Professional Zones - Institutional Demand and Supply Imbalances
Intro to Supply and Demand Zone Technical Analysis
Supply and demand is an increasingly common strategy among day and swing traders in equity, forex, and the futures markets. The goal of analyzing supply and demand zones is to pre-determine where price action may pivot before that pivot happens, thus giving us an edge over the market. There are many unique charting/trading strategies that fit under the supply and demand umbrella, however we are going to focus primarily on Institutional Zones of Demand and Supply Imbalances, as this is what our TradingView indicator actively displays.
What are Institutional Zones of Demand and Supply Imbalances?
First, let’s break down the phrase above. The first word is ‘institutional’, which is a key aspect in our trading. As a retail trader, you must understand that retail traders (individual traders like you and I) have very little control and very little effect on price action in the major markets. The price action that we see everyday is caused by large institutions and hedge funds buying and selling equities in massive quantities.
This chart displays the price action for ES, which is the S&P500 E-mini futures .
At the time this guide was created, that chart for ES displays the low of this year (2022). You can see major highs and major lows, as well as steep drops and momentous runs.
Price action like this appears random to the naked eye, however it is all controlled by major institutions. These institutions place large buy and sell orders for markets such as the S&P 500 Index which causes these moves.
Our Institutional Demand and Supply Analysis attempts to discover the price zones where institutions have placed their buy/sell orders. Their buy orders create “demand zones”. And their sell orders create “supply zones”. Knowing where these zones exist allows us to anticipate price trend reversals so we can profitably participate in them alongside the major institutions when these key moves take place.
We are looking for areas in the chart where institutions have created major imbalances (more buy orders than sell orders or vice versa) which creates demand and supply zones that impact price action and trend reversals in predictable ways.
What Causes These Supply and Demand Zones?
Understanding that institutions control the price of the markets is crucial for understanding how these zones of supply and demand imbalances are formed, and it can be derived from historical price action.
There are two types of price action, balanced and imbalanced. Balanced price action is flat, consolidatory price action where the overall direction is sideways. Imbalanced price action is an exaggerated move in price either up or down. Now here is the key: institutional supply and demand imbalances are formed when price action goes from balanced to imbalanced. Below is an example of balanced price action .
There are clearly areas of institutional buy and sell orders that are causing price action to oscillate between the areas of demand and supply. The longer price action consolidates and moves sideways, the larger the volume profile will be in this range. In other words, more institutional orders will build up as price remains relatively the same for a longer period of time.
Here is how a demand zone is formed :
Due to bullish CPI news, price action went from balanced to imbalanced by exploding to the upside. This bullish price action filled all of the sell orders and broke past the previous area of supply. Because price moved up so fast, the buy orders did not get a chance to fill, essentially leaving an area with a high concentration of buy orders remaining. Hence, a new demand zone is formed which is shown here .
Our state-of-the-art indicator automatically scans for these historical shifts in price action (balanced to imbalanced) via our supply and demand zone detection formula, and displays them on your chart instantly. Remember the first image sent of blank price action? Here it is below:
The image below shows the exact same chart of ES, however, our advanced Professional Zones - Institutional Demand and Supply Imbalances indicator has been applied to the chart.
Just like that, price action has been transformed from unexplainable chaos to an orderly sequence of demand bounces and supply rejections.
Yes, all of these zones may be charted manually if one were to acquire the knowledge required to chart them by hand, and spend numerous hours going back in time to find all these zones. Additionally, these charts would then have to be constantly monitored and updated, which would require hours of work each day. This powerful indicator automates all of that work to give you more precious time to analyze and trade these zone-driven pivots in the markets.
How To Measure the Strength of Supply and Demand Zones?
The longer the consolidation takes place, the larger the demand/ supply zone will be. This strength is measured by the time frame of the origin of the zone.
Each zone may be formed on a different time frame, the biggest being the 1 Month time frame, and the smallest being the 30 Minute. Each supply and demand zone is automatically labeled based on the time frame from which the zone originated.
The weakest zones are derived from the 30 minute time frame. This means the zone only took two 30 minute candles to form, which is not a lot of time for institutions to place large orders. This means that the bounces and rejections off of these zones will usually be smaller, and usually won’t last more than a few days.
Larger zones such as 1 Day, 1 Week, and 1 Month often cause large swings in the market lasting weeks, months and even years. So pay attention not just to where the demand and supply zones currently appear, but also to the strength of that zone. You can see below that the demand zone that the market bottomed in and reversed out of in 2022 was in fact, a very strong weekly zone.
