What do the four colours mean?

They are two independent yes/no questions asked at once: did the index rise against the previous bar, and did the volume rise against the previous bar. Both up is the state usually called green — the move went somewhere and people were in it. Index up with volume down is the 'fake' bar: movement without participation. Index down with volume up is the 'squat' bar, the one Bill Williams watched most closely, where heavy trading produced no progress. Both down is the fade: nothing happening and nobody interested. MetaQuotes' own demo for iBWMFI declares them in that order as Lime, SaddleBrown, Blue and Pink.

What settings should I use?

There are none. iBWMFI takes a symbol, a timeframe and a volume type — three arguments, the fewest of any indicator node in the Builder. Each bar's value is computed from that bar alone, with no averaging window at all. The only choices you actually make are which timeframe to read it on and what to pair it with.

Can an EA read the bar colour?

The Builder's node cannot — it reads buffer index 0, which is the value. Whether the colour is reachable at all in MQL5 is genuinely ambiguous in MetaQuotes' documentation: the reference says iBWMFI has one buffer, while the example on the same page copies index 1 from the iBWMFI handle as the colours. Either way, the colour is two comparisons and both are expressible as nodes, so the template rebuilds it rather than depending on the answer.

Why does the template use shift 1 and shift 2 instead of shift 0 and shift 1?

Because the forming bar is not comparable with a finished one. Its range has not finished widening and its volume has barely started counting — on the first tick of a new bar the tick count is about one. A rule that asked 'is this bar's volume higher than the last bar's' about the forming bar would be false almost always, and true only by accident. Reading the bar that just closed against the one before it compares two completed bars, which is what MT5's colour does.

Can I build a BW MFI EA without coding?

Yes. The BW MFI Green Bar template reads the index at shift 1 and shift 2, reads Volumes at the same two bars, and requires both to have risen — the condition MT5 paints green. Direction comes from that bar's own close against its open, so a green bullish bar buys and a green bearish bar sells. Since the indicator has no parameters, the EA inputs are the stop distances and the spread and position limits.

How should I validate settings before going live?

Backtest on quality tick data, then run on a demo account before risking money. Half of every colour depends on the tick count, which is broker-specific, so results carried over from someone else's data deserve more scepticism than usual — re-run them on the feed you will actually trade. Check the trade count as well as the profit: requiring two rises and a candle direction at once is a narrow filter, and a flattering curve built on a handful of entries is not evidence.

BW Market Facilitation Index for MT5 traders

What the Market Facilitation Index tells you

Divide how far a bar travelled by how much trading it took, and you get a measure of how efficiently the market moved. A wide bar on light volume scores high — price went a long way for very little participation. A narrow bar on heavy volume scores low — a lot of trading produced almost no movement. Bill Williams' point was that neither reading means anything on its own: what matters is whether the index and the volume rose or fell together, and it is the combination that MT5 turns into a bar colour. Four combinations, four colours, and the two that share a colour on most other indicators are exactly the two Bill Williams wanted separated.

Index up, volume up — the move is going somewhere and people are in it
Index up, volume down — price is moving on nobody's participation
Index down, volume up — a lot of trading and no progress
Index down, volume down — the market has stopped caring

1 Take the bar's high minus its low
2 Divide it by the bar's volume
3 Colour the bar by whether that number and the volume each rose

Formülü ve hesaplama detayını göster

The Market Facilitation Index is one division:

BW MFI = (high − low) / volume

That is the whole calculation. There is no averaging window, no applied price and no method — each bar’s value comes from that bar and nothing else. In MQL5 the call is iBWMFI(symbol, period, applied_volume): three arguments, the fewest of any indicator the Builder exposes, and the second one is the timeframe rather than a length.

The number answers a narrow question: how much price movement did each unit of trading buy? But Bill Williams did not intend it to be read as a number. What he defined was a pair of readings — the index and the volume — and four cases depending on whether each rose or fell against the previous bar. MT5 renders those four as bar colours, and the four have names: green (both up), fade (both down), fake (index up, volume down) and squat (index down, volume up). MetaQuotes’ own demo for iBWMFI declares the plot as DRAW_COLOR_HISTOGRAM with clrLime, clrSaddleBrown, clrBlue, clrPink, in that order.

