RedK Relative Strength Ribbon: RS Ribbon and RS Charts

26 thg 7, 2023

RedK Relative Strength Ribbon (RedK RS_Ribbon) is TA tool that plots the Relative Strength of the current chart symbol against another symbol, or an index of choice. It enables us to see when a stock is gaining strength (or weakness) relative to (an index that represents) the market, and when it hits new highs or lows of that relative strength, which may lead to better trading decisions.

I searched TV for existing RS indicators but didn't find what I really wanted, so I put this together and added some additional features for my own use. It started as a simple RS line with new x-weeks Hi/Lo markers, then evolved into what you see here in v1.0 with the ability to plot a full RS chart in regular or HA candle types. Hope this will be useful to some other growth traders here on TV.


What is Relative Strength (RS)
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(RS is a comprehensive concept in TA, below is a quick summary - please research further if it's not already a familiar topic)
Relative Strength (RS) is a technical concept / indicator used mainly by growth / swing / momentum traders to compare the performance of one security or asset against another. RS measures the price performance of a specific security relative to a benchmark, such as an index or another asset. It's not to be confused with the famous Relative Strength Index (RSI) technical indicator

For example, In the context of comparing a stock's relative strength to the SPY (S&P 500) index, the relative strength calculation involves dividing the stock's price or price-related value (e.g., close price) by the corresponding value of the SPY index. The resulting ratio (and its trend over time) indicates the relative performance of the stock compared to the index.

Traders and investors use relative strength analysis to identify securities that have been showing relative strength or weakness compared to a benchmark, which can help in making investment decisions or identifying the "market leaders" and potential trading opportunities.

There are so many books and documentation about the RS concept and its importance to identify market leaders, especially when recovering from a bear market - if you're interested in the concept, please search more about it and review some of that literature. There's also a more detailed definition of Relative Strength in this article on Invstopedia

RedK RS_Ribbon features and options
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The indicator settings provide many options and features - see the settings box below



- Change / choose base symbol
The default is to use SPY as the base symbol - so we're comparing the chart's symbol to a proxy of the S&P 500 - Some traders may prefer to use the QQQ - or other index or ETF that acts as a proxy for the industry / sector / market they are trading

- RS Calculation / RS line
we use the simple form of the RS calculation,
RS = closing price of current chart symbol / closing price of the base symbol (default is SPY) * 100

some RS documentation will use the Rate of Change (RoC) - but that's not what we're using here.

- The RS_Ribbon
* Once the RS line is plotted, it made sense to add couple of moving averages to it, to make it easier to observe the trend of the RS and the changes in that trend as you can see in the sample chart on top.
* The RS_Ribbon is made up of a fast and slow moving averages and will change color (green / red) based on detected trend RS direction - the 2 MA types and lengths can be changed until you get the setup that provides the best view for you of the RS trend over time. My preferred settings are used as defaults here.

- Identifying New (x)Week Hi/Lo RS Values
* Most traders would be interested when the calculated RS hits a new 52-week high or low value.
* There are cases where we may want to see when a new RS Hi/Lo has been hit for a different period - for example, a quarter (13 weeks)
* the number of weeks can be changed as well as adjusting the numbers of trading days per week (if needed for certain symbols/exchanges)

- Working with Different Timeframes
* Now these "markers" will only be available in the daily and weekly timeframes and there is a good reason for that, it's not the fact that i'm lazy :) and that enabling this in timeframes lower than 1D would have been some heavy lifting, but the reality is that with RS, we're really interested if a "day's close" hits a new RS high or low value against the moving window of x weeks (and the weeks close also) - if you think of this more, at lower TF, RS can hit a lower value that never end up registering on the daily closing and that causes a lot of visual confusion. So i took the "cleaner way out" of that issue.

* note that you can choose a different timeframe for the RS_Ribbon than the chart - if you do, please make sure the chart is at a lower timeframe than the indicator's - (and in that case remember to hide the candles because they won't make much sense)

i wanted to leverage TV's built-in multi-Timeframe (MTF) support with the caveat that using the indicator at lower TF with a chart at a higher TF (example chart at 1Wk and indicator at 1D) will show inaccurate results. If this sounds confusing, keep the indicator TF same as the chart.

the example here shows a 2-Hr chart against 1D RS_Ribbon



- Using RS Charts and RS Candles
* Beside the ability to plot the RS "closing" value with the RS line, the indicator provides the ability to show a "full" RS Chart with candles that represent the relative values of open, high, low. and close against the base symbol.
* the RS Charts can be used for regular chart analysis, for example, we can identify common chart patterns like Cup & Handle, VCP, Head & Shoulder..etc using these charts .. which can provide some edge over the price charts

* for the Heikin Ashi fans, I added the ability to choose classic or HA candles for the chart. note you have to enable the option to show the RS candles first before you choose the option to switch to HA.

The chart below shows a side-by-side comparison on the 2 RS chart types



Closing remarks
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* RS is a good way to identify market/sector leaders (who will usually recover from a bear market before others) - and enable us to see the strength that comes from the broader makrket versus the one that comes from the stock's own performance and identify good trading opportunities
* I'll continue to update this work and alerts will come in next version - but wanted to check initial reaction and value
* as usual, if you decide to use this in your chart analysis, it's necessary to combine with other momentum, trend, ...etc indicators and do not make trading decision only based on the signales from a single indicator