The translated HTML, with the t="..." attributes preserved, and standard decoding applied, is: If BOS and CHoCH are coded, the time of the arrow changes depending on when you decide "confirm."

I am lab.aiueo, creating MT4/MT5 indicators and selling them on GogoJungle.

SMC (Smart Money Concept) BOS and CHoCH both represent “having broken the immediate prior high/low.” If the breakout direction matches the previous flow, it is BOS; if opposite, CHoCH.

It’s easy to say by eye, “this is where the high broke.” However, when turning it into an indicator, you must decide when exactly to confirm both “high” and “broke.”

The way you decide changes the time at which the arrow appears.

Today, I will write how I decided with SMC-Radar and SMC-Signal and how that affects the screen’s appearance. I will not discuss trading decisions.

1Highs are not confirmed until five bars to the right align

In my indicator, highs (swing highs) are the bars that are higher than five bars on each side. The lows are the same. The five bars can be changed with the setting SwingLength.

The issue is the five bars on the right. Whether a bar is a high cannot be known until the five bars after that bar are confirmed.

Therefore, the high mark appears five bars after, attached to the bar five bars earlier.

• For a 15-minute chart, 75 minutes later
• For a 1-hour chart, 5 hours later
• For a 4-hour chart, 20 hours later

Once a mark is placed, it does not move later. So it is not a “redraw.” But to the viewer, it may look as if a mark that didn’t exist just appeared five bars earlier.

2Whether it broke is decided by the close

The conditions I used to judge a breakout of the high are twofold.

• Break out by close, not by wick
• Close above the high plus 0.1x ATR (Average True Range)

A bar that only briefly broke by wick is not considered a breakout. It is judged after the bar closes and confirms. Therefore, breakout arrows attach to the bar that confirmed the breakout.

The 0.1x buffer prevents a bar that merely touched the high exactly at close from being considered a breakout. It can be changed in setting BreakoutBuffer_ATR.

3Highs are not broken before confirmation

Here I noticed something while building it.

A high is confirmed when the right five bars are all lower than it. This implies that among the five right bars, there is no bar that closes above the high.

In other words,before confirmation, a high cannot be broken by design.

The trouble is that the eye’s high and the indicator’s high can differ.

For example, suppose there is a high bar, followed by three lower bars to its right. The fourth bar to the right breaks above that high and closes. To the eye, it’s a breakout of the high.

But from the indicator’s view, this bar will be five bars to the right of the high and there are higher bars to its right. So it isn’t a high in the indicator’s sense. No arrow appears because nothing happened on the indicator.

What the indicator watches is the high that has already been confirmed previously and has not yet been broken. BOS or CHoCH will not appear until that high is broken.

4Changing the number of bars shifts the arrow timing

If you reduce the counts on the left and right (SwingLength), high highs confirm sooner. Since many subtle highs become part of breakouts, arrows appear earlier and more frequently.

If you increase, high confirmation is slower, leaving only larger highs. Arrows appear later and fewer in number.

There is no right answer. Smaller settings react to finer movements; larger settings capture only major trends. Even on the same chart, changing the counts alters which bars show arrows.

5Confirmation delay in profit-targeting lines

In SMC-Signal, this “delay in confirmation” introduces a lag in one instance.

SMC-Signal, when drawing arrows, uses nearby highs/lows to derive three take-profit targets. In earlier versions, a high/low that had not yet confirmed at the moment of drawing the arrow might later be used as a take-profit reference.

In my environment, after reinstalling the indicator, the second take-profit price changed from 1.21165 to 1.21028.

The high that had not yet confirmed at the moment of drawing the arrow was confirmed after reinstalling, and ended up being used in calculations.

The fix was to use only the highs/lows that had already confirmed at the moment of drawing the arrow. Specifically, from the arrow’s bar, we use only highs/lows that are at least five bars to the left and right.

6Why I ordered only on the “previous bar” when making an EA

I once built an EA that used SMC-Signal’s judgments as-is for testing. I set one rule for orders.

There are two reasons.

• Indicators redraw past arrows when placed on the chart, which would cause the EA to place orders corresponding to those past arrows immediately upon entry if this were not restricted.
• Indicators recalculate past data with every new bar. Sometimes an arrow appears on an older bar later. If you order based on that arrow, you enter at the current price rather than the price at which the arrow appeared.

You can measure whether an arrow appeared on an older bar using the method described in a previous article. In the pre-fix version, 36–42% of arrows that appeared mid-way were on bars at least 8 bars earlier. In the current version, that is 0 bars.

Summary of screen drift

• High/low marks: appear on the bar five bars after the five-bar window is complete
• Breakout arrows: appear on the bar that confirmed the breakout
• Eye-measured highs and indicator highs can differ: highs not meeting the five-bar left-right condition are not highs for the indicator
• Take-profit targets: depend on highs/lows that were confirmed at the arrow moment

What the creator decides

• Highs/lows are confirmed by the counts on both sides. Do not use them until confirmed
• Breakouts are determined by close plus ATR addition. Wicks are not used for determination
• When recalculating past arrows, use only those confirmed at their bar’s moment
• If used in EA, place orders using only the arrow on the currently confirmed bar

SMC-Radar and SMC-Signal

SMC-Radar is an indicator that automatically draws BOS, CHoCH, OB, FVG, etc. on the chart. SMC-Signal turns that into a signature tool that outputs arrows on confirmed bars by scoring five grounds. Highs/lows and breakouts are both initialized with the method described in this article (five bars on both sides; close; 0.1x ATR).

Thank you for reading to the end.