Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) Calculator

Chaikin Money Flow, developed by Marc Chaikin, is a volume-weighted oscillator built on his Accumulation/Distribution idea. For each bar it asks where the close landed within the high to low range, then weights that answer by the bar's volume. The result oscillates around a zero line, and in practice it stays between -1 and +1.

The calculation has three steps. The money flow multiplier is ((close − low) − (high − close)) / (high − low), which is +1 when the close equals the high and −1 when it equals the low. Multiplying it by volume gives the money flow volume. CMF is then the sum of money flow volume over the lookback divided by the sum of volume over the same lookback. A bar with no range, where the high equals the low, contributes zero money flow volume.

CMF is used to study buying and selling pressure over a window. Readings above zero mean closes tended to land in the upper half of each bar's range, and readings below zero mean they landed in the lower half. Analysts often watch the zero line crossing and compare CMF against price to look for agreement or divergence.

Because the value depends on the lookback length and on where bars close relative to their range, it can differ between instruments and timeframes. What any reading means is a matter of your own analysis. It describes past bars and is not a prediction.

TradingView is one of the most widely used charting and market-analysis platforms, where traders and analysts study price movement across stocks, crypto, forex, and futures on interactive charts. Pine Script is TradingView's own lightweight programming language, created so anyone can build custom tools that run directly on those charts.

People use Pine Script to build four main kinds of tools. Indicators calculate and plot values on the chart, exactly like the calculation above, but recomputed automatically on every bar. Strategies add explicit entry and exit rules and can be backtested against historical data in TradingView's Strategy Tester to see how they would have behaved. Screeners scan many symbols at once for conditions you define. Alerts notify you the moment a condition you specified occurs, so you do not have to watch the screen.

The value is precision and automation. Instead of eyeballing a chart, you describe exactly what you want measured, visualized, or notified about, and TradingView runs it consistently across any market and timeframe. That is why traders, analysts, and developers write Pine Script: it turns a manual charting idea into a repeatable tool. These tools are for tracking, visualizing, and testing market ideas; they do not tell you what to trade, and that decision always remains yours.

Writing that code by hand means learning Pine Script's syntax, its type system, and the exact names of hundreds of built-in functions. It is a real programming language, and small mistakes stop a script from compiling in the Pine Editor.