Impulse Targets

A pattern detector that watches for the classic thrust-plus-pullback rhythm and projects the price ladder the next leg is likely to hit.

1. What This Indicator Watches For

Most strong moves don't go in a straight line. Price thrusts in one direction, takes a breather as profit-takers push back, then resumes — and the second leg often travels a measurable multiple of the first. Most textbook continuation setups (Elliott waves, ABC retracements, breakout-pullback-go) describe slightly different flavours of the same idea.

The trouble for a discretionary trader is twofold. Recognition — was that pullback deep enough to be a real pullback, or has the trend already broken? Eyeballing it across hundreds of charts a day is exhausting and inconsistent. Targeting — once you've decided to take the trade, where do you actually take profit? Picking levels by feel leaves money on the table on big moves and gives back winners on small ones.

Impulse Targets does both jobs at once. It scans for a thrust whose pullback retraces by a textbook amount, then — only when the geometry holds up — paints a complete trade plan onto the chart: a defined entry zone, a stop, a trailing-stop reference, and four extension targets stacked beyond at the classic Fibonacci multiples of the original thrust.

2. How It Works Under the Hood

Three engines run in series. The first finds the swings, the second labels them, the third decides whether they fit the pattern.

The pivots. A running high pivot fires whenever the current bar is the highest of the last zigzagLength bars (default 10); the same logic, mirrored, fires a low pivot. Same-direction pivots back-to-back collapse into the more extreme one, so the chart only ever shows the meaningful turns.
The zigzag. The last ten pivots are kept in memory with a directional tag — regular for an ordinary turn, confirmed wave for a turn that beats the previous same-side pivot (a fresh higher high or lower low). The dotted line connecting them is the zigzag you see on the chart.
The pattern check. Every bar, the engine looks at the last three confirmed pivots — call them Point 0, Point 1, Point 2 — and asks two questions before drawing anything.

How Impulse Targets picks a setup. Two plain-English questions decide whether the level ladder appears.

Did the pullback retrace by a textbook amount? The distance from Point 1 back to Point 2 is compared with the original thrust from Point 0 to Point 1. The pullback must land within ±5 % of one of the four classic retracement depths (50 %, 61.8 %, 76.4 %, 85.4 %). Anything shallower or deeper is rejected.
Are the swings pointing the right way? Point 1 must be a confirmed wave (a fresh extreme), Point 2 a regular pivot in the opposite direction. In plain English a fresh impulse high followed by an ordinary pullback low for bullish setups, the mirror for bearish.

If both pass, the engine commits to a level set. If not, no levels are drawn and the chart shows just the zigzag.

What the engine sees	Output	Plain English
Three swings line up, pullback in the textbook zone	🟢 Levels drawn	A clean impulse with a healthy pullback. Trade plan is on the chart
Pullback too shallow or too deep, swings ambiguous	🟡 Zigzag only	The market is moving but it isn't yet a textbook setup. Wait
Trend rolls over, the impulse direction is broken	🔴 Levels invalidated	Setup is dead. Stop has either been hit or is no longer relevant

The five-percent tolerance is the whole reason Impulse Targets stays disciplined. Without it, every shallow noise dip would qualify as a retracement and the chart would flood with stale level ladders.

3. What You See on the Chart

Element	Looks like	Means
Zigzag pivots	Black dotted segments connecting recent swings	The structural turns the engine has identified
W1 segment	Coloured dotted line from Point 0 to Point 1	The thrust leg, green if pointing up, red if pointing down
W2 segment	Same colour dotted line from Point 1 to Point 2	The pullback leg, ending at the proposed entry zone
Entry line	Blue solid line with the price label	Where the trade is supposed to be initiated
Stop line	Red on bullish setups, green on bearish	Hard invalidation level, anchored at Point 0
T.Stop line	Same colour as Stop, sits beyond Entry	A tighter trailing-stop reference for active management
Target 1 to Target 4	Four solid lines stacked beyond entry	Profit ladders at 1.618, 2.0, 2.618, 3.236 multiples of the pullback

Stop is always coloured opposite to targets so a glance tells you which way the trade is biased.

4. Reading It in 3 Patterns

Pattern A — Impulse triggers, targets hit

Pattern A · clean impulse with all targets reached (synthetic example)


What you see	① Strong thrust higher tags Point 1 ② shallow pullback prints Point 2 inside the textbook zone ③ blue Entry line activates as price re-tests the pullback area ④ price walks up the ladder, clipping Target 1, 2, 3 in turn.
What it means	Both geometry and follow-through are textbook. The pullback was healthy enough to shake out late longs but not deep enough to break structure, and the resumption respected the projected ladder almost rung-by-rung.
What to do	Bias long from the Entry line, stop just beyond Point 0. Scale out at Target 1 to lock in the trade, leave a runner for Target 3 or 4. Trail using the T.Stop reference once Target 1 is filled.

