Direction comes from somewhere else: structure, a higher timeframe, your own read. Edo Bands Fusion answers a different question, whether the market is in a condition where a trend entry makes sense. It fuses Bollinger Bands, Donchian channels and a percentile of band width into one overlay, and condenses them into the State row of its panel. The example is generic, with no ticker and no real prices, and it assumes an uptrend you already want to join.
1. Six states in a fixed order
Every bar gets exactly one state, checked in order. Squeeze comes first: the band width ranks at or below 20% of its own history, the default Squeeze Threshold. Then Expansion Up, a close above the upper Donchian band of the previous bar, and Expansion Down, a close below the lower one. Then Trend Up: price above the 20-period basis and the basis higher than five bars ago. Trend Down is the mirror image. Anything else is Range. The bands and their fill take the colour of the state: green for Trend Up and Expansion Up, red for the bearish pair, gray for Range and a bluish tone for Squeeze.
2. Range means the two halves disagree
Range is not a flat market. By the order above, it is what remains when there is no squeeze and no breakout, and price and the basis do not point the same way: price above the basis while the basis is no higher than five bars ago, or price below it while the basis is still rising. For a trend entry, that is the problem. The entry needs price and its average agreeing, and Range says they do not, even when the candles still look like an uptrend. The manual's reading for Range is to wait for definition. A pullback that turns a Trend Up bar into Range is the moment the filter asks you to let the next closes decide.
3. Squeeze overrides everything
A squeeze outranks every other state. While the band width sits in the bottom fifth of its history, the panel says Squeeze even if the close has just cleared the Donchian channel; the breakout triangle is plotted separately and can still appear under that bar. The background turns faintly blue and the Squeeze row counts the bars in compression. For a trend entry, that label means the trend reading is on hold. The manual describes compression as something that typically comes before wide moves and says nothing about their direction, so the useful alert here is Squeeze Released, followed by whatever state the next bars settle into.
4. Expansion and the Volatility % row
Expansion Up is a close above the previous upper Donchian band, and the first one in a sequence gets a green triangle. The manual treats those markers as confirmation that the recent range has broken, not as entries. The Volatility % row adds the scale: it ranks the current Bollinger band width against the last 252 bars, so a reading of 90% means the bands are wider than about nine in ten of the bars in that window. A trend entry taken there is taken while price is swinging far around its mean. That does not invalidate the trend. It changes where a sensible stop has to sit.
5. Same risk, fewer shares
A stop has to sit outside the ordinary swing, and wide bands mean the ordinary swing is larger. The manual mentions the optional Donchian middle line, hidden by default, as a possible reference for a dynamic stop; the lower Donchian band is another. Wherever you anchor it, the distance grows with volatility, and the position size calculator turns that distance into a size. Take a hypothetical $10,000 account risking 1%, which is $100, and a hypothetical entry at 100.00. With the stop three dollars away, the calculator gives 33 shares, rounded down, and $99 at risk. When the same reference sits six dollars away, it gives 16 shares and $96 at risk. The dollars at risk barely move; the size halves. That is why volatility is worth reading before the entry: it reaches the order as a share count, not as a second opinion on direction.