Two things about this are worth stating plainly.

Colour is not direction. All four states occur on rising bars and on falling bars alike. Green says the market moved efficiently and more people traded; it does not say which way. Any rule built on colour alone needs a direction from somewhere else, and the Builder’s template takes the cheapest honest one — the same bar’s close against its open.

The four states are reachable, unlike most colours on this site. The Awesome and Accelerator oscillators colour their bars by one comparison that MT5 performs at draw time, which an EA cannot read and must recreate. Here the colour is also outside what the Builder’s node returns — it reads buffer index 0 — but the rule behind it is two comparisons of published values, so recreating it is exact rather than approximate. Whether MQL5 additionally exposes the colour as a second buffer is something MetaQuotes’ reference and its own example disagree about; the template does not need the answer.

One implementation detail follows from the formula rather than from the platform. Both halves of the colour are per-bar quantities that are only complete when the bar is. The template therefore compares shift 1 against shift 2 — the bar that just closed against the one before it — where the AC template compares shift 0 against shift 1. Read the forming bar instead and the volume condition is almost never true, because on the first tick of a new bar the tick count is one.

Sinyaller

BW MFI'in sunduğu farklı ve geri test edilebilir sinyaller — ve her birinin uygun olduğu piyasa koşulu.

Green — Index Up, Volume Up

Builder'da hazır

Koşul: Both the index and the volume are higher than on the previous bar
En iyi koşul: Trend continuation
Tipik kullanım: The template's condition — take the move only when participation came with it

Fake — Index Up, Volume Down

Builder'da hazır

Koşul: The index rose while the volume fell
En iyi koşul: Trend exhaustion
Tipik kullanım: Decline a breakout that nobody joined

Squat — Index Down, Volume Up

Builder'da hazır

Koşul: The index fell while the volume rose
En iyi koşul: Either regime
Tipik kullanım: The bar Bill Williams watched most: heavy trading with no progress often precedes the turn

Fade — Index Down, Volume Down

Builder'da hazır

Koşul: Both fell
En iyi koşul: Range
Tipik kullanım: Stand aside; there is neither movement nor interest

MT5 uygulaması

MetaTrader 5'in gerçekte hesapladığı ve çizdiği şey — bu sayfadaki her kuralın dayanağı.

Tamponlar

Dizin	Tampon	MT5'te çizim şekli	Ne tutar
0	MAIN_LINE	Histogram	The index value — (high − low) / volume for the bar. Always positive, drawn as a histogram standing on zero. This is the buffer the Builder's node reads.
1	COLOR_INDEX	Colour index	Which of the four colours MT5 paints the bar. The reference text says iBWMFI has one buffer, but MetaQuotes' own demo for this function copies index 1 from the iBWMFI handle and calls it the histogram's colours. The Builder's node does not read it — see the caveat.

Platform notları

MQL5 fonksiyonu

iBWMFI

Uygulanan fiyat

Bu gösterge uygulanan fiyat parametresi almaz.

Builder'da

iBWMFI takes a symbol, a timeframe and an ENUM_APPLIED_VOLUME — three arguments, fewer than any other indicator node in the Builder. There is no period and no applied price. The node fixes the volume to tick and exposes shift, timeframe and a variable name, and node-prop-gate confirms each of those reaches the generated code.

Uygulama notları

The template places two BW MFI nodes and two Volumes nodes with identical arguments. MT5 returns the same handle for identical arguments, so the indicator is not computed four times — the generated EA creates four handle variables that resolve to two indicators, and the difference between the pairs is the CopyBuffer start offset.
The rule reads shift 1 and shift 2, not shift 0 and shift 1. The forming bar's range and volume are both partial, and on the first tick of a new bar its volume is essentially one — comparing that with a completed bar would make the volume condition almost never true. This is a real difference from the AC template, which compares shift 0 with shift 1 because AC's inputs are already-closed averages.
Direction is not in the indicator. The template takes it from the same bar's Close against its Open, which is the least it can do without importing a second indicator's opinion; the combinations above replace that with AO or the Alligator.
The four colour states are two independent booleans, so they are expressible as nodes — unlike AO's colour, which is one boolean, and unlike divergence, which needs swing detection. The template builds one of the four; the other three are the same tree with the comparison operators changed.

