NR7 Strategy

Discover the NR7 Strategy, a volatility-based trading system. This strategy enters the market when the daily range is the narrowest in seven days, anticipating

Published · Updated · Methodology: Technical Indicators

Part of: Algorithmic & Automated Trading

  • Methodology: Technical Indicators
  • Content type: strategy
  • Timeframes: Daily

Source video

Decoded from: NR7 Strategy From Toby Crabel in 1990 (Backtested) by Quantified Strategies — watch the original

Key timestamps:

  • 0:00 - Introduction to NR7 strategy
  • 0:15 - Definition of range/volatility
  • 0:20 - Long entry condition
  • 0:25 - Exit condition
  • 0:30 - Backtest results

Strategy overview

An NR7 day is simply the day whose high-to-low range is the narrowest of the last seven — a volatility-contraction marker rather than a direction signal. This entry decodes "NR7 Strategy From Toby Crabel in 1990 (Backtested)" from Quantified Strategies, a channel whose usual register is the backtest rather than the tutorial, and the framing here is archival: a pattern documented in 1990, in the era when short-term price-pattern research was done on daily bars, brought forward and put on a modern chart.

The most telling detail is the shape of the clip itself. Its five chapter markers — introduction, definition of range and volatility, long entry, exit, backtest results — all fall inside the first thirty seconds, which makes this a short-form summary of a pattern rather than a study of it. That the definition of range gets its own marker is appropriate: NR7 is a rank, not a threshold. Nothing about it is fixed in points or percent; a bar qualifies only relative to the six before it, which is why a volatility pattern like this needs no indicator at all — the arithmetic of the bar is the whole instrument. It is also why the lookback is not a cosmetic parameter, since seven is what defines the population being ranked. Worth noting too that the index marks a long side and no short, a choice rather than a property, since a contraction says nothing about which way the expansion resolves.

What has changed since 1990 is what a daily range contains. Crabel's generation measured ranges built largely inside a pit session; on today's near-continuously traded instruments a daily bar absorbs the overnight move as well, so a "narrow" day now can mean a quiet session or an active one bounded by an early gap. That makes the instrument and the session convention the video tests on more consequential than the pattern definition. No rules were extracted from this source, so this page stays with the concept and how the video frames it rather than reconstructing the setup — and the "(Backtested)" in the title rests on a single closing marker, without the market, period, or cost assumptions the result would depend on.

Topics

nr7 strategy · volatility strategy · trading strategy · pine script · tradingview strategy · daily timeframe · technical indicators · low volatility trading · price action · mean reversion strategy

Frequently asked questions

What is an NR7 day in trading?

An NR7 is a day whose high-to-low range is the narrowest of the most recent seven daily bars. It is a relative rank rather than a fixed threshold, so the same bar can qualify or not depending on the lookback used.

Why is NR7 associated with Toby Crabel and 1990?

Toby Crabel documented narrow-range days as part of his 1990 work on short-term price patterns, which is where the NR7 label comes from. The video revisits that original framing rather than presenting the pattern as new.

Is an NR7 day a buy signal by itself?

No — NR7 describes a contraction in range and says nothing about direction, so on its own it is a condition rather than a trade. Any tradeable version has to add a trigger that decides which side of the compression to take.

How should I evaluate an NR7 rule before trading it?

Test it on daily data for the specific instrument you intend to trade, since a modern daily range includes overnight movement that pit-era ranges did not. Strategy Decoder catalogs strategies presented in video sources so you can identify the concept and evaluate it on TradingView yourself.

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.

Strategy Decoder catalogs 2,229 decoded strategies. Each one is extracted with confidence scoring, cross-linked to the indicators it uses, and kept up to date as new videos are processed daily. Load this page with JavaScript enabled to use the interactive tools, or start from the strategy explorer to filter by methodology, market and timeframe.

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