Indicator 21

Exhaustion Detector

New low, but nobody left to sell it: the volume taper that marks an exhausted move.

Chart overlay · Intraday and daily · Liquid futures, stocks and ETFs

The Exhaustion Detector looks for a new low made on shrinking volume. Price keeps falling but the selling that drove it is drying up, which means the sellers are done rather than that buyers have arrived. It marks where a decline is running out of fuel.

What it shows

A long marker when price makes a new low, volume dries up at that low, and the bar closes back up through its body.
The mirrored short marker at fresh highs.
A minimum-volume filter so dead tape never fakes a reading.

How it reads the market

Exhaustion is a specific sequence: a push to a new extreme, almost no business done at that extreme, and a close that gives it back. Any one alone is noise; the three together mark the spot where one side ran out. This study checks all three on every bar.

Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
New-extreme lookback	20 bars	How fresh the high or low must be.
Taper threshold	12%	Max share of volume at the extreme for it to count as dried up.
Body minimum	30% of range	The close-back-through requirement.

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

Built-in alerts

Long exhaustion
Short exhaustion

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 Exhaustion Detector.

When to use it, and when not to

It earns its place when

A name has been falling and you want to know whether the selling is finished.
You buy into weakness and need something better than a guess about where it stops.
You want a volume-based read rather than another oscillator.

Leave it off the chart when

The decline is news-driven and ongoing. Volume can taper mid-story and resume the next morning.
You want an entry. Exhaustion says the selling stopped, never that the buying started.
The name is illiquid. A volume taper in a thin stock is Tuesday, not a signal.

Common questions

What is selling exhaustion?

The point where the supply that has been pushing price down runs out. It shows up as a new low made on noticeably less volume than the lows before it. Nobody is left in a hurry to sell.

Does exhaustion mean the bottom is in?

It means the decline stopped being driven by aggressive selling. Price can drift lower on no volume for a long time from there. What usually follows exhaustion is a base, not a rally.

How is this different from a capitulation spike?

Capitulation is a volume explosion, everyone selling at once. Exhaustion is the opposite shape, a volume fade. Both mark ends of declines, and they tend to appear at different kinds of bottom: capitulation ends a panic, exhaustion ends a grind.

What confirms it afterwards?

A move back up on volume clearly above the taper. Exhaustion is one half of the trade; the volume coming back is the other half.