Daily Pivot Points

Seven levels for the day, fixed from yesterday’s prices.

What it measures

The pivot is the average of the previous day’s high, low and close. Three resistance levels sit above it and three support levels below, spaced by the previous day’s range.

How traders read it

Traders use the levels as places where the price may pause or turn during the day: a move through R1 or S1 is read as strength in that direction. It is meant for intraday timeframes.

Formula

pivot = (high + low + close) / 3, of the previous day
R1 = 2 × pivot − low      S1 = 2 × pivot − high
R2 = pivot + (high − low)  S2 = pivot − (high − low)
R3 = R1 + (high − low)     S3 = S1 − (high − low)

Days are UTC. On a Sunday it uses Friday’s bar, and on a Monday Friday’s and Sunday’s high and low together with Sunday’s close, so the short Sunday session does not set the levels on its own. The levels change when the UTC day changes.

Settings and output

Call: dailyPivot()

No settings.

What you get: a list of 7, in this order: 1. a number (“R3”); 2. a number (“R2”); 3. a number (“R1”); 4. a number (“dailyPivot”); 5. a number (“S1”); 6. a number (“S2”); 7. a number (“S3”).

Warm-up: with no settings, it asks for 3 bars of history and a run-up of 1, and its first value came on bar 24 of the example data.

Chart

Daily Pivot Points drawn by its own code on example prices

The prices are made up, hourly, and the same on every page, so the chart shows how the indicator behaves, not how a market behaved.

In an algorithm

function onIntervalClose() {
  const levels = dailyPivot();
  const pivot = levels[3];
  const r1 = levels[2];
  if (CLOSE > r1) {
    log("Above R1", r1, "pivot", pivot);
  }
}

It gives [R3, R2, R1, pivot, S1, S2, S3].