Supertrend Indicator: The ATR Trend-Flip Line
The Supertrend indicator wraps ATR bands around the midpoint of each bar and flips sides when price closes through the active one. The formula, why the band ratchets one way only, the 10 and 3 default and what moving either number costs, a direct answer on whether it repaints, the timeframe guidance, and a mechanic-by-mechanic contrast against Parabolic SAR, which looks like the same indicator and is built from something completely different.
Supertrend is one line. It sits under price and it is green, or it sits over price and it is red, and when price closes through it the line jumps to the other side and changes colour. That is the entire user interface, which is why it spreads so fast and why so many people running it have no idea what is underneath. What is underneath is Average True Range, and that single fact explains every behaviour the indicator has: why the line does not wiggle when price pulls back, why it widens on a volatile day without being told to, and why it is not the Parabolic SAR lookalike it appears to be.
Quick Answer
Supertrend is a trend-following overlay that plots one line, below price in an uptrend and above price in a downtrend, with a colour flip marking the reversal. The bands are the midpoint of the bar offset by a multiple of Average True Range: Upper Band = ( High + Low ) / 2 + ( Multiplier x ATR ) and Lower Band = ( High + Low ) / 2 - ( Multiplier x ATR ). Only one band is plotted at a time, and the plotted band ratchets, meaning it only moves in the trend's favour and never retreats, which is what makes it usable as a built-in trailing stop. Default settings are an ATR period of 10 and a multiplier of 3, with the multiplier commonly tuned between roughly 2.0 and 3.5. It does not repaint on a closed bar, though the live forming bar can shift until it closes. It works in trends and whipsaws in sideways markets. The indicator is commonly attributed to Olivier Seban, a French trader and author.
Everything below is the detail that paragraph compresses: the band arithmetic run over five bars you can check by hand, the ratchet rule that is the whole reason the line behaves the way it does, what moving each of the two settings actually costs you, a precise answer on the repaint question, and the construction-level contrast against Parabolic SAR that most write-ups skip because the two indicators look so similar on a chart.
What Is the Supertrend Indicator?
A single line drawn on the price pane, not in a sub-pane. In an uptrend it tracks along underneath price and is conventionally coloured green. In a downtrend it tracks above price and is conventionally coloured red. Price closing through the line is the reversal signal, and the line immediately relocates to the other side of price. There is no third state. The indicator is always making one of two claims.
The attribution is worth stating carefully, because the sourcing on it is genuinely messy. It is commonly credited to Olivier Seban, a French trader and author who described it in his book Everybody Deserves to be Rich. Sources disagree on the year, with 2000 and 2009 both appearing, and at least one reference source states outright that the exact origin and developer are not definitively documented because the indicator evolved through contributions from several traders. So: commonly attributed to Seban, and if you need the date for anything load-bearing, do not take it from a blog post including this one. Compare that to the documented 1978 publication history behind Parabolic SAR, where the author, the book and the year are all traceable to one primary source.
The premise is the same one behind every trend-following overlay: stay with a move until something measurable says it ended, and define that something in advance so you are not deciding under pressure. What makes Supertrend distinct from a moving average doing the same job is that the distance between the line and price is set by a volatility measurement rather than by an average of past prices. A 20-period average sits wherever the last twenty closes put it. A Supertrend band sits a specific number of average true ranges away from the middle of the current bar, which means it automatically gives a volatile instrument more room and a quiet one less, without you changing a setting.
What Is the Supertrend Formula?
1. The midpoint, usually written hl2 = ( High + Low ) / 2, computed on the current bar
2. The bands: Upper Band = hl2 + ( Multiplier x ATR ), Lower Band = hl2 - ( Multiplier x ATR )
3. The plotted line: in an uptrend the lower band is plotted and is only ever allowed to move up. In a downtrend the upper band is plotted and is only ever allowed to move down. A close on the far side of the plotted band flips the trend and switches which band is drawn.
Two inputs: the ATR period, defaulting to 10, and the multiplier, defaulting to 3.
