NR7 Pattern Strategy

Learn the NR7 Pattern Strategy for futures and S&P 500. This daily timeframe strategy identifies low volatility to enter long positions and exit after a fixed p

Published · Updated · Methodology: Technical Indicators

Part of: ATR & Volatility

  • Methodology: Technical Indicators
  • Content type: strategy
  • Timeframes: Daily
  • Markets: S&P 500, Futures

Indicators used

  • NR7 (Narrow Range 7 bars)
  • Range (ATR-like, but not ATR)

Source video

Decoded from: 📊 The Hidden Power of Toby Crabel's NR7 Pattern Revealed! 🔍💥 by Ali Casey | StatOasis — watch the original

Key timestamps:

  • 0:28 - NR7 definition
  • 1:20 - NR7 pattern success reason
  • 2:20 - Strategy entry rule
  • 2:27 - Strategy exit rule
  • 3:00 - Optimization of lookback and holding periods
  • 4:10 - Market regime filters
  • 5:05 - Pattern filters
  • 5:50 - Time filters (end of month)

Strategy overview

NR7 marks the bar whose high-to-low range is the narrowest of the last seven — a compression signature that Toby Crabel documented decades ago as a precursor to expansion. This entry decodes Ali Casey's video for StatOasis, "The Hidden Power of Toby Crabel's NR7 Pattern Revealed!", which revisits that classic daily-bar pattern from a statistical rather than a chart-reading angle.

The video's structure says a lot about its priorities. It spends its opening minutes on what NR7 actually is and why the pattern is supposed to work at all, then moves quickly past the setup itself into the questions that usually decide whether a simple pattern survives contact with real data: how sensitive the result is to the length of the lookback window, how long a position should be held once the contraction resolves, and which market-regime conditions the pattern should be filtered by. That ordering — definition first, robustness testing second, discretion last — is characteristic of the StatOasis channel's approach to legacy price patterns.

One detail worth flagging for anyone arriving here from the ATR side of volatility analysis: NR7 belongs to the same family but measures compression differently. Where ATR smooths true range across many bars to produce an average, NR7 compares single-bar ranges against each other and asks only which one is smallest — no averaging, no smoothing, just a rank within a fixed window. That makes it a discrete, event-style volatility signal rather than a continuous one, which is precisely why it lends itself to the kind of on/off statistical testing the video runs. The source video, linked on this page, is where the specific rules and parameter choices are presented and discussed.

Topics

nr7 strategy · trading strategy · pine script · tradingview strategy · technical indicators · swing trading · sp 500 trading strategy · futures trading strategy · daily strategy · low volatility strategy · range trading · toby crabel · price action

Frequently asked questions

What is the NR7 pattern in trading?

NR7 stands for "narrow range 7": a bar whose high-to-low range is the smallest of the most recent seven bars, including itself. It is a volatility-contraction signal — a marker that the market has gone quiet relative to its recent behaviour — and is most commonly applied to daily bars.

Who is Toby Crabel and why is NR7 associated with him?

Toby Crabel is a trader and author whose work on short-term price patterns, particularly around opening ranges and narrow-range days, popularised NR7 as a systematic concept. The StatOasis video revisits his pattern specifically, which is why it is framed around his name rather than presented as a new idea.

Is NR7 the same as an ATR-based volatility filter?

No. ATR averages true range across a lookback period to give a continuously updating volatility estimate. NR7 compares raw single-bar ranges and flags only the narrowest one in the window, producing a discrete yes/no event instead of a smoothed value. They measure related things in structurally different ways.

Does the NR7 pattern still work, and how would I check?

A contraction pattern tells you volatility is compressed, not which way the next expansion goes, so its usefulness depends heavily on the entry, exit and regime rules layered on top — which is exactly what the source video spends most of its runtime testing. The honest answer is to backtest it yourself on your own market and timeframe. Strategy Decoder catalogues video-sourced strategies like this one so you can find the original discussion and evaluate it on TradingView.

About this strategy page

This trading strategy was decoded by Strategy Decoder's AI from a public YouTube trading video and turned into a structured, reviewable specification. In the interactive app this page shows the full entry and exit logic, risk management settings, the indicators involved with their parameters, AlgoWizard-compatible logic and a Pine Script export ready for TradingView backtesting — plus an automated backtest verdict when one has been computed for this strategy.

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