Support and Resistance AI, on MT4 and MT5, doesn't look for swing highs. It takes the last 252 closing prices, sorts them into three to five clusters, and puts a level at the centre of each one.
That sounds like a small difference from a pivot-based tool. It isn't. A pivot tool finds the places price turned. This finds the places price stayed, and those are usually not the same prices.
Where the levels come from
The routine is k-means, run fresh on each new bar over the training window.
It starts with k guesses, assigns every close in the window to the nearest one, moves each guess to the mean of the prices assigned to it, and repeats until the guesses stop moving by more than a hundredth of a point. On 252 closes that settles in a handful of passes.
Two things about the implementation matter to you.
The starting guesses are fixed, not random. They're read off specific bars in the window: one at 2% back, then one at each even fraction of the window. Textbook k-means seeds randomly and can land on a different answer each run, which on a chart would mean levels that shift when nothing about the market changed. Here the same chart with the same settings always converges to the same levels.
Only closes go in. Highs and lows are ignored completely. So a spike that pierced a level and got rejected within the hour contributes nothing, while an hour that opened and closed inside a range contributes a full data point. If your levels are meant to catch wick hunts, this is the wrong tool. If they're meant to mark where price is comfortable, it's the right one.
The density column is the reason to use it
The panel in the corner lists each cluster with a percentage. That's the share of the training window whose closes belonged to that cluster.
In the chart above, the bottom cluster holds 48.4% of the window and the top one holds 14.7%. Both are drawn. Only one of them is where this market has actually been living.
That number is the thing no ordinary support and resistance indicator gives you. A line is a line; every level on a normal chart claims the same authority. Here you can see that the level you were about to trade is the one price visited briefly on the way somewhere else.
The band is not decoration
Each level carries a box, and the box is one standard deviation of the prices inside that cluster.
A tight band means the closes in that cluster were packed together, so the level is sharp and a break through it means something. A wide band means the cluster is really a region, and expecting a precise reaction at the centre line is expecting too much. Turn the bands off and you lose that distinction entirely, which is why they ship on.
| Pivot-based S/R | This | |
|---|---|---|
| What defines a level | A swing high or low | The centre of a cluster of closes |
| Number of levels | However many pivots exist | Exactly k, between three and five |
| Level strength | Touch count, if anything | Percentage of the window in that cluster |
| Level width | A line | A band of one standard deviation |
| Wicks | Usually the whole point | Ignored entirely |
What it doesn't draw
No history. On every new bar the tool deletes every object it owns and redraws. What you see is where the levels are now, extending about thirty bars to the right of the current candle, and nothing to the left. Scrolling back shows you a bare chart.
That's deliberate rather than lazy. The levels are a property of the last 252 bars, so a level drawn across a region that wasn't in the window when it was calculated would be a lie. It does mean you can't visually check how the levels behaved last month, and you should know that going in.
No signals, no arrows, no buffers. There's nothing here for an EA to read through iCustom. Alerts are the only way anything leaves the chart.
Alerts
Alerts fire when the close of the newest bar is inside a cluster's band. Clusters one and two are on by default, three to five are off.
One alert per bar at most, through the terminal, email, push or a Telegram bot. Cluster one and two are the two lowest levels by index, not the two strongest — if you want alerts on the heaviest level, read the density column first and switch on the one that matters.
Settings that will bite you
Number of clusters accepts 3 to 5, and refuses anything else. Put in 2 or 6 and the indicator writes a line to the Experts log and fails to load. The chart just stays empty. Same for Bars back, which accepts 20 to 1000.
252 bars means very different things per timeframe. On D1 it's about a trading year. On H1 it's about ten sessions, which is short enough that the levels chase price around. On M15 it's under three days. Raise it on fast charts or the tool will keep telling you that support is wherever price happened to be this morning.
More clusters is not more information. With k at five on a quiet range you'll get five levels stacked inside the same forty pips, each holding a fifth of the window, and none of them meaningful. Three is the honest default for most charts; go to four or five only when the density column shows a genuinely lopsided split.
It recalculates the whole window every bar. That's a fresh k-means run per bar per chart. It's fine on a handful of charts and it is not free on twenty of them with 1000-bar windows.
Questions you'll have
Does Support and Resistance AI repaint? The levels are recomputed from scratch on every new bar, so yes, they move as the window rolls forward. That's what a rolling clustering does. Nothing is retroactively redrawn over old bars because nothing is drawn over old bars at all.
Why does my chart go blank when I change a setting? Number of clusters outside 3 to 5, or Bars back outside 20 to 1000, makes the indicator refuse to start. Check the Experts log for the message.
What does the percentage in the panel mean? The share of the training window whose closing prices fell into that cluster. It's a measure of how much time price spent around that level, not a success rate.
Why doesn't the level line up with an obvious wick high? Because wicks aren't used. The clustering runs on closes only, so a level sits where price closed repeatedly, which is often just inside a spike rather than at its tip.
Best settings for intraday? Keep three clusters and raise Bars back well above 252 on M15 and H1, or the levels track price instead of anchoring it.
Can I get the levels into an EA? Not through iCustom — the indicator publishes no buffers. Telegram or email alerts are the way out.
MT4? Both platforms are included, one download each. Same clustering, same density panel, same limits on k.
Support
Message me through the site with a screenshot, the symbol and the timeframe, and I can usually explain why a level landed where it did. Updates are included for as long as your subscription runs.
Analysis tool. It places no trades and makes no profitability claim. Past price behaviour is not a guide to future price behaviour.