Grover Llorens Activator [alexgrover & Lucía Llorens]

Trailing stops play a key role in technical analysis and are extremely popular trend following indicators. Their main strength lie in their ability to minimize whipsaws while conserving a decent reactivity, the most popular ones include the Supertrend, Parabolic SAR and Gann Hilo activator. However, and like many indicators, most trailing stops assume an infinitely long trend, which penalize their ability to provide early exit points, this isn't the case of the parabolic SAR who take this into account and thus converge toward the price at an increasing speed the longer a trend last.

Today a similar indicator is proposed. From an original idea of alexgrover & Lucía Llorens who wanted to revisit the classic parabolic SAR indicator, the Llorens activator aim to converge toward the price the longer a trend persist, thus allowing for potential early and accurate exit points. The code make use of the idea behind the price curve channel that you can find here :

I tried to make the code as concise as possible.

The Indicator

The indicator posses 2 user settings, length and mult, length control the rate of convergence of the indicator, with higher values of length making the indicator output converge more slowly toward the price. Mult is also related with the rate of convergence, basically once the price cross the trailing stop its value will become equal to the previous trailing stop value plus/minus mult*atr depending on the previous trailing stop value, therefore higher values of mult will require more time for the trailing stop to reach the closing price, use higher values of mult if you want to avoid potential whipsaws.

Above the indicator with slow convergence time (high length) and low mult.

Points with early exit points are highlighted.

Usage For Oscillators

The difference between the closing price and an overlay indicator can provide an oscillator with characteristics depending on the indicators used for differencing, Lucía Llorens stated that we should find indicators for differencing that highlight the cycles in the price, in other terms : Price - Signal, where we want to find Signal such that we maximize the visibility of the cycles, it can be demonstrated that in the case where the closing price is an additive model : Trend + Cycles + Noise, the zero lag estimation of the Trend component can allow for the conservation of the cycle and noise component, that is : Price - Estimate(Trend), for example the difference between the price and moving average isn't optimal because of the moving average lag, instead the use of zero lag moving averages is more suitable, however the proposed indicator allow for a surprisingly good representation of the cycles when using differencing.

The normalization of this oscillator (via the RSI) allow to make the peak amplitude of the cycles more constant. Note however that such method can return an output with a sign inverse to the one of the original cycle component.

Conclusion

We proposed an indicator which share the logic of the SAR indicator, that is using convergence toward the price in order to provide early exit points detection. We have seen that this indicator can be used to highlight cycles when used for differencing and i don't exclude publishing more indicators based on this method.

Lucía Llorens has been a great person to work with, and provided enormous feedback and support while i was coding the indicator, this is why i include her in the indicator name as well as copyright notice. I hope we can make more indicators togethers in the future.

(altho i was against using buy/sells labels xD !)

Thanks for reading !

Release Notes:

- Removed barssince/crossover/under/valuewhen functions from ts in order to avoid unexpected behaviors.
- Changed plot style for cleaner plot.

Thx @LucF

Release Notes:

fixed repainting issues without heavy alterations of the indicator