Holdfast Trend Ribbon is a two-average ribbon with three colors instead of two. Green and red say the trend is intact. Yellow says price is no longer agreeing with it — which is a weaker claim than a reversal, and a far more useful one.
A two-color ribbon has to be green or red at every moment, so it says “still bullish” through a pullback that is quietly taking your trade apart, and then flips to “bearish” a long way after the damage. The chart looks decisive. The information is not.
There is a state in between, and every discretionary trader already reads it: the trend is intact, but price has stopped agreeing with it. That is not a reversal — most of the time it resolves back the way it came. It is a warning, and a two-color tool has nowhere to put it.
Trend Ribbon gives that state its own color, and names which of the two causes produced it.
The fast average is clear of the slow one by more than your threshold, and price is on the same side of the fast average. Both halves have to hold.
Converged — the averages are inside the threshold, so there is no separation left to read. Pullback — they still disagree, but price has closed back through the fast one.
The averages can behave as though they were measured on a higher timeframe, so a 15-second chart carries the 5-minute trend — without loading a second chart, and without stepping in blocks.
How the anchor works. No second data series is loaded. The lookbacks are scaled by the ratio of the anchor to your chart period — on a 15-second chart, a 5-minute EMA(9) becomes EMA(180). It tracks the real higher-timeframe curve closely and updates every bar, so it draws as a smooth line rather than a staircase. On MetaTrader and TradingView you can switch to the real higher-timeframe series instead if you prefer exactness to smoothness.
| State | What it says | What it does not say |
|---|---|---|
| Green / red | The averages disagree by more than the threshold and price agrees with them. | Nothing about how far the move can still go. |
| Yellow — converged | The averages have come together. The trend has run out of separation. | That a reversal is coming. Ranges look like this for hours. |
| Yellow — pullback | The averages still disagree; price has gone the other way through the fast one. | Which way it resolves. Roughly speaking, that is the trade. |
An optional third line — slower, drawn in its own color — that does not change the ribbon's state. It is a level to watch, not part of the decision. Switch Third EMA affects trend on and the ribbon becomes stricter and slower: the slow average must also have cleared the third before it commits. That is the conservative reading, and it costs you the early flips.
The same two averages on a higher anchor, drawn lighter, so you can see whether the bigger trend agrees. When the main ribbon flips into the direction the second one already holds, that is a confluence — both timeframes agreeing on the same bar, with its own alert.
What it is not. A moving-average ribbon is a description of what price has already done, smoothed. It does not lead, it does not predict, and a flip is not an entry. What it is good for is keeping you honest about whether the thing you think is happening is still happening.
| Setting | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Fast / slow EMA length | Before any anchor multiplier is applied | 9 / 21 |
| Anchor timeframe | What the averages behave as though they were measured on | 5 Minute |
| Threshold mode / threshold | How close the averages must be to read neutral. Ticks travels between instruments; MT5 and TradingView add an ATR mode for one template across asset classes | Ticks / 4 |
| Third EMA | Show it, its length, the timeframe it is measured on, and whether it affects the trend | on / 35 / anchor / off |
| Second ribbon | Show it, its anchor, its threshold, its opacity, and whether the main ribbon may only flip with it | on / 15 Minute / off |
| Flip arrows / Fade weak trends | Arrows clear of the bar and all three averages; faint ribbon when the averages are barely past the threshold | false / false |
| Alerts | Trend flip, neutral/pullback, confluence, second-ribbon flip | all off |
Requirements: NinjaTrader 8, MetaTrader 5, or TradingView. Any instrument, any bar type, any feed — it reads price and nothing else.
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The averages are ordinary. The two things that are not: the third state, which separates “the averages converged” from “price pulled back” rather than lumping both into neutral; and the anchor, which lets a fast chart carry a slower trend without a second chart or a stepping higher-timeframe line.
On their own, no. A flip is a change in what the averages are describing, which lags price by construction. The ribbon is for keeping the context honest — what it is good at is telling you when the thing you are leaning on has stopped being true.
The timeframe you would have open in a second window. A 15-second chart with a 5-minute anchor reads like a 5-minute ribbon with 15-second resolution. If the ribbon flips too often for you, lengthen the anchor before you lengthen the averages.
The color of the forming bar can change while the bar is still forming, because price is still moving. Closed bars never change. Alerts fire on the bar that produced them.
It was folded into this. Tide's third average, its higher-timeframe ribbon and its confluence alerts are all here, on top of Trend Ribbon's faster, three-state reading. One tool instead of two that overlapped.
Trend Ribbon says which way the market is leaning and whether price still agrees. It is silent on how far a move can go, and silent on where anyone is actually defending a price: ATR Band for the first, Trend Strength for how orderly the move is, and Liquidity Levels for where real resting size sits in the order book.