Bull Bear Power Indicator Formula, and Its Missing Scale

Two lines: Bulls Power = High - EMA(13) and Bears Power = Low - EMA(13). Every source that prints a formula prints those. The reading is a price distance measured in the instrument's own units, so there is no fixed scale and no overbought level.

What is the Bull Bear Power formula?

Two lines. LiteFinance and TrendSpider both print them, and Admiral Markets prints the same pair in its FAQ:

Bulls Power = High - EMA(13)
Bears Power = Low  - EMA(13)

A worked example, with round numbers invented rather than read off a chart. Say a bar on a currency pair has a high of 1.1050 and a low of 1.0990, and the 13-period EMA sits at 1.1000. Bulls Power is +0.0050 and Bears Power is -0.0010. Now say a share has a high of 101.00 and a low of 99.00 with its EMA at 99.50. Bull Power is +1.50 and Bear Power is -0.50.

Those two sets of numbers cannot be compared. 0.0050 and 1.50 both mean "the high cleared the average", measured in different units on instruments with different prices. The same goes across time on one instrument: when its volatility changes, the typical size of the reading changes with it. The indicator tells you about this bar relative to this average.

Is there an overbought level?

No. The formula makes one impossible, because a reading in price units has no ceiling to be overbought against.

Two sources promise something the arithmetic cannot deliver. Admiral Markets writes that traders can use the indicator to identify "whether bulls or bears are in control of the market, overbought and oversold conditions, as well as divergences". TrendSpider lists among its advantages that "It provides traders with straightforward entry and exit signals based on divergences, overbought, and oversold conditions." Neither prints a number for either condition.

What you can do instead is measure. Compare a reading with that instrument's own recent readings on the same timeframe: note the largest Bulls Power values of the last few months and you have a reference for what a big one looks like on that symbol, in that period. It will not transfer to another symbol, and it will drift as volatility changes, which is why no page prints a figure for it.

What is the Bull Bear Power indicator?

Two readings that measure how far a bar's high and its low sit from a 13-period exponential moving average, which is to say how far buyers and sellers pushed price away from its recent average. The pair makes up the system Dr Alexander Elder called the Elder Ray, and TrendSpider dates it to 1989.

LiteFinance explains why the formula uses the high and the low rather than the close: "A moving average reflects the average consensus of value between buyers and sellers, representing a market equilibrium", and then, "The high price represents the maximum bullish strength... The low price level indicates the maximum bearish strength."

So the average is treated as the fair price the two sides agreed on, and the two readings measure how far each side managed to drag price away from it during the bar.

Is it one indicator or two?

Both, depending on the platform you open, which is why searching for it turns up two different vocabularies.

Source	How it treats the pair
admiralmarkets.com	"Bull and Bear Power indicators are separate indicators in MetaTrader 4. You will find them both contained within the 'Oscillators' folder in the 'Navigator' directory", and to use the system "you would need to add both of them, along with a 13-period EMA"
litefinance.org	"On the trading platform, Index Bull Bull Bear Power are two different indicators" (the garbled phrase is the page's). Two histograms below the chart, labelled BU for Bulls Power and BE for Bears Power
help.tc2000.com	"This indicator consists of two separate indicators known as "bull power" and "bear power"", written by hand as two formulas
trendspider.com	One indicator, the Elder Ray Index, with two calculations inside it
pineify.app	One indicator called Bull Bear Power, the usual TradingView name

In MetaTrader, look for two entries, Bulls Power and Bears Power, in the Oscillators folder. On TradingView and on charting platforms generally, look for one entry named Bull Bear Power. The arithmetic underneath is the same either way.

How do you read it?

Positive Bulls Power means the bar's high cleared the moving average. Negative Bears Power means its low sat below it. In normal conditions that is what you see. TC2000's help page describes the two readings that break the pattern.

On Bull Power going the wrong way: "The higher the value of Bull Power, the stronger the bulls are. Falling Bull Power shows the bulls getting weaker and it can even go negative when the bulls are very weak." A negative Bull Power means the whole bar, high included, traded under the average.

