Elder Ray Indicator: Formula, Settings and How to Read It
Elder Ray plots two separate lines: Bull Power, the distance from each bar's high to an exponential moving average of close, and Bear Power, the distance from that bar's low to the same average. It shows how far buyers pushed price above the moving-average consensus during a bar, and how far sellers drove it below.
Senzoukria · Indicators · Updated September 2026
Elder Ray ships with the Senzoukria desktop app, in the Momentum group of the indicator catalogue. It is drawn in its own panel below the chart.
What Elder Ray measures
Both lines are distances in price units from a single EMA of close, seeded with an SMA and using the standard smoothing factor 2/(N+1); the default period is 13, Alexander Elder's value. The two outputs are never combined into one number, because their sum would cancel exactly the information the tool exists to show - where each side reached relative to the average. Neither line is clamped: when an entire bar trades above the EMA, Bull and Bear Power are both positive, and that is treated as a reading rather than an error. Both lines return no value until the EMA's SMA seed has enough bars.
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:
Elder Ray (Alexander Elder, 1993) — deux lignes, pas un ratio : Bull Power = high − EMA_N(close) Bear Power = low − EMA_N(close) EMA à GRAINE SMA (`helpers.emaSeries`, α = 2/(N+1)) — l'EMA classique du repo, pas du Wilder. Défaut N=13 (Elder). POURQUOI DEUX LIGNES et pas leur somme : l'EMA est le « consensus de valeur » ; Bull Power mesure jusqu'où les ACHETEURS ont pu pousser au-dessus de ce consensus dans la barre, Bear Power jusqu'où les VENDEURS l'ont enfoncé. Les agréger effacerait exactement l'information cherchée — la lecture d'Elder est la DIVERGENCE entre les deux (ex. Bear Power qui remonte pendant que le prix fait un plus bas = vendeurs à bout de souffle). En pratique Bull ≥ 0 ≥ Bear la plupart du temps, mais rien ne l'impose : une barre entièrement au-dessus de l'EMA rend les deux positives, et c'est une information — donc AUCUN bornage. Warm-up : i ≥ N − 1 (graine SMA de l'EMA) → null sur les deux lignes. Sorties : [Bull Power, Bear Power].
How to read it
- Bull Power above zero means the bar's high cleared the moving average; Bear Power below zero means its low broke under it.
- Watch the two lines separately. Bear Power rising while price posts a lower low describes sellers reaching less far below the average than they did before.
- The mirror case - Bull Power shrinking while price posts a higher high - describes buyers extending less far above the average on the newer push.
- Both lines positive means the whole bar traded above the EMA; both negative means the whole bar traded below it.
- Values scale with the instrument's price and with bar size, so compare a reading against the same chart's history, not against another symbol.
Parameters and defaults
The single numeric parameter is the EMA period, 13 by default, accepting 1 to 500. A shorter period pulls the average toward price and compresses both lines toward zero - at a period of 1 the average is the close itself, so Bull Power becomes the upper wick and Bear Power the lower one. A longer period widens both lines, because the reference moves more slowly than the bars around it.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| EMA period | number | 13 | 1 – 500 |
What it does not show
Elder Ray is built from high, low and close only. It shows how far a bar reached beyond the average, never who traded there: the same excursion can come from buyers lifting offers or from offers being pulled, and separating the two needs bid-ask trade classification, as in a footprint or a delta series. The EMA lags, so both lines react to a change in regime after it has begun. Readings are raw price distances, which makes them incomparable across instruments and discontinuous across a futures contract roll. On a very wide bar both values grow simply because the bar is tall.
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
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
- Why does Elder Ray use two lines instead of one?
- Bull Power and Bear Power measure opposite excursions from the same moving average. Adding or averaging them would collapse them into something close to the bar's midpoint relative to the EMA and erase the asymmetry between the two sides, which is the whole point of the indicator.
- Can Bull Power and Bear Power both be positive at the same time?
- Yes. When a bar's low is already above the exponential moving average, both distances are positive. It means the entire bar traded above the reference average, and the indicator does not bound or hide that case.
- What EMA period does Elder Ray use by default?
- 13 bars, the value used by Alexander Elder when he published the indicator in 1993. The average is an ordinary exponential moving average seeded with a simple moving average, not a Wilder-smoothed one, so it matches the EMA used elsewhere in the catalogue.