What Regime Radar does

Regime Radar is a free MetaTrader 5 tool that classifies market conditions across a basket of instruments. It runs on a single chart and analyses up to 40 symbols in the background.

It answers one question: what kind of market is this right now? Not where price is going. What it's doing.

The default basket is 19 instruments — seven USD majors, five JPY and CHF crosses, five commodity-dollar pairs, gold and the S&P 500.

It places no trades. It calls no trading functions at all.

Why most regime indicators only see half the picture

Most of them measure volatility. High or low, quiet or busy.

That misses something important. A market can be violently volatile and go absolutely nowhere, and that is a completely different situation from a steady grind in one direction. Both read as "high volatility". Only one of them is a trend.

Regime Radar measures two independent things and crosses them.

Volatility — how much the market is moving. Two factors vote: whether the Bollinger Bands have contracted inside the Keltner Channels, and the ratio of fast ATR to slow ATR.

Directionality — how efficiently it's moving. Two more vote: the Choppiness Index and ADX.

The four market regimes

Compression — quiet and range-bound. Ranges narrowing, price going sideways. The market is coiling.

Trend — active and directional. Price is moving and it's getting somewhere.

Chop — active but going nowhere. Wide ranges, violent reversals, no net progress. The post-news whipsaw, and the state that punishes breakout systems hardest.

Drift — quiet but directional. A slow grind in one direction on low volatility.

Breakout is the fifth label and it works differently. It's not a cell in that grid — it's the moment volatility expands out of compression. It's time-boxed, so an instrument carries it for five bars and then resolves into whatever it actually became. Trend, chop, or a failure straight back to compression.

That distinction matters. A breakout that's been running three weeks isn't news. One that happened yesterday is.

One reading for the whole basket

Nineteen instruments generating individual alerts would be unusable. So Regime Radar aggregates.

The catch is that a simple headcount lies to you. Seven USD pairs aren't seven opinions — if the dollar moves they all flip together, and you get a reading of "75% of the market is trending" when it's really one dollar bet.

So instruments are grouped by what actually drives them, and each group carries equal weight. Gold on its own weighs the same as all seven dollar pairs combined.

The portfolio line reads like this:

PORTFOLIO: TREND    Conviction 62%    Breadth 5.0 of 5    7 bars

Conviction is how much of the basket agrees. Below 40% it says MIXED rather than overstating what the data supports.

Breadth is how many independent readings the label rests on. All five groups reporting gives 5.0. If groups drop out it falls, and you can see the label is standing on thinner ground.

Alerts you'll actually keep switched on

By default you only get portfolio-level alerts, and only on breakouts and their resolution. On daily bars that's a handful a month, not a stream.

You can switch to individual instrument alerts, or both, or every state change if you want the detail.

Alerts go to MT5 pop-ups, mobile push, and Telegram. The Telegram message includes the state change, both axis readings, all four factor values and which instruments sit where.

Export the data and check it yourself

Regime Radar will write its full labelled history to CSV — one row per bar per instrument, with the state, both axes, event flags and raw factor values.

Join that against your own trade history and you can test whether your results actually differ by regime. If they look the same in every bucket, the classifier isn't capturing anything your strategies respond to. That's worth knowing before you build anything on top of it.

We'd rather you checked than took our word for it.

What it won't do

Regime Radar describes conditions. It doesn't predict them.

It tells you volatility expanded on a bar that has already closed. Compression is the most reliable of its labels, because a Bollinger squeeze is unambiguous. Trend is decent, though ADX lags by five to ten bars, so confirmation tends to arrive mid-move. Breakout is the weakest — it correctly spots that volatility has expanded, but most volatility expansions don't turn into sustained moves.

Use it for context. Not for entries.

Requirements

MetaTrader 5, build 3800 or later. Around 194 bars of history per instrument on your chosen timeframe. Defaults are tuned for the daily chart. For Telegram, one URL added to your MT5 whitelist.

Works on any broker. No account link, no login, nothing to connect.

Included

The EA, a 3,000-word manual with a troubleshooting section and FAQ, and the default 19-instrument basket ready to run. (Contact me for the user manual and troubleshooting documents at mark@hightidetrading.co.uk)

Free. No trial period, no upsell, no card details.

FAQ

Is Regime Radar really free? Yes. No trial, no locked features, no payment details.

Does it place trades? No. It calls no trading functions. You don't even need AutoTrading enabled.

Does it repaint? No. Everything is calculated on closed bars. The forming bar is never used, and a state assigned to a past bar won't change.

Will it work with my broker? Yes. It reads chart data only. If an instrument is named differently at your broker you can edit the list or set a suffix.

Can I run it on a chart I'm already trading? Yes. It only draws its own panel and removes everything cleanly when you detach it.

Do I need a VPS? Only if you want alerts reliably, since it has to be running at the bar close to catch a change. To just check the panel now and then, your desktop terminal is fine — it replays history on attach and always shows the current state.

Which timeframe should I use? Daily. That's what the defaults are tuned for. H4 works if you multiply every period by six so each factor still covers the same span of calendar time.

Can I add my own instruments? Up to 40. Add the symbol and give it a group tag so the weighting knows what it's correlated with.