On Bear Power doing the same: "Bear Power values are typically negative and the lower the value the stronger the bears are. If the Bear Power goes positive, that indicates that the bears are completely in control." That reverses the convention you just learned. A positive Bear Power means the bar's low stayed above the average, which most readers would call bullish; TC2000 reads it as a sign the market has moved to one extreme. Either way it is the rare case, worth marking on your chart.

How do you use Bulls Power and Bears Power together?

In Elder's own structure, as Admiral Markets sets it out, the slope of the 13-period EMA decides which direction you are willing to trade and the two readings decide the timing.

For a long: "EMA slope is upward (trend confirmation)" and "Bears Power is negative but rising (selling pressure weakening)." Its optional filters are that the latest Bulls Power peak is higher than the previous one, and a bullish divergence in Bears Power, meaning price makes new lows and Bears Power does not. Its suggested exit is price making a new high while Bulls Power fails to reach a new peak.

For a short, the mirror image: "EMA slope is downward (trend confirmation)" and "Bulls Power is positive but falling (buying pressure weakening)", with the same two filters reversed.

Admiral Markets adds its own caveat: "The Elder-Ray trading system combines analysis of trend-following and oscillator signals. Whether the system works or not has not been determined and this information is for educational purposes only."

Take that at face value and test the system yourself.

What is the difference between the buy and sell signal?

Less than you would hope, on the one source that states both.

LiteFinance states its rules three times, and the three do not match. Its body signals read:

• Buy: "The Bears Power indicator is below the zero line. The bars are consistently decreasing towards the zero line." Plus Bulls Power above zero and rising.
• Sell: "The Bears Power indicator is below the zero line. The bars are consistently declining, moving away from the zero line." Plus Bulls Power above zero, declining from its maximum values.

Its conclusion compresses the same pair into two lines, and there the Bears leg becomes identical in both:

• "Buy signal: Bulls Power is growing above the zero line. Bears Power is below the zero line, and the bars are decreasing."
• "Sell signal: Bulls Power is above the zero line, the bars are falling. Bears Power is below the zero line, the bars are decreasing."

And its takeaways at the top of the page use the opposite direction word for the buy case: "Bears Power gives a signal to open a long position when it is below the zero line, the bars are increasing, approaching the zero threshold."

The word doing the damage is "decreasing". For a negative value, bars getting shorter and bars getting longer are opposite events, and the page uses "decreasing" for both: once meaning the reading shrinks towards zero, once meaning it grows more negative. The takeaways version, "increasing, approaching the zero threshold", is the one that is arithmetically unambiguous.

Write this down before testing, because no source does it for you: whether your condition is Bears Power rising towards zero or falling away from it, and over how many bars you require that direction to hold. A direction word with no bar count behind it cannot be scored the same way twice.

What are the best settings?

13 periods on the EMA. LiteFinance credits the number to the author: the indicators "are based on the 13-period exponential moving average as recommended by Dr. Alexander Elder."

LiteFinance notes one input most write-ups skip. On MT4 you can set the "Apply to" parameter, which chooses the price the average is calculated from, and it lists seven options: the four OHLC prices plus Median, Typical and Weighted Close. Change that and both readings change, because the average they are measured against moves.

Published advice about changing the period pulls in opposite directions:

• LiteFinance warns about going shorter: "The smaller the period, the sharper and faster the indicators will react to price changes. At the same time, more false signals can be generated." It then says where the choice should be made, which is the closest anybody comes to a method: "The EMA period is selected individually for each time frame, asset, and volatility in the strategy tester."
• Pineify publishes a settings table by trading style, 5 to 8 for day trading, 13 to 21 for swing trading and 26 to 50 for position trading, with no sample, period or symbol list behind the recommendation.

TrendSpider names the same sensitivity as a limitation: "The index is sensitive to the chosen period for the Exponential Moving Average (EMA), which may affect its accuracy and require fine-tuning for optimal results." Fine-tuning for optimal results with no method and no sample attached is curve fitting.

The period is yours to settle. If you move off 13, change the period only, keep the rules and the stretch of history identical, and record the signal count each time.

Does the Bull Bear Power indicator use volume?

No. High, Low and an exponential moving average, and nothing else. The formula has no volume term in it.

