Bulls Power and Bears Power: Reading the Tug of War

Bulls Power and Bears Power are a pair of momentum indicators developed by Alexander Elder, the trader and author best known for popularizing the idea that price action is really a tug of war between buyers ("bulls") and sellers ("bears"). Rather than plotting one line, the indicator draws two separate histograms around a shared Moving Average: Bulls Power measures how far buyers managed to push price above that average during a bar, and Bears Power measures how far sellers managed to push it below. Read together, the two histograms give a direct, numeric answer to the question every trader is really asking on every bar — who's actually winning the fight right now, and by how much.

How Bulls Power and Bears Power Are Calculated

Both indicators start from the same reference point: a 13-period Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of the closing price, the same default period Elder used when he introduced the tool. From there the two calculations split:

• Bulls Power = High − EMA. It takes the bar's high — the single furthest point buyers managed to reach — and subtracts the EMA. A large positive number means buyers pushed price well above the average during that bar; a small or negative number means they barely got above it, or didn't at all.
• Bears Power = Low − EMA. It takes the bar's low — the furthest point sellers managed to drag price down to — and subtracts the EMA. A large negative number means sellers pulled price well below the average; a small negative or positive number means they made little headway.

Because both values are anchored to the same EMA, they're directly comparable bar to bar: the EMA acts as the "line of consensus" for recent price, and Bulls/Bears Power simply measure how far each side managed to stretch price away from that consensus before the bar closed. This is also why the indicator is sometimes described as EMA-based rather than a standalone oscillator — its entire reading only makes sense relative to whatever the underlying moving average is doing.

Reading the Two Histograms Together

In a healthy uptrend, Bulls Power is typically positive and often growing — buyers are consistently pushing the high of each bar above the EMA. Bears Power, meanwhile, is usually still negative even in that same uptrend, just shrinking toward zero — sellers still manage to drag the low a little below the average on most bars, but less and less as the trend strengthens. That combination — strong positive Bulls Power alongside mild, fading negative Bears Power — is the classic "healthy uptrend" fingerprint. The mirror image (deeply negative Bears Power, mild positive Bulls Power) reads the same way for a downtrend.

The diagram above shows this fingerprint directly: the green Bulls Power bars above the zero line and the red Bears Power bars below it, both plotted against the price-and-EMA panel they're derived from. Watch how the two histograms move relative to each other rather than in isolation — a trend where both bars are shrinking toward zero at the same time is a trend running out of conviction on both sides, even before price itself shows any obvious reversal.

Entry Conditions

The custom indicator on this page doesn't try to score every possible Bulls/Bears Power pattern — it watches for one specific, mechanical event: a full zero-line cross, which Elder's original writing treats as a sign that one side has completely lost its grip on the market.

• Bears Power crosses from negative to positive — this means even the low of the bar closed above the EMA. Sellers couldn't drag price below the average at all during that bar, a sign they've lost control entirely. Treated as a bullish signal.
• Bulls Power crosses from positive to negative — this means even the high of the bar closed below the EMA. Buyers couldn't push price above the average at all, a sign they've lost control entirely. Treated as a bearish signal.

These are deliberately strict conditions — a partial fade in Bears Power (say, from -40 to -5) doesn't fire anything, only the moment it actually crosses zero. That strictness is the point: a full cross is rarer and more decisive than a gradual shrink, so it filters out a lot of the noisy back-and-forth the two histograms produce during an ordinary trend. The trade-off is the same one every zero-cross signal makes — by the time the cross confirms, the underlying shift in buyer/seller balance has usually already been building for several bars.

Parameters

• Period_ — default 13. The EMA period both Bulls Power and Bears Power measure against. A shorter period tracks a faster-moving average, so both histograms swing further from zero more often (more signals, more noise); a longer period smooths the reference line, making zero-crosses rarer but generally more meaningful — the same speed-versus-reliability trade-off covered in the Moving Average lesson.
• EnableAlert — default true. Pops up an on-chart Alert box the moment a zero-cross fires.
• EnablePush — default false. Sends a push notification to the MetaTrader mobile app on the same event, useful for traders who aren't watching the chart live.

An Alternative Reading: Divergence Against Price

The zero-cross above is the mechanical signal the included alert code actually watches for, but it isn't the only way traders read Bulls Power and Bears Power — divergence against price is arguably the more common interpretation among Elder's own followers. If price makes a new high but Bulls Power makes a lower high than its previous peak, that's a warning that buyers pushed less forcefully on this rally than the last one, even though price nominally went further — a classic bearish divergence. The mirror version applies to Bears Power: if price makes a new low but Bears Power makes a shallower low than before, sellers are running out of steam even as price technically extends the decline. Neither pattern requires a zero-cross at all — the divergence can form entirely on one side of the zero line, which makes it earlier-warning but also more subjective than the crossover, since "lower high" and "shallower low" are judgment calls rather than a hard threshold.

Bulls/Bears Power vs Alligator: Two Ways to Use an EMA

Bulls Power and Bears Power and the Alligator both build their entire reading around a moving average, but they use that average for very different jobs. The Alligator uses three offset Smoothed Moving Averages purely to classify the market state — sleeping (ranging) versus awake (trending) — and says nothing about the specific push-and-pull happening within any single bar. Bulls Power and Bears Power do the opposite: they ignore market state entirely and instead measure, bar by bar, exactly how far each side stretched price away from one EMA. In practice the two pair well together — the Alligator can confirm a trend is actually underway before a Bulls/Bears Power zero-cross is trusted, while Bulls/Bears Power adds a finer-grained read of conviction that a slow-moving three-line fan can't offer on its own.

A Word of Caution

Bulls Power and Bears Power are, like any EMA-based tool, inherently lagging — the reference average smooths past price, so both histograms describe what buyers and sellers already did on a closed bar, not what they're about to do next. The zero-cross signal in particular can arrive late in a strong move, since a decisive shift in control tends to have been building for several bars before the actual cross prints. The indicator also says nothing about broader market context on its own — a zero-cross during a tight range (see Trend vs Range) is far less trustworthy than the same cross after a clean trending move, since ranging markets can flip both histograms back and forth across zero repeatedly without a real change in direction ever taking hold. As with any single indicator, treat a Bulls/Bears Power signal as one input alongside price structure, volatility context from a tool like ATR, and your own risk management — never as a standalone trigger to enter a trade.

Download the Indicator

This custom indicator plots Bulls Power and Bears Power as two histograms against a zero line, with automatic alerts when either side loses control (crosses zero). It's available for both MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 below.

How to Install — MetaTrader 4

1. Download the bulls-bears-power-alert.mq4 file below.
2. Open MetaTrader 4 → click File → Open Data Folder.
3. Place the file in the MQL4/Indicators folder.
4. Restart MetaTrader 4, then drag the indicator from the Navigator window onto the chart.

How to Install — MetaTrader 5

1. Download the bulls-bears-power-alert.mq5 file below.
2. Open MetaTrader 5 → click File → Open Data Folder.
3. Place the file in the MQL5/Indicators folder.
4. Restart MetaTrader 5, then drag the indicator from the Navigator window onto the chart.

Both files are source code — open and review the full code before using it, for your own safety.