Average True Range is the engine, so it is worth thirty seconds on what it measures. True range for a bar is the largest of three distances: the bar's own high minus its low, the high minus the previous close, and the previous close minus the low. The last two exist so that a gap counts as range rather than being invisible. ATR is then a running average of those true ranges over the look-back period, conventionally using Wilder's smoothing, where each new value carries most of the prior average forward. Everything volatility-adaptive about Supertrend is inherited from that one term. The multiplier is just how many of them you want between price and your exit. The same ATR-band logic drives the ATR envelope that Keltner Channels draw around an EMA, which is the closest relative Supertrend has on this site and a useful comparison: Keltner shows you both bands permanently, Supertrend shows you one and makes it ratchet.
One honest disagreement in the sourcing
The hl2 midpoint version above is the standard construction. It is what the reference charting platform's own documentation describes, and it is what the majority of reference sources reproduce. One published reference, the WallStreetMojo entry on the Supertrend indicator, instead describes offsetting the ATR term from the bare High and the bare Low rather than from their midpoint. That produces a band half the bar's range away from where the standard formula puts it. It is not a large disagreement and it does not change how you read the line, but it exists, and quietly picking one version while pretending the field agrees is how small errors get copied forward. Use hl2. Know that the other version is in print.
The ratchet, which is the part that matters
If the plotted line were simply the raw band recomputed each bar, it would wander up and down with every change in ATR and every change in the bar's midpoint, and it would be useless as a stop. It does not do that. The plotted band is path-dependent: in an uptrend, the new lower band is only adopted if it is higher than the one already plotted, and otherwise the previous value is carried forward unchanged. The line steps up and then holds. It never steps down while the trend is intact. Here is that rule over five bars with a multiplier of 3, with ATR supplied per bar so the arithmetic is checkable.
| Bar | High / Low | hl2 | ATR | Raw lower band | Line actually plotted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 102.00 / 100.00 | 101.00 | 1.00 | 98.00 | 98.00 |
| 2 | 103.20 / 101.40 | 102.30 | 1.05 | 99.15 | 99.15 |
| 3 | 103.60 / 102.10 | 102.85 | 1.00 | 99.85 | 99.85 |
| 4 | 103.10 / 101.20 | 102.15 | 1.10 | 98.85 | 99.85, held |
| 5 | 104.80 / 102.60 | 103.70 | 1.20 | 100.10 | 100.10 |
Bar 4 is the whole lesson. The bar pulled back, the midpoint dropped to 102.15, ATR ticked up to 1.10, and the raw lower band fell from 99.85 all the way to 98.85. The plotted line did not move. It stayed at 99.85, because a lower value is not allowed while the uptrend holds. That is why Supertrend looks calm through pullbacks that make a moving average visibly sag, and it is the single mechanical difference that makes the line usable as a trailing exit rather than just another curve on the chart. Implementations word the carry-forward condition slightly differently, some also checking where the prior close sat relative to the prior band, but the observable effect is the same one-way movement in every version.
The flip, when it comes, is abrupt by design. A close below 100.10 on bar 6 ends the uptrend, the lower band stops being plotted, and the upper band appears above price at the full three-ATR distance on the other side. Nothing eases into it.
The raw band moves both ways. The plotted line does not
What Are the Best Supertrend Settings?
An ATR period of 10 and a multiplier of 3. That is the standard default, it is what the reference implementation ships, and it is what the majority of reference sources name. Treat it as the starting point rather than a discovered optimum, because it is a default somebody chose, not a constant somebody derived.
The multiplier is the setting worth understanding first, because it does exactly one job. It sets how many average true ranges sit between the midpoint and the line, which sets how much adverse movement the trend can absorb before the line is breached. Commonly cited tuning range is roughly 2.0 to 3.5. Higher means fewer flips, arriving later, with a larger share of them describing real moves. Lower means more flips, arriving sooner, with a larger share of them being noise. There is no setting that gives you early and reliable at the same time, and any guide implying otherwise is selling a backtest.