One source says otherwise about its own formula. LiteFinance prints Bulls Power = High - EMA (13) in its calculation section, and then its conclusion, at the far end of the same page, says: "Bulls Power measures the quantitative advantage of the buyers and their trading volume." The formula on the page has no volume in it. A reader who arrives at the conclusion first comes away believing a volume indicator is involved.

If you want an indicator that does multiply price by volume, that is a different family of tools, and on currency pairs the volume figure itself needs checking first.

Has anyone tested it?

Barely, and what exists is too small to carry a conclusion.

Pineify describes backtesting a Bull Power zero-cross system on SPY from March to May 2026, and the sample is thirteen trades on one symbol over about three months. Thirteen is the number to look at. On a run that size, one trade going the other way moves the share of winners by around eight percentage points, and nothing about the method changed when it did.

LiteFinance works through a single trade on a EUR/USD 1-hour chart dated 26 to 27 June 2024. One trade, and the Bollinger Bands channel indicator was on the chart as part of the setup, so it is not a test of this indicator on its own.

TrendSpider links a strategy built on this indicator on its own platform and publishes no result from it, saying only that "The strategy tests buying and selling rules built around this indicator." Pineify admits mid-article that one of its suggested combinations is untested and rests on "several traders I follow".

What a handful of trades can settle is whether you can follow the rule. Whether the rule has an edge needs a sample, and nobody has published one.

How do you backtest Bulls Power and Bears Power yourself?

Eight decisions, written down before the first trade.

1. Pick one rule set: Elder's structure from the EMA-slope section, or one of LiteFinance's, or the zero cross. A test of a blend cannot tell you which part did the work.
2. Fix the EMA period and the applied price. 13 on the close is the default pair. Write both down, because changing either one changes both readings.
3. Turn "rising" and "falling" into a number of bars. The published rules skip this one. Two consecutive bars closer to zero, or three? Your answer is part of the rule, and without it you will score borderline cases differently on a Tuesday than on a Friday.
4. Fix the entry bar: the bar that completes the condition, or the one after it. Decide that in advance.
5. Fix what cancels the setup. If the EMA slope flattens before you are filled, is the setup dead? Decide now.
6. Pick the stretch of history before you look at the chart. Dates chosen after you have seen where the indicator behaved are a test of hindsight.
7. Record the readings in the instrument's own units, with the symbol beside them. A Bulls Power of 0.0050 means nothing on its own, and it means something different on a different symbol.
8. Set your costs before the first trade. In ChartLabs, commission and slippage are set per symbol, and every trade's P&L, balances and analytics reflect them. On a rule that trades often, leaving them out flatters the result. Even the single published trade counted its swap and spread.

Keep the notes with the result: the symbol and timeframe, the EMA period and the price it was applied to, the platform and whether it showed one indicator or two, which rule set you tested, how many bars your direction condition required, which bar you entered on, what cancelled a setup, how many signals the period produced, and the result with commission and slippage already in it.

Two comparisons are easy to make by accident. A result with no signal count beside it cannot be compared with anything, your own next test included, and a reading in price units cannot be compared between two instruments, so a threshold that suited one symbol is not a threshold you can carry to another.

Bull Bear Power is built into ChartLabs, under Standard in the Indicators menu, with Length 13. It follows TradingView's built-in, so it is one histogram in its own pane: Bulls Power and Bears Power added together, (High - EMA) + (Low - EMA), on a 13-period EMA of the close. Most of the rules above read the two lines separately, and the sum cannot give you those back. For two separate lines, write them in the built-in Pine Script editor; it is two lines of arithmetic, so a short script. Nothing backtests either one, so the testing stays manual: you step the chart forward bar by bar and take the trades by hand.

This system wants two sub-panels plus a moving average on the price chart at once. Drawings and sub-panel indicators save as you work, and each indicator instance can be styled separately, so you can give every moving average its own colour and line style and edit one without changing the others. You can also add your own custom indicators from the Indicators menu.

Our forex backtesting guide covers the surrounding method, including how many trades a result needs before it means anything, backtesting versus paper trading covers what each one actually tests, and our trading simulator is the bar-by-bar stepping this kind of test needs.

Start a free trial and turn one of those published rules into something countable.