This Upgraded Supertrend Indicator Crushes Choppy Markets (Free & Open Source)

Supertrend. It is one of the most popular old indicators out there that you can find on every charting platform and for good reason because it beautifully displays if the markets are currently in an up or down trend. However, as with most older indicators, it tries to use one setting for every market regime and often totally fails, especially in choppy markets. So, I thought it's about time to give this indicator a complete overhaul. In this video, I will talk about the following. I will explain what the classic Supertrend is and what the three structural weaknesses are, the three layers I tried to implement to get rid of these weaknesses, how the indicator settings works, how it to use the indicator for trading, and finally why also my version of Supertrend is not a crystal ball, but a tool for confluence. As with most of my indicators, my modern adaptive Supertrend is 100% free and open source available for you on TradingView. You will find a link in the description and pin comment of this video. All I ask in return is that you leave me a like, subscribe to my channel, and especially leave a little comment underneath the video so the YouTube algorithm can continue to work its magic. Thank you. I very much appreciate your support. At its core, Supertrend is a volatility-based trailing stop. It measures how the market is moving around using something called average true range or short ATR. Then it draws a line that distance away from price. When price is above the line, the line sits underneath in green and it is calling an uptrend. When price closes below, the line jumps above price, turns red, and it is calling a downtrend. So, it basically just tries to answer one simple question. Are we trending up or down right now? And that simplicity is exactly why it got so popular. Think about what it gives you. It is a visual. You can read it in half a second. It works on any market and any timeframe. It has basically one setting most people never touch, and it never leaves you guessing about its bias. Green or red? Up or down? For a tool that takes 10 seconds to understand, that's a lot of value. So, no surprise it ended up on millions of charts. But, the same simplicity that made it popular is also where the problems live. There are three structural weaknesses, and once you see them, you cannot unsee them. One, the distance never changes. The line always sits at the same number of ATRs away from price. No matter what the market is doing. A strong clean trend and a messy sideways move get treated exactly the same. In a trend, the distance can be too tight and kick you out early. In choppy markets, it becomes basically useless as it cannot it identify a ranging market. Two, the speed never changes. It reacts at one fixed pace whenever the market is fast or slow. It cannot tell the difference. Three, and this is the big one. It flips on a single touch. One wick through the line and the trend flips. Then the next bar flips it back again. That back and forth in the middle of a range is the thing everybody screenshots and complains about when it comes to Supertrend. When you run the classic Supertrend as a always-in system, long when it's green, short when it's red, on the one-hour and below it bleeds out. It only holds up at the four-hour and above where the trends are big enough to pay for all these flips. So, my task when starting to build a modernized version of Supertrends was simple on paper. Fix the whipsaw to make it more stable in ranging markets. I added three layers, which each one being optional, and I tested each one on its own so I could see exactly what it was contributing to not fool myself. Layer one, the commit filter. This is the one that did most work. It stopped super trend flipping on a single touch. Now price has to actually commit. It has to close past the line by real margin, about half an ATR, not just tag it and bounce back. That one change cut the false flips by roughly 60%. Same trend read, but with far less noise. Layer two, the adaptive distance. I made the band react to the market instead of sitting at a fixed width. When the market is trending cleanly, the band moves wider so it holds the move and stops getting shaken out. When the market is chopping sideways, it also moves wider because a tight band in chop is a whipsaw machine. The only place it tightens up is the transition, right when a new move is starting. Because that is exactly when you want it responsive. And it measures trending versus chopping against the market's own recent behavior, not against a fixed number, so it can auto adapt to the current market regime in a more flexible way. Layer three is the one that cost me the most headache because it did not work. I also tried making the speed adaptive, letting the look back brief with a market's rhythm. After I built and tested it, it really didn't add anything. On crypto, the underlying rhythm turned out to be basically stable. So adaptive just gave us a slightly slower copy of the same indicator. It disagreed with the simple version on about 5% of bars and traded no better. I, however, left it in the settings so you can experiment with it yourself. Maybe you can come up with a solution on how to make it work that I did not see. Let's look at the difference between the classic super trend and my modern adaptive super trend on this chart. You can see at glance that it gives you a much cleaner read of which way the trend is actually pointing. Let me walk you through the settings without drowning you in too much math. The presets switch is the main control. You can get classic, modern, and custom. Classic is the textbook super trend unchanged for comparison. Modern is the default and is the one I recommend to use. Custom is if you want to turn individual layers on and off yourself. The modern setting adjusts itself to your time frame. So, you do not have to experiment with the settings yourself. On the 1-hour and below, it runs both the adaptive distance and the commit filter. Above the 1-hour, it runs the commit filter only and drops the adaptive distance. Why? Because at higher time frames, the classical distance already works fine and the extra layer did not earn its place in testing. So, I took it out there because this is what the data told me. If you go into custom, the knobs that matters are simple. There's how much wider the band goes in a trend and how much wider it goes in a shop. There's the commit buffer, how far past the line it has to close before it flips. Set to about half an ATR by default. And there's persistence, how many bars it has to hold before the flip counts. The defaults are what I tested and they generally work well for most assets. Display is straightforward. Colored line, an optional fill, and flip markers. There's also an optional regime label that shows you what the indicator is thinking, whether it sees trend or chop. That is off by default to to your chart clean, but feel free to turn it on if you want more details shared by the indicator. Alerts, you get a flip up alert, a flip down alert, and a webhook option if you want to wire into something automated. One thing I want to be very clear about before you go and start trading with my modern adaptive supertrend. This is not a full trading system. Do not trade just based on what this indicator tells you. On direction, this indicator's right about 48% of the time, which is basically a coin flip. Supertrend does not predict where price is going, it follows where price has been. The modern version follows it with less noise, but it is not forecasting anything. So, how do you actually use it? As one layer of confluence. Let me show you what I mean by this. On this Bitcoin 5-minute chart, I am using my modern adaptive supertrend, my modern adaptive MACD, plus my standard deviation channel 4X. All of these are available for free on TradingView. You can find them under scripts on my profile page there. On June 17th, 2026, at about 6:25, the MACD showed a bearish divergence while price was was trading around the plus two sigma level of the standard deviation. So, I placed a market sell with a tight stop just above the last local high, and a take profit target of 2R, meaning that should my take profit hit, I would earn twice as much as I had to risk. Watch how the market continued after that. Supertrend eventually also flipped red, confirming that the market bias was dropping towards bearish, which gave me an additional boost in confidence for this trade as three layers of confluence were now aligning. Bearish divergence from the MACD, the signal from the MACD being at mathematically important point, the plus two sigma of a standard deviation channel, plus eventually super trend also flipping to bearish. A little while later, my take profits was hit. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about confluence. Multiple tools lining up and telling you the same story instead of just uh using one tool and hoping that it's the holy grail of trading. My suggestion is to experiment a little bit with this indicator and see whether or not it adds a layer of confluence to your own trading style. As the indicator is open source, also feel free to change the code in any way you want to adapt it more to your own trading style. If you enjoyed this video, I would appreciate it if you leave me a like and subscribe to my channel. I publish new videos about trading, indicators, and quantitative trading stuff every week. See you in the next video.