Concept
TD Pressure
TD Pressure is a Momentum & Oscillators concept. A reference entry: the Library explains it rather than implements it.
What is TD Pressure?
TD Pressure is a DeMark oscillator that estimates the buying or selling pressure behind price movement rather than the movement alone. At a high level, it combines each bar's price action with the volume transacted, on the logic that a move made on heavy participation carries more information than the same move on thin trade.
That construction places it among volume-conditioned momentum gauges rather than pure price oscillators. A tool like ROC asks only how far price traveled; TD Pressure asks who showed up to move it. Its nearest conceptual neighbors are Balance of Power, which reads intrabar pressure from price structure alone, and volume-conditioned hybrids such as Volume-weighted MACD.
It is read like other pressure oscillators: extreme readings flag one-sided aggression that tends not to sustain indefinitely, and a price extreme that the pressure reading declines to confirm warns that the move is running on reduced participation, the same logic as a regular divergence on a momentum oscillator.
Why there's no indicator for this
The precise construction, meaning how pressure is scored, accumulated, and smoothed before it becomes a reading, is DeMark Analytics methodology, licensed rather than published in full. Descriptions in print are general, and community reconstructions fill the gaps with guesses that differ from script to script. A faithful TD Pressure requires the licensed specification, available through DeMark licensees such as Bloomberg and through Symbolik, so the Library documents the study rather than approximating it.
There is also a data caveat any volume-based study inherits: it needs trustworthy volume. On centralized markets that is straightforward; on spot forex and other fragmented venues, only tick volume or partial volume exists, so any pressure reading there is built on a proxy for participation rather than the thing itself.
How traders use it
- Conviction checks on breakouts: a range break accompanied by a strong pressure reading is trusted more than one the study barely registers.
- Divergence monitoring: new price highs with fading pressure readings are treated as evidence of thinning demand, sometimes an earlier warning than close-based momentum tools provide.
- Exhaustion context: extreme one-sided readings serve as background conditions for fade setups, typically alongside exhaustion counts or an overbought/oversold oscillator reading.
- Isolating volume's contribution: comparing TD Pressure against a price-only analog shows whether volume is confirming or contradicting what price alone suggests.
TD Pressure vs adjacent gauges
Balance of Power: Both read intrabar buying versus selling pressure, but Balance of Power uses price structure alone while TD Pressure conditions its reading on volume, so they can disagree when price drifts on thin participation.
Volume-weighted MACD: Both fold volume into a momentum framework. VW-MACD volume-weights a trend-following crossover tool; TD Pressure is an oscillator aimed at conviction and exhaustion reads.
Related concepts · Exhaustion-count cluster (DeMark)
Concept family
Momentum & Oscillators
91 concepts mapped · 72 in the Library
TD Pressure FAQ
What data does TD Pressure use?
Price behavior within each bar combined with the volume transacted. That pairing is the point: it aims to measure the aggression behind movement, not just its direction.
Is TD Pressure a momentum indicator or a volume indicator?
Both, in the sense that it is a momentum-style oscillator whose inputs are volume-conditioned. It belongs to the broad family of buying and selling pressure gauges rather than to pure price oscillators.
Does TD Pressure work on forex?
Only with a caveat: spot forex has no consolidated volume, so implementations lean on tick volume as a stand-in. Readings there measure activity, which often tracks participation but is not identical to it.
How is it different from Balance of Power?
Balance of Power infers pressure from bar structure alone, with no volume input. TD Pressure weights intrabar behavior by volume, and its precise construction is part of DeMark Analytics' licensed methodology.
Build TD Pressure your way.
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