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Run-up from Low — Volatility, in its own panel below the chart.
What Run-up from Low measures
The reference is the rolling minimum of the bar lows, not of closes, so a single intrabar spike down sets the anchor for the rest of the window. The value is close minus that minimum, divided by the minimum, times 100, and is never negative by construction. The default lookback is 50 bars. Warm-up behaviour and the denominator guard — no output when the reference is zero or below — are deliberately identical to the drawdown counterpart, so the two panes degrade the same way and one cannot silently outlive the other while you read them side by side.
The formula, as implemented
This is not how the indicator is usually defined elsewhere — it is what the shipped code computes, documented next to the implementation:
Run-up from Low — le symétrique exact du drawdown, mesuré depuis le plus bas récent : ru[i] = (close[i] − min(low, N barres)[i]) / min(low, N)[i] × 100 Défaut N=50. Valeur ≥ 0 par construction : 0 = on est AU plus bas de la fenêtre, +2 % = le marché a repris 2 % depuis ce plus bas. Même warm-up (fenêtre incomplète → pas de point) et même garde de dénominateur (référence ≤ 0 → pas de point) que `drawdown-from-high` : les deux se lisent ensemble, ils doivent dégrader pareil.
How to read it
- A reading of 0 means a new low for the window is being printed right now.
- The line steps down abruptly when a lower low arrives, then climbs again as price recovers; those resets belong to the window, not to a change in market character.
- A large reading says price is extended from its recent base, which is a description of distance travelled and not an argument for fading it.
- The value can fall with almost no price movement when the oldest bar leaves the lookback and a higher low becomes the anchor — check which bar is anchoring before reading meaning into the drop.
- Plot it with drawdown from high on the same lookback to see which extreme the current close is nearer to.
Parameters and defaults
Lookback defaults to 50 bars and accepts 2 to 1000. Shorter windows reset frequently and make the line behave like a short-horizon recovery measure; longer windows keep distant lows as anchors, so large percentages persist well after the move that produced them. Of the two colour settings only the positive one is ever used on screen, since the series cannot go below zero; the negative colour exists to satisfy the shared plotting contract.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lookback (bars) | number | 50 | 2 – 1000 |
What it does not show
The indicator measures distance, not participation: volume, delta and aggressor side are absent, so the same percentage reached on thin trade and on heavy trade looks identical. It says nothing about how the advance happened — one bar or forty produce the same number. Because the anchor rolls, the series changes for reasons unrelated to the current bar. Instruments quoted at or below zero, such as some spreads, trigger the denominator guard and produce no output, and nothing is plotted until the lookback window is full.
Related indicators
- True Range — Volatility
- Std Dev — Volatility
- Squeeze — Volatility
- Chaikin Volatility — Volatility
- Realized Vol — Volatility
- Skewness — Volatility
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Frequently asked questions
- What does run-up from low measure?
- It measures the percentage distance between the current close and the lowest low over a fixed number of recent bars. Zero means price is at that low; a positive value is how far it has recovered from it, expressed relative to the low itself.
- How is run-up different from drawdown?
- Drawdown measures the decline from a rolling high; run-up measures the advance from a rolling low. They are built symmetrically from the same window length, so reading them together shows where the current close sits between the two extremes of that window.
- Why did run-up from low change when price barely moved?
- The reference low is the minimum over a rolling window. When the oldest bar leaves that window and it happened to hold the lowest low, the anchor jumps to a higher level and the percentage falls immediately, even though the current bar did nothing unusual.