Cumulative TICK Pro Indicator for ThinkorSwim: Trend Day and Exhaustion Levels

The Cumulative TICK Pro is the members' version of our free Cumulative TICK indicator for ThinkorSwim. It keeps the running TICK total, switches to the Nasdaq, Dow or Russell TICK to match the chart, adds Edge Signals arrows, and marks extreme levels for likely trend days at 10:00 Eastern and likely trend exhaustion at 3:55.

Download the zip on this page, which holds one file, TI_CumulativeTICK_ProSTUDY.ts, and import it as a study. Our import tutorial shows the steps. Add it to an intraday chart of SPY, QQQ, DIA, IWM or the index futures, where it plots in a lower panel. I use it on 1, 3 and 5-minute charts.

The Cumulative TICK Pro uses $TICK/Q, the Nasdaq TICK, on /NQ, /MNQ and QQQ. It uses $TIKI, the Dow TICK, on /YM, /MYM and DIA, and $TIKRL, the Russell TICK, on /RTY, /M2K and IWM. Every other symbol, including SPY, uses the NYSE $TICK.

A green Likely Trending Up line prints on the 10:00 Eastern bar when the cumulative TICK is at or above the dashed green extreme level. Likely Trending Down is the red version below zero. In the video, several 10:00 breaks led to a trend that way, and the strongest days kept the TICK outside the zone.

Likely Trend Exhaustion is the green vertical line that prints at 3:55 Eastern when the cumulative TICK is at or above the solid green end-of-day level. The red version, labeled Likely Trending Exhaustion, prints at or below the solid red level. Either one means the day's move may not continue the next session. In the video, the closes beyond the level on September 3 and September 9, 2020 were followed by next-day reversals.

I collected 90 days of NYSE cumulative TICK readings at 10:00 Eastern and at the close, back to May 6, 2020, with a chart bubble. A Jupyter notebook gave the mean, standard deviation and percentiles of each set. The 87.5th percentile worked best: 2,794.75 at 10:00 and 14,734.6 at the close, on a 5-minute chart.

The cumulative TICK adds one reading per bar, so a 1-minute chart ends up about 5 times higher than a 5-minute chart. The Pro version stores each level at 1-minute scale and divides it by the bar length: by 5 on a 5-minute chart, by 3 on a 3-minute chart, and so on.

Open the study settings and set EdgeSignalsOn to no to hide the arrows, or alertsOn to no to stop the alerts. The showEODLine and show7AMLine inputs turn off the 3:55 and 10:00 vertical lines. The horizontal extreme levels stay on the chart either way.