Worth naming the disagreement here too. The same minority reference that describes the bands differently also lists period options of 7, 14, 20 and 50 with a multiplier range of 1 to 3, and names no single default at all. That is a real divergence from the 10 and 3 consensus, and the honest reading is that 10 and 3 is the convention rather than a law of the tape. What you should not do is take a settings combination out of an article and run it on an instrument nobody tested it on, which is the same trap that catches people copying default periods between indicators and timeframes.
| Setting | What happens to the line | What happens to the signals | When people reach for it |
|---|---|---|---|
| ATR 10, multiplier 3 | The standard default, and what the reference charting implementation ships | The baseline every other row is measured against | Start here on any instrument you have not run it on before |
| Multiplier down toward 2.0 | Band sits closer to the midpoint, so the line hugs price | More flips, each one earlier, a larger share of them false | Trending instruments where you would rather be stopped out than late |
| Multiplier up toward 3.5 | Band sits further out, so the line survives deeper pullbacks | Fewer flips, each one later, a larger share of them real | Noisier tape, or when the log shows you are being shaken out of good trades |
| ATR period down toward 7 | Width reacts faster when volatility changes | The band adjusts sooner after a volatility shift, and jitters more | Instruments whose volatility regime changes inside a session |
| ATR period up toward 14 or 20 | Width is steadier and carries old ranges longer | Slower to react to a volatility change in either direction | Higher timeframes, or a name with one gap bar distorting a short window |
| Two copies, fast and slow | Two lines, usually a tighter one for signals and a wider one for context | Only take the fast flip when the slow line agrees with the direction | The dual-Supertrend approach, a filter that costs no new indicator type |
| Anything far from 10 and 3 | A different indicator wearing the same name | Whatever your own testing shows, not what a guide's numbers showed | Only after you have logged what the default actually does on your chart |
One published example of how far people stray from the default is worth quoting precisely, with its caveats attached. FXEmpire describes a system pairing a 25-period simple moving average with Supertrend configured at an ATR period of 60 and a multiplier of 2.2, reporting a 14.36% annual return, a 49.57% win rate, a 1.503 profit factor, a 3.13% maximum drawdown and 232 trades. Read that as one specifically parameterized backtest from one source, on an instrument and period the article does not fully disclose, using settings six times the default ATR period. It is not the win rate of Supertrend. Nothing in it transfers to your chart, and a sub-50% win rate coming out profitable is itself a reminder that the win rate was never the interesting number.
The line just flipped green on the chart you are staring at. That is one indicator agreeing with what you already wanted to do.
Upload the screenshot and SnapPChart reads that single image against a fixed rubric, then returns a setup grade, an entry, a stop with the reasoning behind the level, targets, and the reward-to-risk those levels imply. Arguing with the grade is cheaper than arguing with the fill.
Grade this chartDoes the Supertrend Indicator Repaint?
No, not on a closed bar. Once a bar has finished printing, that bar's band value and the trend state it produced are fixed. Reload the chart, change the timeframe and come back, check it a month later, and the historical line is identical. A flip that happened three days ago will still be sitting on the same bar. That is the precise thing people mean when they ask whether an indicator repaints, and for Supertrend the answer is no.
What does happen, and what generates the question in the first place, is that the live forming bar is not settled yet. Its high and its low are still being written, so hl2 is still moving, ATR's newest input is still moving, and the band is still moving with them. If price is hovering near the line, you can watch the trend state switch and switch back inside a single unfinished bar. Nothing about that is repainting. It is the same property every close-based or bar-based signal has, and it is why the conventional advice is to act on a confirmed close rather than on what the line is doing mid-bar.
Two practical consequences follow. First, if you are alerting on flips, alert on bar close, or you will be woken up by states that never survived the bar. Second, if you are backtesting, be careful which price you assume you got, because a strategy that fills at the flip level is quietly assuming it knew mid-bar what only the close confirmed. The same mid-bar-versus-closed-bar distinction runs through how Renko bricks only exist once a threshold is crossed, where the same confusion shows up with the added twist that Renko genuinely does revise its last brick.
What Is the Best Timeframe for Supertrend?
Fifteen minutes is the common floor for intraday use, and the reasoning is mechanical rather than stylistic. Shorter bars have smaller true ranges, a smaller ATR makes a narrower band at any given multiplier, and a narrow band sits inside the territory ordinary order flow covers in a few minutes. So a 1-minute Supertrend flips constantly, and most of those flips are describing the spread and the order book rather than a trend. Fifteen minutes, thirty minutes and hourly charts are where intraday traders generally run it.