What is the Significance of Supply and Demand Zone Breaks?
These zones are order-based. This means that a supply zone level doesn’t turn into demand when price action breaks above it, and demand doesn’t turn into supply when price action breaks below it. It is unlike standard trend-based support and resistance levels. If price action breaks below demand by even $0. 01 , all of the buy orders have been filled and the demand must be deleted from the chart (and vice versa for a supply zone ).
While it is possible to play these zone breaks as continuation plays off of current momentous price action, it is unpredictable how far price will go up or down after breaking supply or demand during that leg.
However, in my years of supply and demand experience, I have noticed that if demand breaks, the market will eventually come down to the next viable demand zone . This is because without a pivot caused by an institutional-created demand or supply imbalance, there is often not enough participation to cause a sustainable trend reversal for a long period of time. Below is an example of this:
Above is the 4 Hour chart of TSLA bouncing up off of a demand zone . We call this a bounce in “no man's land”, as there is no major demand bounce to support this reversal to the upside. So in theory, price action should return lower to the next major historical zone of demand before it has a chance of pulling off a solid reversal. Here is what happened:
As you can see above, TSLA did indeed end up heading back down into the next major demand zone before getting a sustainable reversal to the upside. So you may play these supply and demand zone breaks as continuation trades, either long or short, with a price target at the next major zone. Just make sure to use proper risk management and position sizing, as timing the trigger of a price target can be difficult.
How Might I Place a Trade Using the Indicator?
Now that the basics of institutional supply and demand zones have been discussed, there will come a time that this strategy must be actively applied to personal trading with a goal of becoming profitable. Here is a step-by-step process to place a trade using supply and demand paired with an example of a day trade from the 1 minute time frame.
Step 1: Find a highly institutionally traded stock that is currently in supply or demand as shown by our indicator. For example, AAPL:
Step 2: Look for an above-average (exaggerated) volume spike. Because we are in one of the green zones at the bottom of the chart, we know that we are in demand where large institutional buy orders reside. We need to wait for some of these orders to actually fill before we take our trade. This is known as volume confirmation. The color of the volume usually does not matter in this situation.
Step 3: Now that we have a volume spike which is confirmation of large orders being filled, we need more confirmation that the institutional orders are not only a buy, but large enough to actually reverse the current trend.
This is ultimately a judgment call. A few green candles may be good enough to dictate a reversal, or a trend break. It comes down to personal preference and how aggressive you would like to be. Keep in mind, the longer you wait, the more confirmation your trade has, but also, the longer you wait, the greater the risk of missing the new trend. In this example, we will use a trend line to confirm our trend reversal.
Step 4: Enter the trade. Now that you have proper demand confirmation, you may place your trade. Be sure to determine your stop loss, price target, position size, and all other risk management factors along the way.
In this example, AAPL ran all the way up to supply before rejecting; making for a perfect demand to supply call trade. Also, more short trade entries could have been taken based off of the multiple supply rejections AAPL had.
The Bottom Line
There are many ways one may go about trading the stock market. However in my years of trading and teaching, there has never been a strategy that has not only changed my career, but improved the trading careers of my students, more dramatically than Institutional Zones of Demand and Supply Imbalances.
Though charting new zones and deleting broken ones everyday was time consuming and repetitive, the results of trading these zones made it well-worth the hours of charting. However, after months of development and fine-tuning, the painful charting process has been automated by this powerful indicator, completely replacing the tedious charting work for myself and my students.
While numerous other indicators include the name “Supply and Demand Zones”, we believe that no supply and demand indicator remotely this advanced and accurate available on TradingView. I am very blessed to finally bring this revolutionary tool to the market.
Introduction to the Aurora Demand and Supply Indicator for TradingView and its Functionality
This page is dedicated to providing a thorough walk-through of our Professional Zones - Institutional Demand and Supply Imbalances indicator. The settings functionality, customizability, and purpose will be discussed to give you an in-depth understanding of the indicator. Understanding the purpose of the different functions and settings is crucial to utilizing this powerful tool at its full potential.
First Look Upon Indicator Addition
After purchasing the indicator, your chart may initially appear cluttered, zoomed out, and hard to read. But do not worry, it just means the indicator settings must be fine-tuned to optimize your experience. Tt may appear overwhelming. However this page will discuss each major customizable setting and the functionality behind it to streamline your TradingView set up.
