Quarterly Theory

A trader who works with Quarterly Theory marks the quarters by hand. The week splits into days. The day splits into sessions. The session splits into 90-minute blocks, and each block splits again. Each level needs its own marks, and every mark expires.

Then the real work starts. Inside each quarter, the trader compares the high of the chart asset against the high of the correlated asset, and the low against the low. A disagreement inside a quarter is the signal. Agreement is not.

Done by hand, this is one comparison per quarter per cycle per asset pair. On a 1-minute chart, that is hundreds of comparisons per session. No trader does all of them. The trader does a few, picks the cycle that feels relevant, and misses the rest.

QT maps the time-based market cycles of Quarterly Theory, and it detects Sequential SMT divergence inside each one. Every layer has its own divergence detection. All seven run at the same time.

Monthly

Week-based quarters inside each month.

Weekly

Daily quarters inside each trading week.

Daily

Session quarters — Asia, London, NY AM, NY PM.

90m

90-minute cycles in four quarters.

30m

30-minute cycles.

Micro

64 sessions per day.

Nano

256 sessions per day. High-resolution mode, below 1-minute charts.

An SSMT is a disagreement between correlated assets, inside one time cycle. Bullish — your asset makes a lower low, and the correlated asset makes a higher low. Bearish — your asset makes a higher high, and the correlated asset makes a lower high. QT draws a line between the divergent extremes. The line color names the cycle. The label names the cycle, the asset, or both.

PSP

A pivot with a divergence on the close. QT can filter these by distance from an existing SSMT line.

CISD

A confirmed directional shift after a pivot. It validates the commitment behind a divergence.

Purge

A sweep of liquidity through a previous pivot level.