Daily and weekly charts are where it is used for swing and position trading, and the indicator is arguably better suited there for a reason that has nothing to do with the formula: a daily flip gives you until the next session to think about it. The band arithmetic is identical on every timeframe. What changes is how much noise sits inside one bar.
The commonly recommended structure is multi-timeframe: read the higher timeframe for the trend state and the lower one for entry timing, which is the same discipline as checking the daily before acting on a 5-minute signal. The dual-Supertrend variant does this within one chart instead, running a slow configuration as the direction filter and a faster one for the trigger, and only taking fast flips that agree with the slow line. Same idea, one fewer chart to keep open, and it inherits the same flaw: both copies are reading the same price series through the same formula, so they will fail together in the same conditions.
Supertrend vs Parabolic SAR
On a chart these two look like the same tool wearing different clothes. Both are trend-following overlays that sit on one side of price. Both flip to the other side on a reversal. Both double as a ready-made trailing stop. Both are useless in chop for the same reason. A trader who has used one usually assumes they already understand the other, and the assumption is wrong at the level that matters, because the thing that sets the distance between price and the line is completely different in each.
Supertrend's distance is a volatility measurement. Multiplier times ATR, recomputed every bar. It has no idea how long the trend has been running and no term that could encode it. Parabolic SAR's distance is a function of trend age. Its acceleration factor starts at 0.02, rises 0.02 every time the trend makes a new extreme, caps at 0.20, and each bar pulls the dot a larger fraction of the way toward the best price of the move. It has no volatility term at all. Two indicators, two entirely different questions being asked about the same chart.
The practical difference shows up at the end of a long move. Twenty new highs into a trend, Parabolic SAR is eating a fifth of the remaining gap every bar and will exit you close to the top whether the tape is calm or violent. Supertrend, on the same twenty bars, is sitting wherever three average true ranges puts it, which on a volatile run means the exit has actually backed further away from price than it was at the start. Neither behaviour is better. One gets you out near the high of a mature trend at the cost of exiting early on a shallow shakeout. The other holds through the shakeout at the cost of giving back more when the move really does end.
| Mechanic | Supertrend | Parabolic SAR |
|---|---|---|
| What sets the distance from price | A multiplier times ATR, so the gap is a volatility measurement | An acceleration factor applied to the gap to the extreme point. No volatility term exists in the formula |
| Core calculation | Upper band = hl2 + ( multiplier x ATR ), lower band = hl2 - ( multiplier x ATR ) | SAR = prior SAR + prior AF x ( prior EP - prior SAR ) |
| What it measures from | The midpoint of the current bar, ( high + low ) / 2, recomputed every bar | Its own prior value, recursive all the way back to the start of the trend |
| What tightens it over time | Nothing. The gap tracks volatility, and has no idea how old the trend is | Trend age. AF rises 0.02 per new extreme and caps at 0.20, so the dots close in |
| Late in a long, quiet trend | Gap is whatever ATR says, and a quiet trend means a tight band | Gap collapses toward price because AF is pinned at its ceiling |
| Late in a long, violent trend | Gap widens with the ranges, so the exit backs away from price | Gap still collapses. Violence in the tape changes nothing in the formula |
| Reversal trigger | A close on the far side of the active band | Price crossing the dot |
| What it draws | A continuous stepped line, one side of price at a time | One dot per bar, above price or below it |
| Ratchet mechanic | The active band only moves in favour of the trend and never retreats | Same one-way movement, plus a clamp forbidding the dot from sitting inside the range of the last two bars |
| Settings you actually change | ATR period and multiplier, conventionally 10 and 3 | Step and maximum step, conventionally 0.02 and 0.20 |
| Attribution | Commonly credited to Olivier Seban, with the year disputed across sources | J. Welles Wilder, published in his 1978 book |
The full walkthrough of the acceleration factor, the extreme-point reset on every flip and the two-bar clamp that keeps the dot out of the last two bars' range lives in the dedicated Parabolic SAR guide, and the StockCharts ChartSchool entry on Parabolic SAR works that arithmetic bar by bar if you want to reproduce both indicators side by side in a spreadsheet. For the Supertrend half, the TradingView help page for Supertrend is the reference implementation the 10 and 3 default comes from.