Pattern B — Impulse with partial fill

Pattern B · entry hits, only first targets reached before fade (synthetic example)


What you see	① Clean Point 0 to Point 1 to Point 2 sequence sets up the ladder ② entry triggers and price grinds up to Target 1 ③ momentum stalls before Target 2 and price chops sideways ④ T.Stop is eventually clipped on a deeper retest.
What it means	The setup was real but the follow-through was tired. This is what most live trades actually look like — geometry good enough to get paid on the first rung, but the broader market didn't have the gas for the full ladder.
What to do	Take Target 1 as the base case, not the bonus. Move stop to break-even after Target 1 fills, rely on T.Stop for the back half. Walking away with one rung is a win.

Pattern C — Failed impulse

Pattern C · entry triggers but stop hits before any target (synthetic example)


What you see	① Apparent W1 plus W2 with the ladder painted ② entry fires on the pullback ③ price never pushes toward Target 1, instead grinding back through entry ④ Stop level at Point 0 is taken out and the levels disappear.
What it means	Recognition was correct, follow-through wasn't. The pattern matched the textbook but the underlying regime — a higher-timeframe trend the other way, a news catalyst, thin liquidity — overruled the local geometry. Normal and expected.
What to do	Take the stop without arguing. Point 0 is the hard invalidation by design. Don't widen, don't average. The next setup is usually only a few sessions away.

5. Trade Walkthrough

ETHUSDT · 4H · Binance · 10 Mar to 22 Mar 2026 — bullish impulse with full ladder run

Symbol	ETHUSDT
Timeframe	4H
Venue	Binance
Window	10 Mar to 22 Mar 2026
Pattern	A — impulse triggers, targets hit

A textbook bullish setup. ETH thrust off the 3,520 swing low to a fresh wave high near 3,900, pulled back roughly two-thirds of that move into the 3,640 area, and then resumed. The pullback landed cleanly inside the textbook retracement band, the engine published the ladder, and the next leg respected the projection almost rung-by-rung. The numbered markers ①–④ map to the four phases of the trade below.

The sequence

#	When	ETH price	Indicator state	What it tells you
①	10 Mar	~3,520 low	Confirmed-wave low (Point 0)	Structural base of the thrust. Becomes the Stop reference
②	13 Mar	~3,900 high	Confirmed-wave high (Point 1), levels appear	The thrust leg is complete. Engine waits for a pullback
③	16 Mar	~3,640 low	Regular pullback low (Point 2), Entry line activates	Pullback retraced ~68 % of W1, inside the textbook band. The real entry.
④	21 Mar	~4,400 area	Target 2 tagged, Target 3 within reach	Move maturing. Cue to scale out and trail with T.Stop

The trade in one card


What you skipped	Chasing the breakout bar at 3,900 — the obvious trade everyone took. Underwater within a session as the pullback developed.
What you took	Long on the retest of the Entry line near 3,650, stop just under Point 0 at 3,510.
Where you exited	Half off at Target 1 around 4,150, balance trailed by T.Stop after Target 2 filled near 4,400.
Move captured	~ +18 % in roughly five days on the held portion.

Lesson

The pattern match gives you the alert. The pullback into the Entry line gives you the trade. The target ladder tells you where to scale and where to walk.

6. Common Pitfalls

Trading without a confirmed Point 1. The level ladder only paints when the engine sees a confirmed-wave pivot. If you see zigzag dots but no blue Entry line, the pattern hasn't triggered yet — don't pre-empt it.
Treating the targets as guarantees. Target 4 is the upper bound of what's realistic, not a forecast. Most live trades only reach Target 1 or 2 — that's Pattern B, the most common outcome. Build your expectations around that.
Ignoring the higher-timeframe regime. A bullish setup inside a clean daily downtrend has a much lower hit rate than the same setup inside a daily uptrend. Pair Impulse Targets with a regime tool — Momentum Wave's ribbon colour is the obvious companion — before sizing in.
Moving the Stop because "it's close." Point 0 is the hard invalidation by design. If price trades through it the impulse interpretation is wrong. Widening the stop just turns a controlled loss into a bigger one.
Re-using a stale ladder. Once Stop is hit, the engine clears the levels and starts looking for the next setup. If you're still anchored to yesterday's targets, you'll miss the new pattern already forming. Trust the redraw.