En iyi çalıştığı yer / dikkatli kullanın

Hiçbir gösterge evrensel bir avantaja sahip değildir. BW MFI'in yardımcı olduğu yer — ve yanıltıcı olduğu yer.

En iyi çalıştığı yer

Confirming that a breakout bar had participation rather than drifting through a thin session
Timeframes where a bar is long enough for its volume to mean something — M30 and above
Alongside a direction source, since the index says nothing about which way price went
Instruments and sessions where the tick count actually reflects activity

Dikkatli kullanın

The forming bar — its range and its volume are both incomplete, so comparing it with a finished bar is comparing two different things
Any fixed threshold on the value; it carries the instrument's price units divided by a broker-specific tick count
Reading a colour as a direction — all four states occur on up bars and on down bars alike
Bars that gap, where the range understates how far the market actually moved

BW MFI stratejisi oluştur

Sinyali giriş ve çıkış kurallarına bağlayın, ardından derlenebilir bir MT5 EA dışa aktarın — kod gerektirmez.

BW MFI at the bar that just closed (shift 1) and the one before it (shift 2)
Volumes at the same two bars
Both higher than the bar before → the state MT5 paints green
The same bar's Close against its Open supplies the direction
Green AND a bullish bar → Open Buy · SL 50 / TP 150; the mirrored pair → Open Sell

BW MFI'i diğer göstergelerle birleştir

Tek bir gösterge nadiren yeterlidir. Bu eşleştirmeler BW MFI'in kör noktalarını kapsar.

BW MFI + Alligator

Alligator lines fanned out
Index and volume both rising
Buy

Neden: The rest of Bill Williams' own system. The Market Facilitation Index says whether a bar was worth anything; the Alligator says whether the market is trending or asleep. A green bar inside a sleeping Alligator is efficiency without a direction to spend it on, which is the case the index cannot rule out by itself
En iyi koşul: Trending

No single-flow template combines them. Start from BW MFI Green Bar and add Alligator nodes for Jaw and Lips with a Compare between them, joined into the existing AND tree.

Builder'ı aç →

BW MFI + Awesome Oscillator

AO above zero
Index and volume both rising
Buy

Neden: AO supplies the direction the index refuses to give. The template takes direction from the bar's own close against its open, which is the cheapest possible answer; an AO reading above zero replaces one bar's opinion with a 34-bar one
En iyi koşul: Trending

No single-flow template pairs them. Start from BW MFI Green Bar, add an AO node with a Compare against a Constant of 0, and feed it into the AND tree in place of the Close-versus-Open pair.

Builder'ı aç →

BW MFI + OBV

OBV above its value 20 bars ago
Index and volume both rising
Buy

Neden: Both read the same tick volume and disagree about what to do with it. OBV accumulates it into a running total and asks where the flow has been going; the index divides a single bar's range by it and asks what that one bar's trading achieved. Requiring the long accumulation to agree with a green bar separates an efficient bar inside the flow from one running against it
En iyi koşul: Trending

No single-flow template pairs the two. Start from BW MFI Green Bar and add an OBV node plus a second OBV node at a shift, compared against each other — OBV has no zero to cross, so it is always read against its own past.

Builder'ı aç →

Parametreler

Kendi paritenz ve zaman diliminizde doğrulamak için başlangıç değerleri — garantili ayarlar değil.