One more difference, and it is about the people rather than the maths. The long tail of searches around Supertrend leans heavily toward scripting and algorithmic platforms, the kind of queries that end in a platform's script language. Parabolic SAR's long tail leans classical and educational. That is a reasonable hint about who each indicator's current audience actually is: Supertrend is popular with people automating a rule, which is exactly the use case where the one-way ratchet and the two clean parameters are most attractive, and exactly the use case where running it in a market with no trend does the most damage fastest.
Same price path. One gap is set by volatility, the other by trend age
Where Supertrend Breaks
Every source on this indicator says the same thing about the same condition, and it is worth stating as a hard limitation rather than a hedge: Supertrend works in trending markets and produces false signals in sideways, choppy, range-bound conditions. That is not a flaw in the implementation. It is what a trend-following overlay does when there is no trend to follow, and it is the identical caveat already attached to the trend-strength reading that exists specifically to tell you whether a trend is present, to Parabolic SAR, and to Renko bricks. If three unrelated tools share one failure mode, the failure mode is the market condition, not the tools.
The rest of the list is more specific, and most of it traces back to ATR being an average of ranges that have already happened.
| Condition | What Supertrend does | Why it misleads |
|---|---|---|
| A range narrower than the band width | Never flips. The line sits below price and stays there | You get no signal at all while price crosses the same territory four times, and a line holding one colour for thirty bars looks identical to a healthy trend. Silence is not confirmation |
| A range wider than the band width | Flips at both ends of the range, repeatedly | Every flip is a fresh, confident trend call and none of them continue. This is the whipsaw case every source on the indicator warns about, and it is the arithmetic working exactly as specified |
| Volatility collapsing into a squeeze | ATR shrinks, so the band tightens onto price | The stop distance shrinks with it. A wiggle you would have ignored two weeks ago now closes through the line, because the line is measuring a volatility regime that has already ended |
| Volatility expanding hard | ATR grows, so the band backs away from price | The ratchet cannot pull it in. On a position you already hold, the distance to the exit quietly widens after entry, which means the risk on that trade is not the risk you sized it for |
| The bar immediately after a flip | New line starts at the full multiplier times ATR on the other side | The widest stop of the entire trend is the one you get at the moment of entry. Traders who flip and immediately complain the line is miles away have met this and assumed it is a bug |
| One gap bar inside the ATR look-back | True range includes the gap, so ATR jumps and holds | Every band for the rest of the look-back is set by a single overnight move. The line is wide for ten bars because of something that happened before one of them |
| A freshly loaded chart | ATR needs its look-back window to fill before it means anything | The first bands, and therefore the first flips, depend on where your data window happens to start. Load 200 bars and 2,000 of the same symbol and the early history can differ |
| A thin, low-volume name | ATR is built from ranges that were not worth measuring | One wide bar on almost no volume sets the true range, and the average carries it for the whole window. The band is not wrong, it is faithfully reporting a volatility estimate made of noise |
| Treating the line as a guaranteed exit | Reports a level, and levels are not fills | A gap through the line on an earnings print fills you wherever the book reopens. Every trailing-stop overlay shares this and none of them mention it |
The standard response to the whipsaw problem is a filter, and every source recommends one. A longer moving average as a direction gate, so you take long flips only above it and short flips only below. A trend-strength reading, so you skip flips that happen while the market is measurably directionless. RSI or a stochastic oscillator for a momentum cross-check. A MACD crossover for confirmation of the same turn, or an RSI reading to check whether the flip is arriving into an already-stretched move. Pick one or two, not five. Four indicators derived from the same price series mostly agree with each other, which feels like confirmation and is not, and counting genuinely independent signals rather than counting lines on the screen is the difference between a filter and decoration.
Worth being plain about what a filter costs. Requiring two conditions instead of one means fewer trades and later entries on the ones that survive. Filters do not make signals better, they make them rarer. Whether rarer is better depends entirely on what the false ones were costing you, which is a question about your own log and not about the indicator.
Where Supertrend Fits on a Real Chart
It answers one question well: given the current volatility, where does price have to close for me to accept that this move is over. That is a genuinely useful thing to have decided in advance, and it is the reason the indicator is worth having even if you never take a single flip as an entry. Using the line as a rules-based trailing stop rather than as a signal generator is, for a lot of traders, the higher-value half of it.