Does it work on stocks, indices or crypto? Mechanically yes — the factors are generic price and volatility measures. The thresholds were tuned on FX and gold, so instruments with very different volatility may need those adjusting.

Why is it an Expert Advisor and not an indicator? MetaTrader blocks web requests inside indicators, which would make Telegram impossible. It's an EA that never trades.

What the Health Monitor does

The High Tide Health Monitor is a free MetaTrader 5 tool for anyone running several EAs, several accounts, or a trade copier.

It puts everything on one panel: live P/L for your master account and each connected sub, attributed by magic number so you can see which system produced what.

Then it watches for the three things that quietly go wrong in a multi-account setup and tells you when they do.

The problems it was built for

Running one EA on one account is easy to keep an eye on. Running four EAs across four accounts through a copier is not, and the failures are usually silent.

A terminal dies and you don't notice. A VPS reboots, MT5 doesn't restart, and a sub account stops trading. Nothing alerts you, because nothing has gone wrong exactly — it's just stopped. The Health Monitor flags any account whose report goes stale.

The copier drops trades. Your sub opens a position, the master doesn't receive it. Or it receives it at the wrong size. Your accounts drift apart and you find out weeks later reconciling statements. The Health Monitor compares floating P/L between master and sub and warns you when they diverge beyond a threshold you set.

Correlated drawdown creeps up on you. Four EAs, each within its own limits, all drawing down at once. No single system has breached anything. Your account is still in trouble. The Health Monitor tracks floating drawdown at portfolio level, which is the level that actually matters.

The circuit breaker

There's an optional last-resort guard. If floating drawdown reaches the percentage you set, it closes every open position, deletes every pending order, and stays locked out for a period you choose so nothing immediately re-enters.

Read that twice, because it matters: this feature closes positions. It's off until you arm it, and you should test it on a demo account before you rely on it. It's a floor, not a strategy.

Most EAs have internal drawdown limits, but those only ever see their own trades. If you run several systems on one account, nothing is watching the total. This does.

What's on the panel

Open, monthly and overall P/L for the master and for every sub. Position and order counts per account. Time since each account last reported. Floating drawdown against your threshold. Divergence between master and sub.

Alerts go to MT5 pop-ups, mobile push and Telegram.

How it fits together

The Health Monitor runs on your master chart. A small companion reporter runs on each sub account and publishes its state to a shared folder, which is how the master can show you sub P/L without any account credentials being involved anywhere.

Both terminals need to be on the same machine, which for most people running a copier they already are.

Requirements

MetaTrader 5. Master and sub terminals on the same machine. AutoTrading enabled if you arm the circuit breaker, since closing positions is a trade operation.

Works with any copier and any broker. Nothing to link, no credentials, no external service.

Included

The Health Monitor EA, the sub account reporter, and setup instructions.

Free. No trial, no upsell, no card details.

FAQ

Is the Health Monitor really free? Yes. No trial, no locked features, no payment details.

Does it place trades? Only if you arm the circuit breaker, and then only to close positions. It never opens anything. With the breaker off it's read-only.

Will it work with my trade copier? Yes. It watches accounts, not the copier, so it doesn't care which one you use. The divergence warning works by comparing what the master and sub are each holding.

Do I need to give it my account details? No. Both terminals are already logged in on your machine, and the sub accounts publish to a shared local folder. Nothing leaves your computer except the alerts you configure.

How many sub accounts does it handle? Three, plus the master.

What if a sub account is on a different VPS? It won't see it. Sub reporting works through a shared local folder, so master and subs need to be on the same machine.

Can I use it with just one account? Yes. You'll lose the sub P/L panel and the divergence warnings, but the portfolio drawdown tracking and circuit breaker work on a single account running multiple EAs.

Is the circuit breaker safe to leave on? Test it on demo first. It closes every position when it trips, which is what you want in the situation it's built for, but you should see it happen once before you rely on it. It's off by default.

Do I need a VPS? If you're running EAs, you probably already have one. The Health Monitor needs to be running to monitor anything.

Notes for the site build

Schema. Both FAQ blocks should be marked up as FAQPage schema. That's the single highest-value thing for AI answer engines — it's the format they lift from most readily. SoftwareApplication schema with price: 0 on both pages.

Internal linking. Regime Radar should link to the EA review pages, since someone researching regimes is researching systems. The Health Monitor should link to the trade copier page, because the two solve adjacent problems and anyone running a copier is the exact audience.

Primary keywords. Regime Radar: free MT5 indicator, market regime indicator MT5, MT5 volatility dashboard, forex market regime. Health Monitor: MT5 portfolio dashboard, trade copier monitoring, MT5 multi account monitor, EA drawdown protection.

Both are low-competition long-tail. "Free MT5" prefixed terms convert well because intent is unambiguous.

Two things to check before publishing.

The Health Monitor copy describes the three-sub version we built. If the public release differs from what's running on your own portfolio, tell me what changed and I'll adjust — particularly the sub count and whether the reporter is bundled.

And on compliance: both pages are software-led with no performance figures, no returns, no testimonials, and no call to action pointing at a broker or copy-trading platform. The only action is downloading free software, which isn't an investment decision. That reads as clear of s21 to me, but I'm not your compliance specialist and free tools that funnel to email capture sit close enough to the line to be worth a look before they go live.