Pivot Point Calculator

A pivot point is a single number computed from the previous candle — classically the average of its high, low and close — together with a ladder of support and resistance levels placed around it by fixed arithmetic. That is the whole idea. There is no model, no fitting, no data beyond those three or four prices, and no parameter anyone can tune. Two traders using the same candle and the same family get identical levels, which is precisely why floor traders adopted them: before screens, a pivot table was something you could work out on paper before the open and carry in your pocket all session.

The classic set works like this:

Notice that R1 and S1 are the low and the high reflected through the pivot: R1 is the pivot plus the distance down to the low, S1 the pivot minus the distance up to the high. That is why the classic levels are not symmetric around the pivot: the close is rarely in the middle of the range, so the pivot sits nearer one end, and the reflections come out lopsided. Fibonacci pivots take the opposite approach and place the levels at fixed fractions of the range on both sides, so they always come out symmetric. Neither is more correct; they answer slightly different questions.

One thing worth being precise about, because it is the most common way to get a pivot table wrong: the levels are computed from the previous, completed candle and then held fixed for the whole of the next period. Daily pivots are calculated once from yesterday’s bar and do not move all day. If a level appears to shift during the session, something is being recomputed that should not be — usually a candle that has not finished yet.

Classic (Floor)

The original. Pivot at the average of high, low and close; the first levels reflect the low and the high back through the pivot; the outer ones step away by whole ranges. When someone says “the pivot” with no qualifier, this is the one they mean, and it is the set most widely watched — which, for a self-referential tool like this, is not nothing.

A naming trap worth knowing. On TradingView, the mode called Classic is not this formula: its third level is PP ± 2 × (High − Low), which can sit a long way from ours. The TradingView mode that matches the levels on this page is the one called Traditional. The first two levels are identical in both, so among the three levels a side this page publishes a disagreement can only show up at R3 and S3. With a fourth or fifth level switched on, TradingView’s two modes part company again. Same arithmetic, different label — not a bug in either tool.

Fibonacci

Same pivot, different spacing: the levels sit 38.2%, 61.8% and 100% of the previous range above and below it. Because the distances are fractions of the range rather than reflections, the ladder is symmetric around the pivot, and the inner levels are usually tighter than the classic ones. Traders who already work with retracements tend to prefer this set for consistency, not because it has been shown to work better.

Woodie

Weights the close twice: PP = (High + Low + 2 × Close) ÷ 4. The pivot is pulled towards where the candle finished rather than the middle of its range, which makes a difference on days that trend and close near an extreme. Two levels a side, no more.

This is the one family where the published sources genuinely contradict each other, so it is worth stating plainly rather than picking quietly. Some sources use the previous candle’s close in that formula, as above. Others put the current period’s open there instead — (High + Low + 2 × Open) ÷ 4 — and the two give different levels, not slightly different ones. This page uses the previous close, for two reasons: it keeps all five families reading the same finished candle, so the comparison table means something; and the current period’s open does not exist yet at the moment the table is built. If your platform shows different Woodie levels, this is almost certainly the reason.

The extra R3 and R4 levels you may have seen attached to Woodie come from a single source and have no agreed definition, so they are not calculated here rather than invented.

Camarilla

Built around the close rather than around a pivot, with the range multiplied by 1.1/12, 1.1/6, 1.1/4 and 1.1/2. The third and fourth levels are the ones people watch: the classic reading treats L3–L4 and H3–H4 as the zone where a range day is expected to reverse or a breakout to be confirmed.

Whether Camarilla has a pivot at all is one of the two things the sources disagree about. EarnForex publishes the eight levels and stops there. TradingView attaches a pivot to the same set — but the formula it attaches is (High + Low + Close) ÷ 3, which is the classic pivot, and it adds a fifth level either side built on a shape of its own. So the empty PP row in this column is a decision, not an omission: the number that would go there is borrowed from another family, it is already sitting in the first column of this page, and inside a Camarilla ladder it does not even land where a pivot should — S1 and R1 hug the close, and on roughly three of every four real daily candles the classic pivot falls outside them. The fifth levels are left out for the ordinary reason: one source publishes them, so there is nothing to check them against.

DeMark

The only family that reads the candle’s open as well. It first builds an intermediate value X, choosing one of three formulas depending on whether the candle closed below, above or exactly at its open, and then derives a pivot and one level each side. It is deliberately minimal — one resistance, one support — and because the branch depends on the open, this page leaves the DeMark column empty when the open is unknown instead of picking a branch on your behalf. The open it needs is the one belonging to the same finished candle as the high, low and close, not the open of the period now trading.