What it cannot contribute is whether a trend exists, where the levels are, what the higher timeframe is doing, whether the structure is clean, or how much you should risk. The ordering that works is the ordinary one: structure and regime first, then Supertrend as the exit rule for what those already told you to do. That is the same layering the broader technical analysis overview walks through, and the same reason an intraday momentum playbook treats the entry trigger as the last thing to arrive, not the first.
What a screenshot read can and cannot see here
Worth being straight about, since this site sells a tool. SnapPChart has no Supertrend field. It does not compute an Average True Range, it holds no band state, it does not track which side of a line price is on, and it carries no Supertrend value at all, the way it does for trend and market structure, breaks of structure and changes of character, the moving average stack, the VWAP relationship, MACD, volume behaviour, and support and resistance as price ranges. What the engine does is read a chart screenshot you upload. So if you plot Supertrend on your own platform before taking that screenshot, that line is part of what the analysis sees, as geometry drawn on the price pane. That is a picture of an overlay, not a verified computed value: it cannot confirm your multiplier is 3, it cannot tell you the band is wide because of one gap bar eight sessions ago, and it cannot know whether your platform smoothed ATR the conventional way. Which chart states a screenshot-based read genuinely carries and which it only infers from shape is the subject of the wider guide to how AI reads a chart, and a neutral description of what a single chart read covers sits on the AI chart analysis page. If the flip is the reason you are taking the trade, verifying the flip stays your job.
Take the midpoint of the bar, ( high + low ) / 2. Add a multiplier times ATR for the upper band, subtract it for the lower. Plot the lower band in an uptrend and the upper band in a downtrend, and only ever let the plotted one move in the trend's favour. A close on the far side flips it. Defaults are an ATR period of 10 and a multiplier of 3, with roughly 2.0 to 3.5 the usual range on the multiplier, and higher always meaning fewer, later, more reliable flips. It does not repaint on a closed bar, though the unfinished bar shifts until it closes. Fifteen minutes and up for intraday, daily and weekly for swing. It looks like Parabolic SAR and is built from something else entirely: volatility distance versus trend-age acceleration. And it will keep producing confident colour changes in a flat market for as long as you leave it on the chart.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you trade Supertrend on its own?
Mechanically yes, and that is the trap. The line always has an opinion, because the formula always produces a band and price is always on one side of it. There is no output that means nothing is happening here. So a bare flip-long-flip-short system trades every condition the market offers, including the ones where the indicator has no information, and the flat, range-bound tape is where a trend-following overlay does its worst work. What the line genuinely gives you is a rule-based exit level that moves in one direction, which is a real thing to own. What it does not give you is permission to be in the trade. Something outside the indicator has to answer whether there is a trend at all, whether the level price is sitting at matters, and how much you are risking. Those are three inputs the formula has no term for.
Why does my Supertrend line look different from someone else's on the same chart?
Four candidates, in the order they are usually the answer. First the settings, because the ATR period and the multiplier are both adjustable and 10 and 3 are defaults rather than laws. Second the ATR smoothing method, since Wilder's running average is the conventional one but implementations that use a simple average of true ranges, or an exponential one, produce a measurably different band width from identical price data. Third the band centre, because the majority construction uses the midpoint of the bar's high and low while at least one published reference describes offsetting from the bare high and low instead, which shifts every band by half the bar's range. Fourth, and the one people never check, extended-hours data: folding pre-market and after-hours trade into a bar changes its high, its low and therefore both the midpoint and the true range at once. Match all four before concluding one of the two charts is wrong.
What does it mean when Supertrend flips twice in three bars?
That your multiplier is smaller than the instrument's ordinary noise on that timeframe. A flip requires a close on the far side of a band sitting a fixed number of average true ranges away from the midpoint, so a double flip inside three bars is arithmetic telling you the bars are routinely travelling further than that distance in both directions. It is not a signal about the market so much as a mismatch between the setting and the tape. Two responses exist and they are not equivalent. Widen the multiplier and the flips get rarer and later, which costs you the start of real moves. Stop trading that condition and you cost yourself nothing except the trades that were going to whipsaw. Traders who keep a log of their own flips usually find the second response is the cheaper one, because a cluster of fast flips is itself a readable description of a market with no direction.
