Atlas IB
Atlas IB measures the Initial Balance of any 30- or 60-minute window of the futures day and shows how often, historically, price reached the upper extension first, the lower extension first, or neither before the session closed.
What it shows
Pick an anchor, any 30-minute boundary from 18:00 to 16:30 New York time, and a duration of 30 or 60 minutes. Atlas IB draws the box, projects a target rail above and below it, and labels each rail with the historical frequency of that side being reached first. A third figure gives the frequency of neither side being reached by the close. The three add to 100% before rounding.
- IB box and extension rails with the historical first-touch frequency on each side, tinted toward the favoured side, and an abstain state when the split is too close to favour either.
- A live ladder while the window forms: at each checkpoint, how often the current window high or low has survived as the final IB extreme, with a flag when a historically uncommon event prints. For awareness, not a signal.
- A status table: window, regime tag, sample size, the three-outcome breakdown, target distance in points, a strength rating for the selected window, and a running tally of how the figures have fared on the history loaded on your chart.
- An outcome tick once the race resolves: upper target first, lower target first, or neither.
- Median run-on guides beyond each target: on by default in the gold build, optional in the NQ build.
- Optional extras, off by default: the previous IB's levels projected forward, an Event Horizon level halfway between the favoured IB edge and its target, and a scenarios table.
Two builds, measured separately
Gold was measured on its own terms rather than ported from the Nasdaq edition, which is why the two do not favour the same windows.
| NQ build | Gold build | |
|---|---|---|
| Markets | NQ / MNQ | GC / MGC |
| Measured on | 17 years of NQ 1-minute data, 2009 to 2026 | 11 years of gold 1-minute data, 2015 to 2026 |
| Target distance | 0.5 × the IB range by default; 0.25 ×, 1.0 × and an automatic setting are available | Set automatically from how the session's IB compares with its own history |
| Optional adjustments | A small set of contextual adjustments, off by default | None |
| Chart timeframes | Any that divides 30 minutes, 1m to 30m | Any that divides 30 minutes, 1m to 30m |
| On TradingView | Atlas IB (NQ) ↗ | Atlas IB (GC) ↗ |
How to read it
Every figure is a historical frequency. A 60% label on the upper rail means that, in the measured history, comparable windows reached the upper target first 60% of the time. It says nothing certain about today, and the indicator abstains when the two sides are too close to call.
The figures are clock-time based, so the same window shows the same numbers on a 1-minute or a 15-minute chart. Atlas IB works on any TradingView plan, including the free one.
Contract rolls
A futures contract roll does not stretch the target distances or the run-on guides. On the roll day itself, a few optional features can still show the price gap between contracts: the NQ build's overnight-gap and prior-day-high adjustments, and previous-IB levels extended to the current bar.
The record
From August to September 2026 we published every week what Atlas IB showed and what price did next: the NQ record at the 09:30 cash open and the gold record at 09:00, including the misses and the windows it declined to call.
Want rules applied for you?
Midas Model, our paid gold strategy, waits for price to push to the edge of a qualifying 30-minute range and trades the pullback. It is a separate product; Atlas IB stays free.