MATTRIX 8x / MetaTrader 5 / v1.22

Basket Strength

Reads one basket at a glance: how far it has moved, how many of its legs agree, and which leg leads.

IN CHART VERITAS

01What it is

A panel in the top-right of a MATTRIX synthetic chart or a broker FX pair. It breaks the basket into its individual legs, sorts them strongest-first, and answers the question a single price chart cannot: is this move broad, or is it one pair doing all the work?

Panel

Basket move (big number) + unit
Coherence — how many legs agree
Signal label (CHOPPY → MIXED → STRONG → EXTREME, or DIVERGENT)
Every leg with arrow and value, sorted
Info line: basket move in ATR units and activity
An exposure dot on legs you hold

On the chart

CLS lines: entry, SL and TP of the running basket
Click any leg name to open that pair’s chart
On a broker pair: click the header to switch between base and quote basket

02Setup

Drop it on a MATTRIX synthetic chart (#EUR, #USD, #RON, #MyMag7 …) or on one of the 28 FX majors. On any other symbol it reports WRONG CHART and stops.
For # charts the SyntheticCharts EA must have created the symbols first. On a broker pair no synthetic symbol is needed.
Set Broker suffix if your FX symbols carry one (e.g. .a).

03Which baskets it reads

Chart	Legs	Unit
#EUR … #JPY	7 pairs	pips
#RON / #ROFF	8 pairs	pips
Any other # chart	up to 8 members	pips or %
EURUSD, AUDJPY …	7 pairs of the base or quote currency	pips
#FIX	—	CLS lines only, no panel

On a broker pair the panel shows the base basket first — #EUR on EURUSD. The header carries a ↔; click it to switch to the quote basket (header turns amber). The choice is remembered per chart. One basket at a time keeps the panel narrow; compare both by switching, or open the two # charts side by side.

Custom baskets need no configuration. The members are read from the synthetic symbol’s own description — the list SyntheticCharts writes there (AMD+CSCO+CVX+JNJ+…). Free text in the description is ignored, so a prefix like MyTop8: does no harm. Change the synthetic and the panel follows; there is no list to keep in sync.

The unit picks itself. If every member is an FX pair, the panel measures in pips — the familiar behaviour. As soon as one member is not FX (a stock, index or metal), it switches to percent, because a $1 move means something entirely different on a $170 share than on a $610 one. Percent legs are measured against the previous close, the way any quote screen does it, so gaps are counted properly.

You can override it. Leg values shown in forces pips, points or percent regardless of what the basket holds; the default Auto is the behaviour described above. Points are the natural way to read an index leg — but be aware that a point on an instrument quoted near 44,000 and one quoted near 2,400 are the same number and a very different move, so the basket total will follow whichever member carries the largest figures. For mixed baskets percent stays the honest choice, and forcing pips or points on one is noted in the journal rather than blocked.

04Reading the panel

The big number is the basket move for the current bar. For a currency basket it is the summed pip move of all legs; for a custom basket it is taken from the synthetic series itself, so it reflects exactly the weighting your basket is built with.

Leg names. A pair in which the basket currency is the quote is counted inverted and shown reversed in brackets: EURUSD in the USD basket appears as (USDEUR), so every value reads in the basket’s direction. Values that round to zero show 0, without a sign.

Coherence is the count that matters: 6/7 means six of seven legs point the same way. It is the difference between a currency being bought across the board and a single cross running away.

Signal	Meaning
CHOPPY	Below ~60% agreement — no usable direction.
MIXED ▲/▼	Majority agrees, but the basket is not aligned.
STRONG ▲/▼	~85% or more of the legs agree — this is breadth.
EXTREME ▲/▼	STRONG plus momentum beyond the extreme threshold. Powerful, but also where moves exhaust. Judged in ATR units by default (see below).
DIVERGENT	The total points one way, the majority of legs the other. Replaces whatever the reading would otherwise have been — including STRONG and EXTREME. Shown without an arrow, because there is no single direction to point at.

05Volatility and activity

Why ATR units. Momentum is the average leg move over the lookback (default 50 bars). A fixed threshold of 60 pips means very different things across timeframes: routine on D1, rare on M1 — and in percent mode, 60 % is never reached. Since v1.22 the momentum is divided by the average ATR of the legs, so the default threshold of 6 ATR means the same on every timeframe and in every unit. On H1 it roughly matches the former 60-pip rule. The fixed-value mode remains selectable.

