Williams %R vs Awesome Oscillator
Williams percent r reports where the close sits inside the recent high-low range, bounded and unsmoothed. The awesome oscillator subtracts a thirty-four period average of bar midpoints from a five period one, so it measures the gap between two speeds and has no upper limit.
Both of these sit under the chart and both are built from the whole bar rather than the close alone, which already separates them from most of the panel. What divides them is time: one reports this bar, and the other reports the relationship between two stretches of bars.
What each one is
Williams percent r measures where the close sits inside the recent high-low range, from minus one hundred to zero, with no smoothing at all. Williams %R covers it.
The awesome oscillator subtracts a thirty-four period average of bar midpoints from a five period one and draws the difference as a histogram. The awesome oscillator covers the calculation.
One is a snapshot and the other is a comparison. Williams tells you about the position of the latest close. The awesome oscillator tells you how a recent stretch compares with a longer one, whereas nothing in williams percent r refers to more than one lookback.
Where they differ
Whether the scale runs out. Williams percent r reaches zero and stops. In a strong trend it sits there for weeks, unable to say that the move has got stronger. The awesome oscillator’s histogram keeps widening, so degrees of strength stay visible.
How much time is in the reading. Williams responds to the last bar. The awesome oscillator is a difference of two averages, one of them thirty-four bars long, so it is slow on purpose and quiet through noise that pins the other completely.
What the midline means. The awesome oscillator crossing zero means the fast average crossed the slow one, which is an event you can point at on the price chart. Williams percent r at minus fifty means the close sat halfway up the recent range, which is a fact about one bar.
What shape adds. A histogram whose bars are shrinking while still positive is momentum fading inside an intact move. A bounded oscillator has no equivalent — it is either at an extreme or it is not.
Where they agree
Both use the whole bar. Williams reads the high and low of the lookback; the awesome oscillator averages midpoints. Neither is a close-only tool, which is unusual in this panel.
Both are misread as reversal signals. A big reading means the recent move was strong, and strength is how trends start rather than how they end.
Both fight the same drift. On this site’s shared series 54% of 566 ten-bar windows finished higher than they started.
And both cost a round trip when acted on — 0.0098 here, about 2% of the median bar range of 0.493 — which the faster tool incurs far more often.
Which one to use
Run the awesome oscillator when a trend might be running. It is the one that still reports degrees once price is moving, and the histogram’s shape carries information the other cannot express.
Run williams percent r inside a confirmed range for timing. When there is a range, position within it is the right question and no smoothing means no delay in answering it.
Run both, and let them do different jobs. The slow one for condition, the fast one for timing inside it. That works because they genuinely differ in what they measure, which most oscillator pairs do not.
And when they disagree in a trend, believe the histogram. A pinned williams is what happens in every trend, so it is not saying anything specific about this one.
Why one instantaneous and one slow tool pair well
Because they fail in opposite conditions. The fast one is useless in a trend and precise in a range; the slow one is useless in a range and informative in a trend. Two tools that fail the same way are one tool, whereas two that fail differently can cover each other.
And because the disagreement is legible. When the fast one is extreme and the slow one is flat, that combination has a meaning — a sharp move inside a market that is going nowhere.
The original data
Of the 24,971 unique videos in the search corpus, no title compares these two directly. The awesome oscillator appears in 53 titles at a median of 10,321 views across 44 channels. Williams percent r appears in 46, at a median of 3,253 across 45.
Similar video counts, three times the audience on one of them. Williams percent r is a decades-old standard that almost every channel covers once and nobody returns to. The awesome oscillator carries a named-method association that keeps pulling searches, which is a fact about branding rather than about which measurement is better.
On the chart above the shrinking histogram is the informative half. It reports a move that is intact but decelerating, which the pinned reading has no way to represent.
When it fails
The characteristic failure is treating williams percent r’s extreme as a signal in a trending market. It reaches zero and stays there for as long as the trend runs, so the trader who sells the first extreme sells the beginning of the move and then sells it again at every subsequent one, paying a round trip each time against a drift that finished higher in 54% of 566 ten-bar windows on this series. The awesome oscillator does not fix that by itself, but it does at least distinguish a move that is accelerating from one that is fading, which is the information the bounded tool destroys.
A second failure is reading every awesome oscillator colour change as an event. A bar shorter than the last one is a description, and most mean nothing.
A third is running williams percent r alongside a stochastic, which is the same measurement with a different sign convention.
A fourth is tuning either lookback until the last swing is caught, which fits that sample only.
And a fifth is judging either on a sample with only one condition in it — a trend flatters one and breaks the other.
Related
Williams %R covers the raw range-position reading. The awesome oscillator covers the midpoint averages and the histogram. And RSI covers the momentum family both sit near.
These two pair better than most because one is instantaneous and the other is deliberately slow, and they read different aspects of the same bars. That is a real division of labour rather than two versions of the same reading, which is what most indicator stacks turn out to be.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.