Indicator 08

Breadth Thermometer

How many of the QQQ's big names are actually rising? The index can lie; breadth doesn't.

Own pane · Daily · Best on a QQQ or NDX chart

The Breadth Thermometer counts how many of the QQQ's largest names are actually rising, rather than trusting the index price. When the index makes a high on four stocks and eighty are falling, the tape is far weaker than the chart. This reads that gap directly.

What it shows

One line: the percentage of the QQQ's 38 largest holdings trading with RSI(14) above 50.
Zones: under 20% (fear), under 10% (capitulation), over 80% (overheated).
Alerts when the line enters each zone.

How it reads the market

An index at highs with thin participation is fragile; an index at lows with breadth already washed out is late in the decline. Watching the share of leaders above the RSI midline gives you that participation read in one line.

Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
RSI length	14	The per-name momentum measure.
Midline	50	A name counts as rising when its RSI is above this.
Zone thresholds	20 / 10 / 80	Where fear, capitulation and overheated start.

Everything is an input: colors, thresholds and time windows adjust from the indicator's settings panel, no code needed.

Built-in alerts

Entered fear zone
Entered capitulation
Entered overheated

Set them once from TradingView's alert dialog and get notified on your phone, no chart-watching required.

Comes with the membership

The whole indicator suite is included with the paid plan, $20/month or $200/year. Subscribe, submit your TradingView username, and the scripts land in your TradingView library.

Get full access

How to add it to your chart

Request access above with your TradingView username (one request covers the whole suite).
We grant it on TradingView, usually within 24 hours; TradingView notifies you.
On your chart, open Indicators → Invite-only scripts and add Breadth Thermometer.

When to use it, and when not to

It earns its place when

The index is making highs and you want to know how many names are along for the ride.
You hold growth exposure and need early warning that leadership is narrowing.
You are deciding whether a pullback is broad selling or a rotation out of a few names.

Leave it off the chart when

You trade a single stock with no index correlation. Breadth is a market measure.
It is earnings season for one mega-cap. A single 8 percent move distorts a cap-weighted index in ways breadth is designed to ignore, so the two will disagree for reasons that are not a warning.
You want a timing signal. Breadth can narrow for months before it matters.

Common questions

What is market breadth?

How many stocks are participating in a move, as opposed to how far the index went. An index can rise on a handful of large names while most of its members fall. Breadth measures the difference, and the difference is usually where the risk hides.

Why does narrow breadth matter?

Because a market carried by a few names has fewer places to hide when those names break. It is not a sell signal on its own; plenty of narrow markets have kept climbing for a year. It is a statement about how much of your upside depends on how few decisions.

Why the QQQ specifically?

Because it is where concentration shows up first and hardest. The top ten holdings drive most of the index, so the gap between price and participation opens wider and earlier there than in a broader index.

How does this differ from Concentration Jaws?

This counts how many names are rising right now. Concentration Jaws measures how much of the market's total weight sits in the top handful, which is a slower, more structural read. One is participation, the other is dependency.