Anchored Darvas Box

## ANCHORED DARVAS BOX

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### OVERVIEW
**Anchored Darvas Box** lets you drop a single timestamp on your chart and build a Darvas-style consolidation zone forward from that exact candle. The indicator freezes the first user-defined number of bars to establish the range, verifies that price respects that range for another user-defined number of bars, then waits for the first decisive breakout. The resulting rectangle captures every tick of the accumulation phase and the exact moment of expansion—no manual drawing, complete timestamp precision.

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### HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Nicolas Darvas’s 1950s box theory tracked institutional accumulation by hand-drawing rectangles around tight price ranges. A trade was triggered only when price escaped the rectangle.
The anchored version preserves Darvas’s logic but pins the entire sequence to a user-chosen candle: perfect for analysing a market open, an earnings release, FOMC minute, or any other catalytic bar.

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### ALGORITHM DETAIL

1. **ANCHOR BAR**
*You provide a timestamp via the settings panel.* The script waits until the chart reaches that bar and records its index as **startBar**.

2. **RANGE DEFINITION — BARS 1-7**
• `rangeHigh` = highest high of bars 1-7 plus optional tolerance.
• `rangeLow` = lowest low of bars 1-7 minus optional tolerance.

3. **RANGE VALIDATION — BARS 8-14**
• Price must stay inside `[rangeLow, rangeHigh]`.
• Any violation aborts the test; no box is created.

4. **ARMED STATE**
• If bars 8-14 hold the range, two live guide-lines appear:
– **Green** at `rangeHigh`
– **Red** at `rangeLow`
• The script is now “armed,” waiting indefinitely for the first true breakout.

5. **BREAKOUT & BOX CREATION**
• **Up breakout** =`high > rangeHigh` → rectangle drawn in **green**.
• **Down breakout**=`low < rangeLow` → rectangle drawn in **red**.
• Box extends from **startBar** to the breakout bar and never updates again.
• Optional labels print the dollar and percentage height of the box at its left edge.

6. **OPTIONAL COOLDOWN**
• After the box is painted the script can stay silent for a user-defined number of bars, letting you study the fallout without another range immediately arming on top of it.

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### INPUT PARAMETERS

• **ANCHOR TIME** – Precise yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS that seeds the sequence.
• **BARS TO DEFINE RANGE** – Default 7; affects both definition and validation windows.
• **OPTIONAL TOLERANCE** – Absolute price buffer to ignore micro-wicks.
• **COOLDOWN BARS AFTER BREAKOUT** – Pause length before the indicator is allowed to re-anchor (set to zero to disable).
• **SHOW BOX DISTANCE LABELS** – Toggle to print Δ\$ and Δ% on every completed box.

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### USER WORKFLOW

1. Add the indicator, open settings, and set **ANCHOR TIME** to the candle you care about (e.g., “2025-04-23 09:30:00” for NYSE open).
2. Watch live as the script:
– Paints the seven-bar range.
– Draws validation lines.
– Locks in the box on breakout.
3. Use the box boundaries as structural stops, targets, or context for further trades.

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### PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

• **OPENING RANGE BREAKOUTS** – Anchor at the first second of the session; capture the initial 7-bar range and trade the first clean break.
• **EVENT STUDIES** – Anchor at a news candle to measure immediate post-event volatility.
• **VOLUME PROFILE FUSION** – Combine the anchored box with VPVR to see if the breakout occurs at a high-volume node or a low-liquidity pocket.
• **RISK DISCIPLINE** – Stop-loss can sit just inside the opposite edge of the anchored range, enforcing objective risk.

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### ADVANCED CUSTOMISATION IDEAS

• **MULTIPLE ANCHORS** – Clone the indicator and anchor several boxes (e.g., London open, New York open).
• **DYNAMIC WINDOW** – Switch the 7-bar fixed length to a volatility-scaled length (ATR percentile).
• **STRATEGY WRAPPER** – Turn the indicator into a `strategy{}` script and back-test anchored boxes on decades of data.

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### FINAL THOUGHTS
Anchored Darvas Boxes give you Darvas’s timeless range-break methodology anchored to any candle of interest—perfect for dissecting openings, economic releases, or your own bespoke “important” bars with laboratory precision.