genuine relative-strength score per currency, not just a two-way comparison.

Because the base currency of a pair gains exactly what the quote currency loses, the math stays simple and self-consistent: every pair contributes +change to its base currency's score and -change to its quote currency's score, and each currency's final score is just the average of everything it took part in. Pairs the broker doesn't offer (some exotic crosses aren't available everywhere) are automatically skipped, so the ranking degrades gracefully instead of failing outright.

How to interpret it

• The ranked list — all 8 currencies, sorted strongest to weakest, refreshed every time the panel updates. The strongest currency is always row 1.
• The percentage value — each currency's average percentage change across all its available pairs over the chosen lookback window; positive means strengthening, negative means weakening.
• Bar length — scaled relative to whichever currency has the largest absolute score that refresh, so the strongest and weakest currencies are visually obvious even when the numeric differences are small.
• Bar/text color — InpStrongColor for a positive (strengthening) score, InpWeakColor for a negative (weakening) score.
• Refresh timing — with InpUpdateOnNewBarOnly enabled (default), the panel recalculates once per new bar of the chart it's attached to; disable it to recalculate on every tick instead.

External variables (inputs)

Input

Default

Purpose

InpCalcTimeframe

H1

Timeframe used to measure each pair's percentage change — independent of the chart's own timeframe.

InpLookbackBars

24

How many bars back (on InpCalcTimeframe) each pair's current price is compared against.

InpUpdateOnNewBarOnly

true

When true, recalculates once per new chart bar; when false, recalculates on every tick.

InpPanelCorner

Left Upper

Chart corner the panel is anchored to.

InpPanelXDistance / InpPanelYDistance

12 / 18

Panel offset from the chosen corner, in pixels.

InpBarMaxWidth

100

Pixel width of the bar for whichever currency currently has the largest absolute score.

InpBarHeight

14

Height of each currency's bar, in pixels.

InpFontSize

8

Font size used for the panel text.

InpStrongColor / InpWeakColor

Lime / Red

Bar and text color for positive vs. negative strength scores.

InpPanelTextColor / InpPanelBgColor

White / Dark Gray

Panel text and background colors.

Recommended use

Can be attached to any single chart of any symbol and any timeframe — the ranking itself is independent of the chart it's running on, since it pulls its own data directly from each currency pair via iClose() . Only attach one instance per chart layout; there's no benefit to running it on multiple charts at once since the panel content would be identical.

Accuracy depends on how many of the 28 possible crosses your broker actually offers — most retail brokers cover all 8-currency crosses, but if some are missing, the affected currencies' scores are simply averaged over fewer pairs, which is noted in the code as an intentional graceful-degradation behavior rather than an error. This indicator only reads price data and never places, modifies, or closes any order, so it's safe to run on any account type.

All chart objects are created under a single internal name prefix and are fully removed via ObjectsDeleteAll() in OnDeinit() when the indicator is detached, so it leaves nothing behind on the chart.

Fig. 1. The ranked currency strength panel on EURUSD M15, strongest to weakest with proportional bars. Rendered in black and white per the Code Base image guidelines (750×500 px).