Relative Measured Volatility (RMV)

RMV is a 0-100 oscillator that measures how loud today's bar is versus the strongest of the last few prior bars. Lower values mean compression; higher values mean expansion. The reading is purely about price tightness - it does not look at trend, momentum, or relative strength.

The gap it fills is narrow but real. Standard ATR or range readings tell you absolute volatility; they don't tell you whether today is compressed relative to its own recent character. Percentile-rank tightness oscillators answer that question, but they have a structural blind spot - a single quiet bar inside a wild stretch can read as "tight" purely because of where it lands in the distribution, not because the bar itself is genuinely small.

RMV addresses that by anchoring today's bar against the loudest of the last few prior bars, not the typical one. Today is compared to the strongest recent context - and crucially, today's own value is excluded from that baseline so an expansion bar can't dilute itself. The result is a reading that stays honest through both calm and volatile regimes.

Built for spotting tightness before breakouts - VCP being the canonical case, but it works on any setup where price compression is the precondition: cup-and-handle, flat bases, ascending triangles, post-IPO bases, anywhere the breakout is preceded by a quiet stretch.

Inspired by the broader concept of tightness oscillators; formula and methodology independently designed and validated against NSE data.

The 0-100 scale

• RMV ≤ 20 - very tight. Today's effective size is under 40% of the recent loudest bar.
• RMV ≈ 50 - neutral. Today is roughly equal to the recent loudest.
• RMV ≥ 75 - expanding. Today is materially larger than recent context.
• RMV = 100 - full expansion. Today is at least 2× the recent baseline; the formula caps at 100.

What to look at on the pane

Three layers carry information at once:

• The histogram shows the raw RMV value, drawn only when RMV is in the viable zone (≤ warm level). Above warm, the bar is hidden - that's deliberate; expansion regimes are not the indicator's domain.
• The smoothed line (5-bar SMA of RMV) tells you whether tightness is structural or noise. When the smoothed line stays below the tight level for several bars, you have real compression - not just one quiet bar inside a noisy stretch.
• The background colour and rank digit (➊➋➌➍) at the top of the pane encode the four-tier signal layer - see Signals below.

The live label on the right edge shows the current RMV value plus, when in the tight regime, how many consecutive bars the regime has lasted and the lowest reading during that streak.

The numerator - what counts as "today's size"

A naive choice would be today's full range (high − low). That works most of the time, but it misclassifies two specific bar shapes: bars that are small in absolute terms (a genuinely quiet day with a small range), and rejection bars (a long lower wick that closes near the top - bullish action that the day's range overstates). For both of those, the body is a more honest measure of how much the market actually moved.

So the numerator is selected by a three-rule ladder. Evaluated top-down. The first matching rule wins.

The denominator - and why "today excluded" matters

The baseline is the maximum of two prior-N-bar measurements: the average true range over the last N bars, and the largest single-bar high-minus-low over the last N bars. Both are computed with a one-bar offset - today's bar is not part of either calculation.

That offset is load-bearing. An earlier today-inclusive formulation produced a clear failure mode: a real expansion bar in the test data scored zero on RMV - flagged as "tightest in window" - because its own large range inflated the baseline it was being compared against. With today excluded, the expansion bar is anchored against pre-expansion context, and the reading lands where intuition says it should (around 60+).

Taking the max of ATR and the highest H − L (rather than just ATR) makes the baseline conservative on purpose. Today is compared to the loudest recent bar, not the average one, so the formula doesn't get fooled when the prior window mixes calm and noisy days.

Final scaling

The ratio is multiplied by 50 (so a ratio of 1.0 - today equals the recent loudest - maps to RMV = 50) and capped at 100 (a ratio of 2.0+ maps to a full-expansion reading without the value running away).

Core RMV engine

Thresholds & zones

A+ setup

Tightness recognition aids

Colours

The four-tier rank system

Every bar where RMV is in the viable zone (≤ warm level) gets one of four tier classifications, encoded as a background colour and a rank digit at the top of the pane. The tiers are mutually exclusive and prioritised top-down.

RMV > warm level produces no fill and no rank digit - the indicator deliberately stops talking once the regime becomes expansion.

The A+ trigger and its mode dropdown

A+ is built on two embedded scans - a Tightness scan and a Volume Dry-Up (VDU) scan - both implemented bar-by-bar inside the indicator. The mode dropdown controls how they combine:

• AND (both scans) - strictest. Both Tightness and VDU must pass on the same bar. Rare confluence; treat hits as serious.
• OR (either scan) - default. Either scan passes. Most lenient combination.
• Tightness only - only the Tightness scan must pass.
• VDU only - only the VDU scan must pass.

Regardless of mode, A+ also requires RMV ≤ tight level - the RMV-tightness gate is built into the trigger, not optional. Both scan formulas are scoped to the bar-level conditions only; universe filters (price, market cap, liquidity) belong in the screener layer, not the indicator, and have been intentionally omitted.

Alerts

Three alert conditions are exposed for use in TradingView's alert dialog:

• RMV - tight zone entry - fires on the bar RMV crosses down through the tight level. The "we just entered compression" signal.
• RMV - very tight - fires on the bar RMV crosses down through the very-tight level. Compression is now deep.
• RMV - A+ setup formed - fires on the bar A+ first prints (rising edge), per the chosen mode. Doesn't re-fire on subsequent A+ bars in the same streak.

The indicator exposes ten boolean conditions as 1/0 columns to TradingView's Pine Screener and Data Window. They don't add anything to the chart pane - they exist purely for screening across a watchlist or universe. In Pine Screener, filter on the column's value > 0 to find names matching the scan.

Daily timeframe, NSE liquid names. RMV does its best work on instruments where daily bars are statistically meaningful. Illiquid names produce noisy compression that doesn't tell you much; the indicator's value comes from clean baselines, and clean baselines need real participation.

RMV is deliberately scoped narrow - it is a setup detector, not a trigger. The indicator does not look at trend strength, relative leadership, or price-pane structure. Moving averages on price live on a separate price-pane indicator, kept in sync manually. Relative strength and momentum are a separate workflow entirely. RMV's only question is "is today compressed against recent context?" - everything else is read from other layers.

Read the four-tier signal layer first, then the smoothed line. Coral (➊) and yellow (➋) are the top tier - I treat them at roughly the same weight; confluence is rarer, but any A+ firing with RMV inside the tight gate is worth opening the price pane for. Mint (➌) is the next read down - deepest compression of the cycle, often leading a breakout by 1-3 bars. Grey (➍) is the slow-build state - the regime is right, nothing is firing, but the name is on the radar. The smoothed line is the structure check: when it stays below the tight level for several bars, compression is real, not a single quiet day inside a noisy stretch.

Entry decisions still happen on the price pane. RMV tells me a setup is forming or has formed; the actual buy stop, the volume confirmation, and the MA confluence are price-side reads. The pivot-line auto-draw was deliberately removed during development - judging the breakout level visually keeps the discretion in the right place.

Pine Screener for cross-sectional sweeps. The 1/0 columns plug directly into TradingView Pine Screener; filter on the column's value > 0 to find names matching the scan. The columns I use most often:

• Scan: Rank 1 (confluence) - for the rare confluence sweep across a watchlist.
• Scan: A+ setup - the broader "any A+ fired today" sweep, regardless of trough.
• Scan: Rank 3 (trough only) - to find names sitting at deepest compression right now.
• Scan: Smoothed bottom + breakout - to catch names where the smoothed RMV recently bottomed inside the tight zone and the current bar has crossed back above neutral - the moment compression releases.