Technical Indicators: The Complete Guide to 49 Common Indicators, Sorted by What They Measure
There are hundreds of technical indicators, and new ones keep appearing. But lay them all out and most of them are just different ways of answering the same few questions: Which way is it going? How strong is the move? How wild is the market? Is volume keeping up? Which price levels matter?
This is the overview page of MASQuant’s “Trading Academy · Technical Indicators” series. It sorts 49 common indicators into five categories, explains in one sentence what each one measures, and shows whether MT5 has it built in. Indicators with links have a full guide; the others will be added over time, roughly in order of how widely they are used.
The bottom line first
More indicators are not better. Indicators in the same category measure the same thing; stack as many as you like and you are just saying the same sentence in different words.
First decide which question you want to answer, then pick one from that category, and use a backtest to check whether it works on your instrument.
Ask what you want to know, then pick the indicator
Not sure where to start? First look at which question you want to answer:
| You want to know | Look at | Plain example | Learn first |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is it going up or down right now? | Trend | The price is above the 60-day line and the line is rising → leaning bullish lately | Moving average |
| Has this move up (or down) gone too far? | Momentum / oscillators | RSI hits 70 → recent buying strength is very strong; in a range this is often the end of a swing, but in a trend it can stay high for a long time | RSI |
| How far away should my stop loss be? | Volatility | ATR is 1.5 → each candle normally moves about 1.5; put your stop closer than that and normal noise will easily take you out | ATR |
| Is there volume behind this move? | Volume | The price makes a new high and OBV makes a new high too → price and volume agree; remember that on CFDs this is tick volume | OBV |
| Which price levels do many traders watch? | Price structure | Between the high and low of a rally, draw the 38.2%, 50% and 61.8% retracement levels | Fibonacci retracement |
How to combine them: a complete example
The principle is to combine across categories, one from each is enough. RSI, KD and Williams %R all measure “how much it has risen lately”; watch all three together and they will mostly light up at the same time. That is the same thing said three times, with no new information.
A better combination lets each indicator answer a different question. For example, a long rule could be built like this:
- Direction (trend): only consider going long when the price is above the 60-day line.
- Timing (oscillator): enter when RSI drops below 30 and then climbs back above 30; within a rising market, wait for a pullback.
- Stop loss (volatility): place the stop 2 × ATR below the entry price, so normal wobbles don’t take you out.
Each of the three indicators handles one job, with no overlap. Also remember the market each category fears most: trend indicators get whipsawed in ranges, oscillators get stuck in trends. They are two sides of the same thing, and each guide walks you through it step by step on real market data.
What the MT5 column in the tables means: Built-in means it is directly in MT5’s indicator list; Example means it is one of the example indicators that come with MT5 (the Examples or Free Indicators folder); Install means you need to install a custom indicator. MT5 may differ slightly between versions and brokers, so go by your own platform.
1. Trend: which way is it going?
Trend indicators show the direction, and how clear that direction is. What they share is that they lag: they only confirm after the price has already moved a while, and in a market with no direction they get whipsawed again and again.
Example: closes of 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, then a sudden jump to 20, then back to 15 and 14. Yet the 5-bar moving average keeps rising, from 12 to 14, 14.8 and 15.2. The price has already turned, but the average is still going up. That is “lag”.
| Indicator | What it measures | MT5 |
|---|---|---|
| Simple moving average (SMA) | The average of the last N closes, used to see direction; always slower than the price. | Built-in |
| Exponential moving average (EMA) | A moving average that gives more weight to recent prices; turns faster, and is more easily pulled around by volatility. | Built-in |
| Weighted moving average (WMA) | A moving average whose weights decrease linearly from the latest bar backwards; lags less than the SMA. | Built-in |
| Hull moving average (HMA) | Combines several weighted averages to reduce lag; turns very fast, and easily overshoots. | Install |
| DEMA / TEMA | Moving averages that use multiple EMAs to cancel out lag; react faster than the EMA. | Built-in |
| Adaptive averages AMA / FrAMA / VIDYA | Moving averages that adjust their speed automatically to the market’s volatility or efficiency. | Built-in |
| MACD | The difference between two EMAs (12 and 26), plus a 9-period average of that difference, used to see changes in momentum. | Built-in |
| ADX / DMI | ADX measures how strong a trend is, regardless of direction; +DI and −DI show the direction. | Built-in |
| Parabolic SAR | Trailing stop dots that tighten in the direction of the trend and flip sides when touched. | Built-in |
| Supertrend | A trailing stop line kept at an ATR distance from the price; flips less often and exits later. | Install |
| Ichimoku Cloud | Several lines and a cloud made from midpoints of highs and lows over different periods, showing the centre of the range and the direction. | Built-in |
| Aroon | How many bars have passed since the latest high and low, to judge whether a trend is still fresh. | Install |
| Alligator | Three smoothed moving averages shifted forward, showing whether a trend is unfolding. | Built-in |
