The one indicator I added back after removing everything

[FXS London Scalper]

Last year I removed all indicators from my charts and traded price only: levels, candles, and session times. It worked fine, and my charts were much cleaner.

But I added one thing back: a simple average of the last 20 bars' range, shown as a number in the corner. Not a line on the chart.

The reason is that I misjudged volatility without it. On quiet days I set targets too far, and on busy days stops too tight. A single number fixed that.

I'm curious which single tool others would keep if they had to choose one.

[Shadow Trader]

Everybody knows the first problem. An indicator that redraws past values looks perfect in hindsight and gives signals that never existed in real time. That is old news.

The second problem gets far less attention. Many repainting indicators are repainting because they recalculate a long stretch of history on every tick. That is how they get to change old values. The same design that makes the signal unreliable also makes the indicator expensive to run. Load a handful of them on several charts and the terminal starts lagging in fast markets, which delays the very entries those indicators were supposed to help with.

Blunt opinion: an indicator that both repaints and burns processor time has no place on a scalping chart. The signal cannot be trusted, and the cost shows up as slower execution on the whole platform.

A quick way to spot the problem is to watch the chart at the live edge for a few minutes and note whether past arrows or lines shift, then check how the platform responds when the indicator is added to a busy chart.

Which indicators have you caught repainting, and did removing them make the terminal noticeably smoother?