Arrow Signals is a free, instant-download MT5 chart-window indicator by Vladimir Mametov that plots a period-block trend channel directly on price, with dedicated Buy and Sell arrows firing exactly on the bar where price breaks out of that channel. It’s built around a slightly unusual idea worth understanding before you use it: instead of a rolling bar-count lookback, its channel is anchored to the boundaries of a higher period — a 4-hour block, a trading day, a week — rather than a fixed number of the chart’s own bars.

How the Channel Is Actually Built

The indicator’s own isDelimeter() function walks backward through price history looking for the start of a higher-period “block”: on an M1-M20 chart that’s the top of every hour, on M30/H1/H2/H3 it’s every 4-hour mark, on H4/H6/H8/H12 it’s the start of each trading day, and on D1 it’s the start of each week. The AverageHigh() and AverageLow() functions then average together the highest-high and lowest-low of the last iPeriod of those higher-period blocks (not the last iPeriod raw bars), producing the smoothed HH and LL values the channel is built from.

For every bar, the indicator compares the current close against that averaged HH/LL: a close above HH starts (or continues) an uptrend and plots the TrendUp line at the LL level; a close below LL starts (or continues) a downtrend and plots TrendDown at the HH level. When price sits between the two, the indicator simply carries forward whichever trend was already active. The moment a fresh TrendUp value appears where the prior bar had none, a DodgerBlue “Buy trend_arrows signal” arrow is plotted at that same level — and the mirror case, a fresh TrendDown appearing where the prior bar had none, plots a DarkOrange “Sell trend_arrows signal” arrow.

How to Read the Chart

• Blue TrendUp line — the market is in an up-phase relative to the averaged higher-period low; this line sits below price as a trailing reference.
• Red TrendDown line — the market is in a down-phase relative to the averaged higher-period high; this line sits above price as a trailing reference.
• DodgerBlue arrow — marks the exact bar where the channel flipped from a down-phase to an up-phase (a fresh TrendUp appearing after none the bar before) — the indicator’s buy signal.
• DarkOrange arrow — marks the exact bar where the channel flipped from an up-phase to a down-phase — the indicator’s sell signal.

Because the underlying channel is rebuilt from higher-period blocks rather than raw bars, the arrows tend to fire less often than a typical bar-by-bar crossover system, and each flip represents a break of a fairly meaningful reference level rather than routine noise.

Input Parameters (Actual Defaults From the Code)

• iPeriod = 15 — how many higher-period blocks are averaged together to build the HH/LL channel. A smaller value makes the channel track more recent blocks only and react faster; a larger value smooths it out and delays flips.
• iFullPeriods = 1 — controls whether the most recent (still-forming) higher-period block is included in the average (1) or excluded in favor of only fully-closed blocks (0), which changes how the divisor in the averaging formula is applied.
• Shift = 0 — shifts all four plotted series left or right on the chart by this many bars; purely visual, it does not change the underlying calculation.

Why the “Block” Design Matters

Most trend-channel indicators simply average the last N raw bars, which means the channel’s meaning shifts depending on what timeframe you’re viewing — 20 bars on M5 covers a very different span than 20 bars on H4. By anchoring to isDelimeter() boundaries instead, Arrow Signals is trying to give the channel a more consistent real-world meaning: on an H1 chart it’s averaging a fixed number of 4-hour sessions, and on an H4 chart it’s averaging a fixed number of trading days, regardless of how many raw bars happen to fall inside each block. That’s also why the code needs its own custom block-detection function rather than relying on a simple bar-count input — it has to work out, from the actual timestamps, where each higher-period boundary falls for whatever timeframe it’s attached to.

Honest Limitations

Because the channel is built from higher-period blocks rather than the chart’s own bars, Arrow Signals needs a meaningful stretch of history before it can plot anything — with the default iPeriod of 15, it has to locate 15 full higher-period boundaries first, which on a daily chart alone means roughly 15 weeks of prior data. The indicator also carries no built-in alerts or notifications; reading it is purely visual, via the line color and the arrow markers. And because a signal only fires on a genuine channel flip rather than on every price swing, it will feel quieter and slower than a typical arrow-scalping tool — it’s better suited to swing-style position management than to fast intraday scalping.