Donchian Indicator: Formula, Settings and How to Read It
Donchian Channel draws the highest high and the lowest low of the last N bars as two stepping edges, with a middle line halfway between them. It is a range indicator built from bar extremes, not from closes.
Senzoukria · Indicators · Updated September 2026
Donchian ships with the Senzoukria desktop app, in the Averages & volatility group of the indicator catalogue. It is drawn on the price chart.
What Donchian measures
At each bar the upper edge is the maximum of the highs over the lookback window, the lower edge is the minimum of the lows, and the basis is their midpoint. The upper edge steps up the moment a new high is made, but it can only step down once the bar that held the previous high leaves the window, which is why the edges stay flat for long stretches and then move in one jump. The channel is empty until N bars exist.
The formula, as implemented
This is not a description of how the indicator is usually defined elsewhere — it is what the shipped code computes, documented next to the implementation:
Donchian : upper = max(high, N barres), lower = min(low, N barres), basis = milieu. Warm-up (< N barres) → null. Défaut N=20 (les « 4-week rules » de Donchian transposées en barres).
How to read it
- The length of a flat section is the information: a flat upper edge means no new high has printed for as many bars as the flat is long.
- By construction, a break of an edge is a new extreme of the window, so the indicator confirms it at the same bar it happens and never before.
- Channel width measures the range covered by the last N bars; a narrowing channel means old extremes are dropping out without being replaced.
- The basis sits halfway between two extremes, so a single outlier bar shifts it. It is the midpoint of a range, not an average of the market.
- When an edge drops, check whether an old extreme simply expired out of the window before treating the step as an event at that bar.
Parameters and defaults
The period defaults to 20, which transposes Donchian's four-week rule to a bar count, and accepts 1 to 200. Longer periods produce wider, slower channels whose edges expire rarely; shorter ones hug the recent price and are broken far more often. Since the channel uses highs and lows, the same period gives very different widths on timeframes with different bar sizes.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Period | number | 20 | 1 – 200 |
What it does not show
The channel records that an extreme occurred, not how it was made: a high reached on one thin print and a high defended by heavy two-sided trade produce the same edge. Because the edges are extremes of the window, a single spike dominates the channel for N bars. There is no notion of trend here, and the midpoint carries no significance beyond arithmetic. On instruments where the feed can miss or misprint a trade, an erroneous high sticks to the upper edge for the whole lookback.
Using it in Senzoukria
Add it from the Indicators panel of any footprint chart or candle chart. It runs on futures data from Rithmic or Databento and on crypto pairs from Binance and Bybit, on the same engine — the calculation does not change with the venue, only the data feeding it does. Market data subscriptions are billed by the provider, separately from the app.
Related indicators
- SMA — Averages & volatility
- EMA — Averages & volatility
- WMA — Averages & volatility
- Hull MA — Averages & volatility
- ATR (Wilder) — Averages & volatility
- Bollinger — Averages & volatility
See the full indicator library, or start with the order flow guide if you are new to reading aggression, delta and absorption.
Frequently asked questions
- Does the Donchian Channel repaint?
- No. Each value uses only the bars up to and including the current one, so what you see on a closed bar is what was available at that bar. The edges of the bar still forming can move while it is open, as any high or low can.
- What is the difference between a Donchian Channel and a Fractal Channel?
- Donchian tracks the rolling extreme of a fixed number of bars, so its upper edge rises immediately on any new high and only falls when the old extreme leaves the window. A Fractal Channel tracks confirmed pivot points instead, holds each level until the next pivot is confirmed, and can tighten on its own when a lower pivot high forms.
- What does the middle line of the Donchian Channel represent?
- It is the arithmetic midpoint between the highest high and the lowest low of the window. It is not a moving average of price, and it gives no weight at all to where price actually spent its time inside the range.