Even-better Sinewave

What is the Even-Better Sinewave?

The even-better sinewave is a John Ehlers indicator, published in Cycle Analytics for Traders (2013) as an improvement on his earlier sinewave indicator. It filters price to a chosen wavelength band, smooths the result, and then normalizes it by its own recent power so the output is confined between roughly -1 and +1. The name reflects the design goal: a cleaner, more usable wave than the original sinewave construction.

Its distinguishing behavior is how it treats trends. Most cycle oscillators become unreliable when the market stops cycling; the even-better sinewave instead saturates, pinning near +1 in sustained uptrends and near -1 in sustained downtrends, while oscillating through the range when the market is actually swinging. That makes it unusual among Ehlers tools: it is often read as a trend indicator built from cycle machinery rather than a pure cycle timer.

The construction chain is characteristic Ehlers DSP: a high-pass filter removes components slower than the selected duration, a smoother such as the Ehlers SuperSmoother removes the fast noise, and the normalization step divides the smoothed wave by the square root of its average power. Because the normalization is local, the indicator adapts its amplitude automatically, without the fixed overbought and oversold levels that conventional oscillators need.

How it's calculated

The standard form published by Ehlers, with the wave and power computed over the three most recent filtered values:

Implementations differ in the order and exact coefficients of the high-pass and smoothing stages; the wave-over-root-power normalization is the defining step.

How traders use it

• Trend-mode reading: values pinned near +1 or -1 for many consecutive bars are taken as confirmation of an established trend, and traders stay with trend-following tactics until the reading leaves the extreme.
• Swing timing: when the line oscillates through its range instead of saturating, crossings away from the extremes are used as swing entries, in the same spirit as the original sinewave indicator.
• Regime filter: some traders use it purely as a switch, enabling trend systems while it is saturated and mean-reversion systems while it cycles, similar in intent to other trend-versus-range classifiers.
• The duration input matters: it sets which wavelengths count as signal. Choosing it badly filters out the very swings being traded, and estimates from dominant cycle measurement can help but carry their own error.
• Like all normalized oscillators it says nothing about the size of a move, and rapid regime flips can produce a saturated reading just before a reversal.

Even-better sinewave vs related concepts