Wick Imbalance Indicator: Formula, Settings and How to Read It
Wick Imbalance compares the upper and lower wicks of each bar and expresses the difference as a percentage of the bar's total range, on a scale from −100 to +100. Positive values mean the upper wick dominates, which is a rejection of higher prices; negative values mean the lower wick dominates.
Senzoukria · Indicators · Updated September 2026
Wick Imbalance ships with the Senzoukria desktop app, in the Structure & sessions group of the indicator catalogue. It is drawn in its own panel below the chart.
What Wick Imbalance measures
The upper wick is the distance from the high to the higher of the open and close, the lower wick the distance from the lower of the open and close down to the low, and the plotted value is their difference divided by the full range. The choice of denominator matters: normalising by the range rather than by the body keeps the reading defined on doji bars, where the body can be zero while the range still exists as soon as trade took place. A bar whose range is zero produces no point at all instead of a zero, so a bar that traded at a single price is never confused with a balanced one. The scale is bounded, so +100 describes a bar that opened and closed at its low with the entire range above, and −100 the opposite case.
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:
Wick imbalance — asymétrie des mèches, normalisée par le range : value = (upperWick − lowerWick) / (high − low) × 100 ∈ [−100, +100] upperWick = high − max(open, close) ; lowerWick = min(open, close) − low. > 0 = rejet par le HAUT (offre au-dessus) ; < 0 = rejet par le bas. Normalisation par le range et non par le corps : le corps peut être nul (doji) alors que le range, lui, existe toujours dès qu'il y a eu échange — on évite un dénominateur qui s'annule pour la moitié des barres calmes. range = 0 → PAS de point (canon : dénominateur nul → pas de point).
How to read it
- Read the sign first: above zero the bar spent part of its range above its body and came back down, below zero it did the reverse.
- Read the magnitude second: a value close to the bounds means one side of the bar is almost entirely wick, which is a different bar from one reading 15 or 20.
- Values near zero are ambiguous by construction — they occur both when the two wicks are similar and when the bar is nearly all body — so check the bar itself before concluding balance.
- Repeated strongly positive readings on bars that keep touching the same area describe higher prices being given back several times; that is an observation about where trade stopped, not a direction.
- Gaps in the series are bars that traded at a single price, not a plotting fault.
Parameters and defaults
Smoothing defaults to 1, meaning the raw per-bar value is plotted with no averaging; raising it, up to 200, averages successive readings into a slower series in which sign changes arrive later. Positive color defaults to #ef5350 and Negative color to #26a69a, so upper-wick dominance is tinted the way a rejection from above is usually drawn on a chart.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smoothing | number | 1 | 1 – 200 |
What it does not show
The calculation uses only the four prices of the bar, so it says nothing about volume, delta or whether the wick was built against resting size or simply on a thin print with no one there. The same reading can therefore come from genuine absorption or from a handful of contracts in an illiquid window, and the indicator cannot separate the two. The value also depends entirely on where the bar boundaries fall: the same move cut into different bar sizes produces different wicks and different readings. With smoothing above 1, the series no longer describes the current bar but an average of recent ones, and extreme single-bar readings are flattened.
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
- Session High/Low — Structure & sessions
- Opening Range — Structure & sessions
- IB Extensions — Structure & sessions
- Classic Pivots — Structure & sessions
- Camarilla Pivots — Structure & sessions
- Naked POC — Structure & sessions
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
- How is wick imbalance calculated?
- The upper wick is the high minus the higher of the open and close, and the lower wick is the lower of the open and close minus the low. The indicator subtracts the lower wick from the upper wick, divides by the bar's range and multiplies by 100, which gives a bounded value between −100 and +100. When the high and the low are identical there is no range to divide by, and no point is plotted.
- What does a long upper wick mean on a candle?
- It means price traded above where the bar eventually settled and did not hold there, so the highest prices of the bar were given back before the close. On its own this describes what happened inside the bar; it does not indicate what comes next, and reading the volume and the aggressor side at those prices tells you more than the shape alone.
- Should wick imbalance be smoothed?
- The default of 1 plots each bar's own reading, which is what the formula describes. Raising Smoothing, up to 200, averages consecutive bars: single-bar extremes are flattened and sign changes arrive later. Leave it at 1 to read individual rejections; a higher value answers a different question, about the recent balance of wicks rather than about this bar.