The info line below the legs shows two numbers:

Value	Meaning
+1.2 ATR	The basket move of the current bar relative to the legs’ normal bar range: pip sum divided by the sum of the legs’ ATR (percent mode: basket move over the mean leg ATR). Around 1 is a full normal bar in the same direction on every leg.
Act 1.3x	Tick volume of the legs against their normal level. Intraday: the same time of day on up to 10 previous days (fewer on M1). D1 and above: the mean of the previous 20 bars.

From 1.5x activity the signal label blinks — a hint that the market is unusually busy right now, typically around news or a session open.

Tick volume is not traded volume. It counts price updates from your broker’s feed, so its level differs between brokers. The ratio against its own history is what carries information; early in a bar it reads low, because the bar is still filling.

06Positions and charts

The exposure dot to the right of each value shows where you are actually positioned. Filled means a position carrying your EA Magic Number, hollow means someone else's magic on the same symbol — a manual trade, or another EA. Green is floating profit, red floating loss, grey means too close to zero to say: commission is not readable from an open position, so a sign that small would be a guess. Legs you do not hold show nothing.

The leg list is sorted strongest first, so the leader and the laggard are always at the ends. Click any leg name to open that pair’s chart in the timeframe and template you configured.

Who opens the chart. With Let AutoQuickTrade open the chart on (the default), the click becomes a request and an AutoQuickTrade opens the chart instead. That matters: a chart opened by an EA inherits permission to trade, one opened by an indicator does not. If no AutoQuickTrade answers within three seconds, Basket Strength opens the chart itself and says so — the chart appears, but the EA on it will not be allowed to trade until you enable it by hand.

The new chart brings its own settings. Magic number, lot mode, risk and SL/TP on the chart you just opened come from the template named below — not from the basket chart you clicked on. Nothing is copied across. Keep that template in step with how you want those pair charts to trade, and glance at the panel before you act on a chart that just appeared.

DIVERGENT is the warning worth knowing. It appears when the big number and the leg majority disagree — the basket is net positive while most legs point down, or the reverse. The move is then carried by a few strong crosses rather than by breadth, which is the weakest kind of basket move and the easiest to misread from the total alone. Read the leg list: the two or three outliers doing the work are usually the actual trade, and the basket is not. Treat it as a reason to look closer, never as a direction.

07CLS lines

If the MATTRIX EA is running a basket with the same EA Magic Number, the panel draws its entry, stop and target onto the synthetic chart, so you see the running trade in basket terms rather than per pair. Drag a line and the update pauses briefly so it does not fight you.

08Key settings

Setting	Note
Broker suffix	e.g. `.a` — leave empty if your symbols have none.
Leg values shown in	Auto / pips / points / percent. Auto picks pips for an all-FX basket, percent otherwise.
Momentum lookback	Bars used for the momentum reading (default 50).
EXTREME judged in	ATR units (default) or a fixed value in the leg unit, as before v1.22.
Momentum extreme threshold (ATR / fixed)	6 ATR, or 60 in the leg unit (pips, points or %).
ATR length	Bars of the ATR per leg (default 14, Wilder smoothing).
Show activity / High activity from / Blink	Activity in the info line; threshold for “high” (default 1.5x); blinking signal label on or off.
Panel X / Y offset	Position from the top-right corner. Keep Y ≥ 50 so the EA label stays clear.
Chart timeframe / template	Used when you click a leg to open its chart. The template also decides how that chart trades.
Let AutoQuickTrade open the chart	Default on. Keeps Algo Trading alive on the new chart. Off → the indicator opens it and the EA there stays blocked.
EA Magic Number	Must match the EA whose basket you want drawn as CLS lines.

09How to use it

Pick the basket, not the pair. Compare coherence across your # charts and trade the one with real breadth behind it.
Confirm, never trigger. The panel tells you how broad a move is. Where and when to act stays a chart decision.
Watch the extremes. EXTREME means the move is powerful and stretched at the same time — a level to respect in both directions.

Correlated baskets. Several baskets showing STRONG in the same direction are usually one trade seen from different sides — most FX moves are a dollar move. Breadth is a signal; it is not diversification.