2. Momentum / oscillators: has it gone too far?
Oscillators show the strength of recent gains and losses, or the price’s relative position within its recent range. What they share is that they work well in ranges and get stuck in trends: in a strong market they can stay “overbought” for a long time.
Example: over the last 14 bars the high is 110 and the low 100, and today closes at 108, so Williams %R is −20, meaning “closed 20% below the top of the range”. In a rally the price closes near the top every day, so these indicators sit in the overbought zone every day. That is strength, not necessarily a turn.
| Indicator | What it measures | MT5 |
|---|---|---|
| RSI | How much of the recent price movement was upward, from 0 to 100. | Built-in |
| KD (stochastic oscillator) | Where the close sits within its recent high–low range, then smoothed. | Built-in |
| Stochastic RSI | Where the RSI sits within its own recent high–low range; far more sensitive than the RSI. | Install |
| Williams %R | Where the close sits within its recent high–low range, unsmoothed; the fastest and the noisiest. | Built-in |
| CCI | How far the price is from its average, as a multiple of normal deviation; has no upper or lower limit. | Built-in |
| ROC (rate of change) | By what percentage the current price has risen or fallen compared with N bars ago. | Example |
| Momentum | The ratio of the current price to the price N bars ago. | Built-in |
| TRIX | The rate of change after triple EMA smoothing; filters out small moves before looking at momentum. | Built-in |
| Awesome Oscillator | The difference between the 5-period and 34-period averages of the median price. | Built-in |
| Ultimate Oscillator | Combines buying-pressure ratios over three periods to reduce the noise of any single period. | Example |
| DeMarker | Compares whether the latest high and low are higher or lower than the previous bar’s. | Built-in |
| RVI (Relative Vigor Index) | The strength of the close relative to the open, divided by the bar’s high–low range, then smoothed. | Built-in |
| Bulls / Bears Power | How far the high and the low are from an EMA. | Built-in |
3. Volatility: how wild is the market?
Volatility indicators don’t tell you direction; they only tell you how much the price has been moving lately. Where they are most useful is in deciding how far away to put your stop loss and how big a position to take, and in spotting when a quiet market turns wild.
Example: with a midline of 100 and an ATR of 1.5, the Keltner Channel runs from 97 to 103. When the market is very quiet, the Bollinger Bands shrink inside it, which is often called a “squeeze”. Volatility indicators only say “how wild”, not which way.
| Indicator | What it measures | MT5 |
|---|---|---|
| ATR | The average true range of each candle, often used to set stop-loss distance. | Built-in |
| Bollinger Bands | A moving average plus and minus standard deviations; narrows when quiet, widens when wild. | Built-in |
| Keltner Channel | An EMA plus and minus a multiple of ATR; its width changes more steadily than Bollinger’s, and seen together with Bollinger it shows the “squeeze”. | Install |
| Donchian Channel | A channel drawn from the highest high and lowest low of the last N bars; often used for breakouts. | Example |
| Standard deviation (StdDev) | How spread out recent closes are; also the source of the Bollinger Bands’ width. | Built-in |
| Envelopes | A channel drawn a fixed percentage above and below a moving average. | Built-in |
| Bollinger Bandwidth and %B | How wide the Bollinger Bands are, and where the price sits within them. | Install |
| Chaikin Volatility | How quickly the gap between the high and the low is changing. | Example |
4. Volume: is volume keeping up?
Volume indicators look at volume and price together. On CFDs, be especially careful: CFDs on MT5 mostly only have tick volume, meaning how many times the quote changed, not how many lots actually traded. On CFDs, these indicators can at most be used as a guide to how active the market is.
