EquiVolume

What is EquiVolume?

EquiVolume is a charting style introduced by Richard W. Arms Jr. in his 1971 book Profits in Volume. Arms, also known for the Arms Index (TRIN), wanted volume moved out of a separate pane and into the price plot itself: each period is drawn as a box whose height spans the high-to-low range and whose width is proportional to the period's volume, so heavy-participation bars print wide and quiet bars print narrow. The CandleVolume variant keeps candlestick open-close bodies while borrowing the volume-scaled width.

Reading the chart is an exercise in effort versus result. A tall, wide box (Arms called it a power box) is range with participation, the signature of a move with real backing. A tall, narrow box is movement on thin trade, easier to unwind. A short, wide box is heavy volume that went nowhere, which near the edge of a move often reads as absorption and precedes some turns, though not reliably enough to trade on its own. Widths are relative to recent bars, so the same volume prints differently in different eras of the chart.

EquiVolume belongs with the alternative bar types that re-encode the chart rather than adding an indicator. Renko discards time and volume to isolate price movement; Heikin Ashi recomputes bar values to smooth the read; EquiVolume keeps every period and its prices intact but lets participation set the geometry. The cost is a distorted x-axis: horizontal distance measures traded activity, not elapsed time, so a busy session occupies more width than a quiet week, time-anchored tools plot unevenly, and the horizontal axis no longer behaves like conventional chart scales.

EquiVolume survives as a specialist lens. Few platforms ship it natively, so it is usually reproduced with custom scripts, such as LuxAlgo's EquiVolume on TradingView, which draw volume-scaled boxes on the chart. Users consult it for specific questions, whether a breakout had participation, whether a rally is thinning, whether heavy trade at an extreme went nowhere, and keep a conventional chart alongside for session context, a version of top-down analysis across chart representations rather than timeframes.

How to Read an EquiVolume Chart

Identification is about decoding the boxes once the chart type is applied:

1. 1Apply the EquiVolume chart type or script; price bars become rectangles and the separate volume pane disappears.
2. 2Read height as the period's high-to-low range and width as its volume relative to recent bars.
3. 3Scan for tall, wide power boxes: the bars where range and participation arrived together.
4. 4Note short, wide boxes at swing extremes: heavy trade without progress, a candidate for exhaustion.
5. 5Watch box widths shrink as a consolidation matures, then judge the resolution bar's width against them.
6. 6Remember the x-axis is activity, not time: check timestamps before assuming equal spacing means equal duration.

How traders use it

• To qualify breakouts: a breakout printing wide boxes shows participation behind the move, while narrow boxes flag a thin push that convention reads as more failure-prone, the box-width version of checking volume at the breakout.
• To spot climactic turns: short, wide boxes after an extended run mark heavy two-sided trade with little progress, a classic exhaustion candidate that still needs price confirmation before acting.
• To watch consolidations mature: boxes that narrow as a range develops show volume drying up, useful context for judging whether a resolution attempt has fuel behind it.
• To grade trend health: impulse bars printing wide while pullbacks print narrow show participation aligned with direction; widening pullback boxes are an early warning worth cross-checking with a trend/range classifier.
• To anchor discretionary volume reads: box geometry makes effort versus result visible at a glance, harder to ignore than a histogram at the bottom of the chart and easier to audit in hindsight.

EquiVolume vs related concepts