Liquidation Estimates is a two-sided histogram in a separate window on MT4 and MT5. Aqua above the line is estimated long liquidation pressure, red below it is the short side.
The word doing the work in that sentence is estimated, and I'd rather deal with it in the first paragraph than bury it.
There is no liquidation data in MetaTrader
No broker feed carries it. No exchange publishes it to a retail terminal. Any indicator claiming to show you real liquidations on an MT4 chart is showing you something it computed, and the honest question is what it computed from.
This one uses two things a chart does have: the bar's volume, and how far the bar travelled past a chosen reference price.
For the long side it takes the distance from a reference price down to the bar's low, as a fraction of that reference, and multiplies by the bar's volume. For the short side it takes the distance from a reference price up to the bar's high, the same way. A bar with heavy volume that dropped a long way below its opening price scores high on the long side, on the reasoning that a leveraged long position sitting under that move is the one that gets closed out.
That's the whole model. It's a proxy, it's transparent, and knowing exactly what it is tells you precisely how much weight to put on it.
The two sides use different reference prices
This is the part I'd have expected to be symmetric and isn't, and it's deliberate.
Longs Reference Price defaults to the bar's open. Shorts Reference Price defaults to (open + close) / 2.
So the long side asks how far price fell from where the bar started, and the short side asks how far it rose above the bar's midpoint. Nine price sources are available for each, independently: open, close, oc2, hl2, ooc3, occ3, hlc3, ohlc4, hlcc4.
Setting both to the same source gives you a symmetric reading, which is easier to reason about and, on most instruments, a lot less interesting. The asymmetric default exists because a bar's open and its midpoint say different things about where positions were actually taken.
Four modes
Mode changes what the two buffers carry.
Longs/Shorts Liquidations, the default, puts the long estimate up and the short estimate down. That's the picture above, and it's the one to start with.
Total Liquidations adds both sides into a single upward histogram. Useful when you only care that something violent happened, not which side wore it.
Liquidations Dominance plots the difference, so the bar shows only the net and only in the direction that won. Quiet bars nearly vanish, which is the point.
Cumulative Liquidations sums the net over Length cum bars, 100 by default, and plots the running total. This is the slowest of the four and the only one with memory.
Notice the scale on the right of each. Gold's histogram tops out near a thousand, EURUSD's near twenty-three. The number is in volume units multiplied by a price fraction, so it is not comparable between instruments and it is not comparable between timeframes. Only its shape against its own history means anything.
It publishes buffers, which most of this range does not
Two plotted buffers, up and down, with zero as the empty value. iCustom gets you both, so an EA can read the estimate directly and use it as a volatility or exhaustion filter without any chart-object scraping.
That's worth saying plainly because most of the tools I sell are chart-object drawings with nothing readable behind them. This one is the opposite: it's all buffer and no drawing.
| Volume histogram | This | |
|---|---|---|
| What the bar height is | Volume | Volume weighted by how far price travelled past a reference |
| Sides | One | Two, computed from two independently chosen reference prices |
| Modes | One | Four, including a net and a cumulative |
| Readable by an EA | Usually | Yes, two buffers |
| Scale | Comparable across charts | Instrument-specific, shape only |
Where it's weak
It is an estimate and the name is the only warning. There's no liquidation feed behind it. If you need real liquidation data, this is not that and no MetaTrader indicator can be.
On FX, volume is tick volume. The number of price updates, not contracts. It correlates with activity well enough to be useful and it is not turnover. On symbols where the broker publishes real volume the indicator prefers it, and on the majors you're getting ticks.
No alerts of any kind. There's no notification block in this one. It draws, and that's all it does.
No threshold, no normalisation, no signal. Nothing marks a bar as significant. You're reading a shape by eye, and "big spike" is your judgement rather than the tool's.
The lookback is fixed at 1000 bars and isn't an input. Older bars stay empty. On a chart scrolled well back you'll find the histogram simply stops.
Cumulative mode is sensitive to Length cum. It's a plain rolling sum with no decay, so a single violent bar stays inside the window for the full hundred bars and then drops out all at once, which puts a step in the line that isn't a market event.
Every bar in the window is recomputed on every tick. There's no incremental path. On a 1000-bar window that's fine; it is not free, and running several copies on one chart is noticeable.
Questions you'll have
Does Liquidation Estimates repaint? The forming bar's value moves as its volume and range grow, the way any volume histogram does. Closed bars are stable and the loop stops one bar short of the live candle.
Is this real liquidation data? No. MetaTrader has no such feed. It's an estimate built from each bar's volume and how far the bar travelled past a reference price, and the formula is described above so you can judge it.
Why are the long and short sides using different prices by default? Because they're asking different questions: the long side measures the fall from the bar's open, the short side the rise above its midpoint. Set both to the same source if you want a symmetric reading.
What do the numbers on the scale mean? Volume multiplied by a price fraction. They're not currency, not contracts, and not comparable between symbols or timeframes. Read the shape against the chart's own history.
Which mode should I use? Start with Longs/Shorts. Dominance is the clearest for spotting one-sided bars. Cumulative is the only one with memory and the only one where Length cum matters.
Why does the histogram stop partway back? The lookback is fixed at 1000 bars.
Does it have alerts? No. This one draws only.
Can an EA read it? Yes. Two plotted buffers, up and down, so iCustom gets both sides.
Best timeframe? M15 to H4. It's a per-bar measurement, so it works anywhere, but on D1 there are too few bars for the shape to say much.
MT4? Both platforms are included, one download each. Same formula, same four modes, same two buffers.
Support
Send me a message with a screenshot, the symbol and the timeframe, and I'll tell you what the tool was doing on that bar.
Analysis tool. It places no trades and makes no profitability claim. Past price behaviour is not a guide to future price behaviour.