Parametre	Varsayılan	Önerilen test aralığı	Ne işe yarar
Shift	0	0–30	Which bar back the node reads the buffer from. It is the only setting that changes what the node returns, and the template depends on it: two BW MFI nodes at shift 1 and shift 2 are how 'higher than the bar before' — half of what MT5 shows as a colour — becomes a condition an EA can test.
Timeframe	Current	M1–MN1	Which chart the reading comes from. Because the index has no period, the timeframe is the only thing that changes how much market each reading covers.
Applied volume	Tick volume	Tick or Real	Which volume series divides the range. The Builder fixes this to tick volume, because real volume is unavailable on most retail forex feeds. It is the third and last argument iBWMFI takes.
Period	Not applicable	—	There is none. iBWMFI has no averaging window at all — each bar's value is computed from that bar alone, which is why two consecutive readings can differ by a large factor with nothing wrong.

Başlangıç ön ayarları

There are none — iBWMFI takes a symbol, a timeframe and a volume type. Nothing else exists to preset.

Piyasa örnekleri

BW MFI'in çalıştığı yer, başarısız olduğu yer ve filtrenin sonucu nasıl değiştirdiği.

Çalışır

A green bar that carried on

A breakout bar prints a wider range than the one before it on a higher tick count, and it closes above its open. The entry fires on the next bar's first tick and the fixed target is reached before the stop.

Başarısız

Green in a thin session

A quiet stretch where a slightly wider bar arrives on a slightly higher tick count. Both conditions are technically true and the whole move is a few pips wide.

Filtrelenmiş

The Fake bar the rule declines

Price breaks out on a wide bar, but the tick count fell against the previous bar — MT5 paints this blue, not green. The index rose, so half the condition is met; the volume condition is not, and the template declines the entry.

İlgili göstergeler

Awesome Oscillator Rehberi gör →

Alligator Rehberi gör →

OBV Rehberi gör →

Volumes Rehberi gör →

FAQ

What do the four colours mean?: They are two independent yes/no questions asked at once: did the index rise against the previous bar, and did the volume rise against the previous bar. Both up is the state usually called green — the move went somewhere and people were in it. Index up with volume down is the 'fake' bar: movement without participation. Index down with volume up is the 'squat' bar, the one Bill Williams watched most closely, where heavy trading produced no progress. Both down is the fade: nothing happening and nobody interested. MetaQuotes' own demo for iBWMFI declares them in that order as Lime, SaddleBrown, Blue and Pink.
What settings should I use?: There are none. iBWMFI takes a symbol, a timeframe and a volume type — three arguments, the fewest of any indicator node in the Builder. Each bar's value is computed from that bar alone, with no averaging window at all. The only choices you actually make are which timeframe to read it on and what to pair it with.
Can an EA read the bar colour?: The Builder's node cannot — it reads buffer index 0, which is the value. Whether the colour is reachable at all in MQL5 is genuinely ambiguous in MetaQuotes' documentation: the reference says iBWMFI has one buffer, while the example on the same page copies index 1 from the iBWMFI handle as the colours. Either way, the colour is two comparisons and both are expressible as nodes, so the template rebuilds it rather than depending on the answer.
Why does the template use shift 1 and shift 2 instead of shift 0 and shift 1?: Because the forming bar is not comparable with a finished one. Its range has not finished widening and its volume has barely started counting — on the first tick of a new bar the tick count is about one. A rule that asked 'is this bar's volume higher than the last bar's' about the forming bar would be false almost always, and true only by accident. Reading the bar that just closed against the one before it compares two completed bars, which is what MT5's colour does.
Can I build a BW MFI EA without coding?: Yes. The BW MFI Green Bar template reads the index at shift 1 and shift 2, reads Volumes at the same two bars, and requires both to have risen — the condition MT5 paints green. Direction comes from that bar's own close against its open, so a green bullish bar buys and a green bearish bar sells. Since the indicator has no parameters, the EA inputs are the stop distances and the spread and position limits.
How should I validate settings before going live?: Backtest on quality tick data, then run on a demo account before risking money. Half of every colour depends on the tick count, which is broker-specific, so results carried over from someone else's data deserve more scepticism than usual — re-run them on the feed you will actually trade. Check the trade count as well as the profit: requiring two rises and a candle direction at once is a narrow filter, and a flattering curve built on a handful of entries is not evidence.

Glossary

Anahtar terimler

Geriye dönük test (backtest)Aşırı uyum Spread