Filter Options Settings Category
This is the first customizable feature that appears when accessing the settings of the indicator. What Filter Zone Ranges does is allow you to filter the range at which zones appear both above and below the current asset price. With this setting unchecked, every single demand and supply zone within the 5k candle limit (or 20k limit if you have a premium TradingView account) will appear on your chart. This causes chart clutter which limits the visibility of price action.
If you have this setting activated, you can choose exactly the range of zones visible to you. This range is percent based and is measured both above and below the current market price. For example, if you activate Filter Zone Ranges and set the Filter Percentage at 7%, only zones within the range of 7% above, and 7% below the current asset price will be shown.
Demand/ Supply Zone Options Settings Category
The next two categories contain the majority of the customizability for supply and demand zones. The first option in both the Demand/ Supply Zone Options is Create Demand/Supply Zones. This toggle is very straight forward, you may choose whether or not to display all demand zones, or all supply zones.
The next two options are Demand/ Supply Zone Border and Demand/ Supply Zone Fill. Again, these are straight forward. The border setting allows you to edit both the color and opacity of the zones’ border lines. The fill setting allows you to edit the color and opacity of the interior of the supply/demand boxes.
Following the first pair of visual settings, you will see Demand/ Supply Zone Box Offset. This allows you to toggle how much the indicator offsets each zone from its origin point. In other words, move it to the left or right from the point in time at which the zone was created. The 0 offset is the base setting which is actually a slight offset to the right of the origin point to ensure that the candlesticks remain unobstructed visually.
After the offset options, you will find Demand/ Supply Zone ERC Multiple. This is a key setting which inputs the value our formula utilizes to scan the areas of institutional supply and demand imbalances. Unless you are extremely experienced with supply and demand analysis or you are running backtesting, it is highly recommended this value is left at ‘2’ for both the demand and supply options.
The next two options you will see in your indicator settings are Extend Demand/ Supply Zone and Demand/ Supply Zone Size. This feature allows you to customize exactly how far your zones will extend from the point of origin into the future.
The three options on the drop down menu are Extend, Fixed, and Dynamic. Each of these options extend your zones in a different fashion. It is important to note that the value inputted in the size option is the amount of units the zones will extend to the right for both Fixed and Dynamic options. The larger this input is, the further out the zones will extend into the future, and vice versa.
The final setting in the Demand/ Supply Zone Options category is Broken Zones to Keep and Broken Demand/ Supply Zone Fill. The Broken Zones to Keep input allows you to see recent supply or demand zones that have been broken and deleted from your chart. This may be useful for a trader in a few different ways. The Broken Demand/ Supply Zone Fill setting allows you to customize the number of broken zones displayed as well as their color and opacity. The most prominent example of this option’s utility is for traders that do not observe price action during the entirety of the market open.
If an individual left their charts for a few hours and missed a demand break, it may give the illusion that there was never a demand there and price action has been in “no-man's land” all day. However if that individual inputted ‘1’ in the Broken Zones to Keep setting, they would be able to see that a demand has broken. This may be useful as the trader may have an altered sentiment after knowing that a zone did in fact break.
Note: the value inputted is the amount of previously broken zones that will appear on your chart. For example, if the value ‘3’ is inputted, the three most recently broken zones will appear on your chart.
Time Frame Options Settings Category
Time Frame Options Settings allows you to toggle which supply and demand zones appear on your chart by time frame. For example, if you are analyzing a chart on a larger time frame such as the daily or weekly, the small 30 minute and 45 minute zones will often clutter your chart. By deselecting the weaker and smaller time frame zones, it will clean your chart up, allowing you to only see the zones that assist your analysis.
However the first two options in the category are unique.The first is Show Forming Zones. This option is extremely useful if you are watching price action play out live, when seeing the possibility of a supply or demand zone forming may be of benefit during your day trading. By toggling this setting ON, you will see all possible supply and demand zones forming in real time. However, this could cause clutter if multiple zones are forming at once in which case, toggling it off may be more beneficial.
The second option in the Timeframe Options category is the Show Zones Inside toggle, which controls the table at the top right of your screen (you may get rid of this table by deselecting tables in display settings).
This setting simply is a “yes” or “no” as to whether or not the table located at the top right of your screen will display the number of zones price action is currently sitting in. This setting is useful as zones may sometimes pile up on top of one another, making it hard to know exactly how many zones price action is currently sitting in.
