Ease of Movement (EMV)

How easily the price is moving: a large move on little volume scores high.

What it measures

Richard Arms’ Ease of Movement divides the change in the bar’s midpoint by a “box ratio” of volume to range, then averages it. Volume is divided by 100,000,000, a scale chosen for share volumes, so on forex the values are small numbers. 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 the price rising easily and below zero as falling easily. Values near zero mean the price needs a lot of volume to move.

Formula

distance moved = (high + low) / 2 − previous (high + low) / 2
box ratio = (volume / 100,000,000) / (high − low)
EMV = SMA(distance moved / box ratio, periods)

Settings and output

Call: emv(periods)

Setting	Chart default
`periods`: Periods	14

What you get: a number.

Warm-up: with emv(14), it asks for 0 bars of history and a run-up of 15, and its first value came on bar 15 of the example data.

Chart

Ease of Movement (EMV) 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() {
  if (OPEN_POSITIONS_COUNT === 0 && emv(14) > 0 && CLOSE > sma(50)) {
    openPosition("BUY", { quantity: 10000, stopLossPips: 25, takeProfitPips: 50 });
  }
}