Chaikin Money Flow (CMF)

Whether the bars of a recent window mostly closed near their highs on good volume.

What it measures

Chaikin Money Flow divides the sum of money flow volume (as in the ADL) by the sum of volume over the window, giving a value between −1 and +1. Volume here is the volume the price feed reports for each bar. For forex, brokers usually report the number of price updates in the bar, not an amount traded, so read it as activity rather than money.

How traders read it

Traders read a value above zero as buying pressure and below zero as selling pressure, with ±0.25 as strong.

Formula

multiplier = ((close − low) − (high − close)) / (high − low)
CMF = Σ (multiplier × volume) / Σ volume, over the last periods bars

A bar with no range counts as a multiplier of 0.

Settings and output

Call: cmf(periods)

Setting	Chart default
`periods`: Periods	20

What you get: a number.

Warm-up: with cmf(20), it asks for 0 bars of history and a run-up of 20, and its first value came on bar 20 of the example data.

Chart

Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) 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() {
  log("Chaikin Money Flow", cmf(20));
}