Gap Options Settings Category
Just below the Timeframe Options category, is the Gap Options category. Gaps appear when two daily candles highs and lows do not overlap. These are often created when a catalyst is released into the market overnight causing a large move, resulting in a “gap” up or down the next morning.
A Gap often forms due to a strong move to the upside, and the indicator highlights this gap with a gray box. Gaps are important to many traders as there is often a large lack of liquidity inside the gap area, which often acts as a magnet that attracts future price action to fill it. If toggled on, the indicator displays the gap among the supply and demand zones seamlessly. The rest of the settings for this category are options to customize the color, opacity, size, and offset. These have the same effect as the options in the Demand/ Supply Zone Options category.
Text Options Settings Category
The final category in the indicator input settings is Text Options. This category allows you to toggle zone labeling on or off, and to specify how you would like the zone labels to appear. It’s strongly recommended that zone labeling is left ON because knowing the time frame a supply or demand zone originated from is a massive indicator of its strength. Top right alignment causes labeling such as “3H” to appear at the top right of each zone.
Indicator Data Limitations
There are a few limitations of TradingView which impact the Professional Zones - Institutional Supply and Demand Imbalances indicator. The first is the data TradingView provides to its users. With a basic TradingView account, a user only has access to 5,000 candles of data. So if a user is on the 1 minute time frame, that user can only see 5,000 candles before that current point. This is important because our advanced indicator scans historical price action that has formed supply and demand zones and displays it on your chart. This means that if a user is on a 1 minute time frame chart, they will only be able to see zones formed within the last 5,000 candles. Older supply and demand zones can not be displayed. However if a user has the Premium TradingView subscription, they can access up to 20,000 candles, which greatly increases the potential zones the user may see on the smaller time frames.
To counter this, we strongly recommend checking the larger time frames before starting your trading day, as there could be an old zone lurking behind the scenes. Once you spot it on the 30 minute time frame, for example, you may easily take note of the demand zone and its location.
The Bottom Line
This indicator has been intricately and powerfully designed to not only display institutional supply and demand imbalances more accurately and efficiently than any other TradingView indicator, but it has also been designed to give the user full control. Full control means the user has the ability to customize the appearance and inputs, as well as toggle specific objects visible to the trader.
We have meticulously designed the Professional Zones - Institutional Supply and Demand Imbalances indicator to be extremely valuable as a stand-alone strategy, as well as versatile enough to incorporate multiple other trading strategies on top of supply and demand .
However, in order for this indicator to be utilized by you at its full potential, it is important that you understand all of its features, capabilities and configuration options before you dive into trading.
Supplydemandimbalance
Supply and Demand Zone IndicatorOVERVIEW
The supply and demand zone indicator shows real-time supply and demand zones on the chart. It also plots a table including the high and low values of the zones. The last row of the table also shows the daily trend in the market.
CONCEPTS
What is Supply & Demand?
Supply and Demand represent the two most powerful forces of the forex market. Demand means the number of buyers buying a security in the market. Supply means the number of sellers selling a security in the market.
How to identify supply and demand zones?
Supply and Demand zones are formed on the base region of price on the chart. There are two types of movement of price in technical analysis.
Impulsive wave
Retracement wave
The impulsive wave represents the price movement of market makers. The Retracement wave indicates base regions where market makers decide their next direction to go up or down.
There are four fundamental concepts of Demand and supply in forex.
Rally Base Rally (RBR)
Rally Base Drop (RBD)
Drop Base Rally (DBR)
Drop Base Drop (DBD)
How does supply & demand indicator work?
Our supply & demand indicator will use a simple formula based on price action to plot the zones. It will plot the zone on the base candles using the high and low of the base zone.
Base candle = a candlestick that has a small body and big shadows like a Doji candlestick.
Big candle = a candlestick with a large body and small shadows.
The zone will be drawn on the high and low of the base candlestick. There can be more than one base candlesticks in the base zone, but our indicator will identify the maximum of 4 base candlesticks.
FEATURES
Specify desired Big Body Candle Size Percentage
Specify desired Small Body Candle Size Percentage
Change the Colors of Zones at your own will
The Indicator Draws the latest zones and puts a label on historical Zones
The Indicator Draws real-time Zones under specified conditions of candle body sizes. The Zone will stop once the candlestick closes above the supply zone or below demand zones.
Recommended Timeframe
Above 30 Minutes
