Gann HiLo Activator

What is the Gann HiLo Activator?

The Gann HiLo Activator is a trailing trend line built from two simple moving averages: one of the highs and one of the lows, each over a short lookback (3 periods is the common default). While the market is in an up state, the indicator plots the smoothed lows beneath price as trailing support; a close below that line flips the state, and the indicator switches to plotting the smoothed highs above price as trailing resistance. The result is a stepped line that hugs one side of price at a time and swaps sides only on a close through it.

Despite the name, it does not come from W.D. Gann's own writings. Robert Krausz introduced it in the 1990s as part of his Gann-inspired swing-trading work, and it has since become a standard alternative to volatility-based trailers such as Supertrend: it keys off smoothed highs and lows rather than an ATR multiple, so its distance from price adapts to recent bar range instead of an explicit volatility term.

How traders use it

• As a trend-state switch: long bias while closes hold above the low-side line, short or flat once a close flips it, the same flip logic used with Parabolic SAR but without an acceleration factor.
• As a trailing stop: the active line is a ready-made stop location that moves with the smoothed highs or lows, one of several families in the trailing-method taxonomy.
• As a filter for faster entry triggers: signals are only taken in the direction of the current HiLo state, with the lookback lengthened to slow the flips on noisy symbols.