Is Supertrend a lagging indicator?
Yes, in both halves of its construction, and it is worth being precise about which half lags more. The ATR term is an average of true ranges that have already printed, so the band width is always a description of past volatility applied to the current bar. The flip is worse than that: it requires a close beyond a band that sits several average ranges away, which means by the time the line changes colour, price has already travelled the full band distance plus whatever it took to get there. That delay is the price of the ratchet. An overlay that flipped sooner would flip more often, and most of those extra flips would be noise. Anyone treating the colour change as an early warning has the causality backwards, since the colour change is a confirmation that something already happened.
Does Supertrend work on a 1-minute chart for scalping?
It runs, and the common guidance is to treat 15 minutes as the practical floor for intraday use because shorter bars produce more flips than the signals are worth. The mechanism is the same one behind the double-flip question: ATR on 1-minute bars is a small number, three times a small number is a narrow band, and a narrow band sits inside the range that ordinary order flow covers in a couple of minutes. You can widen the multiplier to compensate, but then the exit is so far from a 1-minute entry that the reward-to-risk on the trade stops making sense. If you scalp and you want an ATR-derived exit, the usual workaround is to read the flip off a higher timeframe for direction and to size and place stops off the timeframe you are actually executing on, which is the multi-timeframe approach rather than a settings tweak.
This article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not investment, financial or trading advice. The Supertrend band formula built on the midpoint of the bar's high and low offset by a multiplier times Average True Range, the one-way ratchet behaviour of the plotted band, the close-based flip rule, the ATR period of 10 and multiplier of 3 default, the roughly 2.0 to 3.5 multiplier tuning range, the 15-minute intraday floor and daily/weekly swing timeframe guidance, the multi-timeframe and dual-Supertrend structures, the indicator-pairing recommendations, and the attribution of the indicator to Olivier Seban are the conventional published accounts reproduced by charting platforms and reference sources. Sources disagree on the year of that attribution, with 2000 and 2009 both appearing, and at least one reference source states that no single creator or origin is definitively documented; the attribution is reproduced here as an attribution, not as an established fact. One reference source describes the bands as offset from the bare high and low rather than from their midpoint, and lists period options of 7, 14, 20 and 50 with a multiplier range of 1 to 3 and no single named default; both divergences are stated in the body rather than resolved silently. The five-bar worked example, including every high, low, midpoint, ATR figure, raw band value and plotted line value, is an illustrative construction built so the arithmetic can be checked by hand; it is not a real security, a real trading session or a market observation, and the ATR values were supplied directly rather than derived from a longer price series. The backtest figures quoted in the settings section (a 25-period simple moving average paired with Supertrend at an ATR period of 60 and a multiplier of 2.2, returning 14.36% annually with a 49.57% win rate, a 1.503 profit factor, a 3.13% maximum drawdown across 232 trades) are reported by a single third-party source, used non-default settings, and do not fully disclose the instrument or period tested; they are quoted as one named example and are not a general performance claim about the indicator. No backtest here is my own, no setting, multiplier, timeframe, filter or indicator pairing described is claimed to be profitable, and no edge is claimed or implied. Indicator readings describe what price has already done and do not predict what it will do next. Day trading and active trading carry a substantial risk of loss and are not suitable for every investor. SnapPChart grades a static chart screenshot you upload and returns a setup grade, entry, stop, targets and reasoning for that single image; it does not calculate a Supertrend band, an Average True Range, a Parabolic SAR value or any other indicator value itself, does not track indicator states it has not been shown, does not scan the market, and does not track your account, positions or P&L. It can only account for indicators that are visibly drawn on the image you upload. Do your own analysis, size positions so that being wrong is survivable, and consider speaking to a licensed financial professional about your own circumstances before trading.
Writes about AI-assisted day trading, technical analysis, and the systems traders actually use to stay disciplined.
The line flipped green. It has no opinion on whether this chart is worth risking money on.
Supertrend will hand you a colour and a level in any condition, including the flat, chopping tape it was never going to work in. Upload the screenshot and SnapPChart reads that one image against a fixed rubric, then returns a setup grade, an entry, a stop with the reasoning behind the level, targets, and the reward-to-risk those levels imply. One skipped bad trade covers it.