What is Chop Zone?
Chop Zone draws a row of equal-height columns in its own pane, one per bar. All of the reading is in the colour. Each column is coloured by the angle that a 34-bar exponential moving average makes on the chart, from turquoise for a steep climb, through greens, to yellow for flat, then oranges and reds for a fall. A run of yellow and pale colours marks a market moving sideways.
Chop Zone describes the slope of one moving average. It does not plot a value you can measure, it does not show where price is relative to the average, and it does not forecast when a flat period will end.
How to use Chop Zone
- Greens and turquoise. The 34-bar EMA is rising. Turquoise is the steepest climb, then dark green, pale green and teal as the angle shallows.
- Yellow. The EMA is flat to the nearest degree. Clusters of yellow are the chop the name refers to.
- Oranges and reds. The EMA is falling. Light orange is the shallowest decline, then orange, red and dark red as it steepens.
- Changes in colour. A run of turquoise fading towards yellow means the rise is losing slope, even while price may still be climbing.
These are ways to read the colours, not entry signals on their own.
Settings
Chop Zone has no inputs. The 34-bar EMA, the 30-bar range and the colour bands are fixed.
Calculation
The indicator converts the bar-to-bar change in a 34-bar EMA into an on-screen angle. The drop is rescaled by the recent range so that one bar of width and the price change are in comparable units:
EMA = 34-bar exponential moving average of close
span = 25 / (highest high over 30 - lowest low over 30) * lowest low over 30
y = (previous EMA - EMA) / hlc3 * span
angle = round(180 / pi * arccos(1 / sqrt(1 + y^2)))
made negative when the EMA has fallen
angle >= 5 turquoise
angle 4 dark green
angle 3 pale green
angle 1 or 2 teal
angle 0 yellow
angle -1 or -2 light orange
angle -3 orange
angle -4 red
angle <= -5 dark redThe angle is rounded to a whole degree before it is coloured, so the bands are exactly the whole-number steps above.
Every column is drawn at a height of 1. There is no warm-up gap: until the 34-bar EMA has enough bars to produce an angle, the columns are drawn yellow. The first bars of a chart are therefore yellow because there is no reading yet, not because the market was flat.
Limitations
- Early yellow means no data. The first bars of the loaded history show yellow simply because the average has not started yet.
- It only knows one average. Everything comes from the slope of a 34-bar EMA, so it lags price by the same amount that average does.
- The bands are fixed. There are no inputs, so the angle thresholds cannot be adapted to a market that moves faster or slower.
- The angle depends on the recent range. The same price change gives a different colour when the last 30 bars were wide or narrow, which is intended but makes colours hard to compare across periods.
- The live candle moves. The current bar's colour can change until that bar closes.
Frequently asked questions
Chop Zone is a colour-coded column display of the angle of a 34-bar exponential moving average. Greens show a rising average, reds a falling one, and yellow a flat average, which is the sideways chop the indicator is named after.
From steepest rise to steepest fall: turquoise at 5 degrees or more, dark green at 4, pale green at 3, teal at 1 or 2, yellow at 0, light orange at -1 or -2, orange at -3, red at -4 and dark red at -5 or below. The angle is the slope of the 34-bar EMA, rounded to a whole degree.
No. The indicator declares no inputs. The 34-bar EMA, the 30-bar range used to scale the angle and the colour thresholds are fixed. If you want to change the average's length, an [EMA](/library/indicator/ema) with your own setting shows its slope directly.
Colours on closed bars are not revised. The current bar's colour can change while it is live and settles when it closes. Because the EMA is started from the beginning of the loaded history, loading older bars recalculates it, and colours near the very start of the range can change.
Chop Zone reads the slope of one moving average and shows it as colours. The Choppiness Index measures how much of the recent range price has covered relative to its bar-by-bar movement and plots it as a line. Both aim to separate trending from sideways markets, by different routes.
Use the Add to chart button at the top of this page. It opens BTC/USDT on Binance in the Altrady Charts terminal with the built-in Chop Zone already applied. On any other market, open the indicator picker on the chart and choose Chop Zone from the Trend group.