Example: the price barely moves, from 100.0 to 100.1, yet just because one candle with a volume of 2,000 happened to close 0.1 higher, OBV rises by 2,000. Volume indicators are easily dominated by one or two volume spikes, so the direction matters more than the number.
| Indicator | What it measures | MT5 |
|---|---|---|
| OBV (on-balance volume) | Adds the bar’s volume when the close rises and subtracts it when it falls, accumulating into one line. | Built-in |
| VWAP | The volume-weighted average price accumulated from the start of the session, restarting each session. | Install |
| CVD (cumulative volume delta) | Aggressive buying volume minus aggressive selling volume, accumulated over time; needs trade-by-trade direction data. | Install |
| Accumulation/Distribution (A/D) | Allocates volume according to where the close sits within the bar’s high–low range, then keeps adding it up. | Built-in |
| Money Flow Index (MFI) | An RSI with volume added, from 0 to 100. | Built-in |
| Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) | Over a period, the total volume allocated by close position, divided by total volume. | Install |
| Force Index | The price change multiplied by volume. | Built-in |
| Chaikin Oscillator | The difference between two EMAs of the Accumulation/Distribution line. | Built-in |
| Volume Profile | How much volume has accumulated at each price level. | Install |
| Price Volume Trend (PVT) | Accumulates volume in proportion to each bar’s percentage change. | Example |
5. Price structure: which price levels matter?
This category is not really indicators; it is more like drawing and marking tools for finding the levels traders often watch and the main highs and lows. Their levels are calculated, not orders someone has actually placed there.
Example: for a move from 100 up to 120, the 38.2% retracement level is 120 − 20 × 0.382 ≈ 112.4, and 50% is 110. It just works out the ratios; whether the price will stop there is another matter.
| Indicator | What it measures | MT5 |
|---|---|---|
| Pivot Points | Uses the previous period’s high, low and close to work out reference levels for this period. | Example |
| Fibonacci retracement | Draws levels at ratios such as 23.6%, 38.2%, 50% and 61.8% between a rise and a fall. | Built-in (drawing tool) |
| ZigZag | Filters out moves smaller than a set size and only connects the main highs and lows. | Example |
| Fractals | Marks a high with two lower bars on each side, or a low with two higher bars on each side. | Built-in |
| Heikin Ashi | Candles redrawn using averages, making trends look more continuous. | Example |
FAQ
How many technical indicators are there?
There are hundreds of common ones, but by what they measure they fall roughly into five categories: trend, momentum / oscillators, volatility, volume and price structure. Indicators in the same category answer the same question.
Which technical indicator is the most accurate?
No indicator is accurate on every instrument in every market. Trend indicators get whipsawed in ranges, and oscillators get stuck in trends. Which one works on your instrument has to be verified with a backtest, not by listening to someone tell you which is most accurate.
Which ones should beginners learn first?
Learn one from each category first: the moving average for trend, RSI for momentum, ATR for volatility. Once you understand these three, most other indicators are variations on the same idea: the EMA is a moving average with different weights, Williams %R and KD are different ways of calculating “where it closed within the range”, and Keltner and Bollinger are channels that measure width in different ways.
Can technical indicators be used together?
Yes, but it is best to combine across categories, for example a moving average for direction, RSI for timing and ATR for the stop loss. Stack indicators from the same category and they mostly just light up together without adding new information.
What if MT5 doesn’t have an indicator built in?
You can install a custom indicator, or watch it on other charting software. Custom indicators written by different people may use different calculations and default settings, so before using one, check that its values match the source you are following.
Conclusion
Indicators are tools, not answers. The same RSI is accurate in a range and gets stuck in a trend; the same moving average runs smoothly in a trend and gets whipsawed in a range. How useful they are depends on your instrument, your timeframe and your rules.
So the real question is not “which indicator is best” but: does the rule built from the indicators you chose hold up on your instrument? One table cannot answer that. Backtest it with our AI Strategy Assistant and you will know.
Write your rule as one sentence, for example “enter when the price is above the 50-day line and RSI climbs back after dropping below 30, with the stop at 2 × ATR”, give it to MASQuant’s AI Strategy Assistant, and press go to start the backtest. The backtest environment includes real market frictions such as spreads, slippage, changes in market liquidity and execution delays (see the AI Strategy Assistant guide for how to use it). A backtest tells you “how this rule performed in past market conditions”, not a guarantee about the future.
An idea only becomes a strategy once it’s been tested.
Risk disclosure: CFDs are high-risk financial products and can lead to rapid loss of capital. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All strategies and backtests are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Please read our Risk Disclosure carefully before trading.
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