How these formulas were checked

Before this page went up, every formula on it was read back against published references rather than typed from memory: Wikipedia’s pivot point article, TradingView’s Pivot Points Standard documentation, StockCharts ChartSchool and EarnForex. Classic, Fibonacci, Camarilla’s eight levels and all three DeMark branches came back identical across the sources that publish them. The two places where the sources disagree — Woodie’s pivot, and whether Camarilla has a pivot at all — are the two places this page stops to explain itself instead of picking one silently.

• They are not a forecast. A pivot table is arithmetic on a candle that has already closed. It says nothing about what price will do next, and it contains no information that was not already in yesterday’s high, low and close. A level being “R2” does not make price more likely to stop there; it makes it a number that a lot of people are looking at, which is a different and much weaker claim.
• They are not measured. We publish no hit rate for these levels, because we have not measured one. The one thing on this site that carries a verified, published record is the daily AI plan, and that record is a different artefact entirely — every plan checked against real candles and published win or lose.
• They depend on where your day starts. Change the session boundary and the high, low and close change with it, so every level moves. A broker whose daily candle closes at 17:00 New York and one that closes the day at midnight in its own time zone will disagree about “yesterday” — see the note below.
• The family is a choice, not a discovery. Five families on the same candle give five different ladders, and there is no test on this page that says which is right. Picking the one whose levels happen to sit where you already wanted to trade is the easiest mistake to make with a tool like this.
• They are not a stop. A pivot level is a reference price, not a risk decision. Where the stop belongs, and how big the position may then be, are separate questions — the lot size calculator handles the second one.

Which candle the pre-filled numbers come from

The pre-filled values come from the last daily candle the market finished at the New York close — 17:00 New York, which is 21:00 UTC under US daylight saving and 22:00 UTC the rest of the year — taken from our broker price feed. A day that is still trading is never shown as “yesterday”: until 17:00 New York the pre-filled candle is the previous one. While the market is closed, from the New York close on Friday until it reopens on Sunday, it is Friday’s, and it is complete.

The convention is worth knowing. Our daily candle runs from 17:00 New York to 17:00 New York, the session most brokers and TradingView use for forex, and carries the date of the day it closes on. A broker that closes the day at another time — some use midnight in their own time zone — puts a slightly different high, low and close in its “yesterday”, and its pivots will differ slightly from the ones pre-filled here. Neither is wrong — they are two different days. If you want the levels your own chart shows, read the OHLC off that chart and type them into the fields above; the arithmetic is identical either way.

The pre-filled candle is labelled daily close with the day it closed on. It changes once a day, at the New York close: it is not a live quote, and this page never pretends otherwise.

This page and our support & resistance zones both put horizontal lines on a chart, and it would be easy to assume they are the same thing measured twice. They are not, and the difference is worth stating plainly.

• A pivot level is a formula. It comes from three or four numbers by fixed arithmetic. It exists whether or not anything ever happened at that price. Change the candle and it moves; change nothing and it cannot move. There is no judgement in it, and no way for it to be “wrong” — only for the candle to be the wrong candle.
• A support or resistance zone is a reading of price structure. Those levels come from our AI analysis of where buying and selling actually showed up in the price history, refreshed several times a day, and they carry a bias and a confidence rating the model assigned. They are an interpretation, and interpretations can be wrong in a way that arithmetic cannot.
• They are built from different things. Two pivot families disagreeing is a property of their formulas. A pivot level and a zone disagreeing tells you something mildly interesting: the round-number arithmetic and the observed structure are not pointing at the same price.
• Only one of them feeds our signals. The support and resistance zones are an input to our trading signals and to the high-probability zones. Pivot points are not: no score on this site is built on them. They are rendered in one other place — beside each pair on the support and resistance page — but nothing weighs them.

If you want a level that something on this site actually acts on, use the zones. If you want the number your trading room quotes at the open, use the pivots. Using both, and noticing when they line up, is a reasonable habit — just do not mistake the agreement of two lines for evidence.

• Support & resistance zones — the levels our analysis reads from price structure, with the nearest one first and its distance from the analysis price.
• Lot size calculator — once you have a level and a stop, the position size that keeps the risk where you decided.
• Where to place a stop loss in forex — structure, ATR, and why a level alone is not a stop.
• Volatility analysis — the ATR of each market in its own unit, which tells you whether a pivot ladder is wide or narrow relative to how the market actually moves.