Alligator settings: is the forward shift doing anything?

The Alligator is three smoothed moving averages, named the jaw (13), teeth (8) and lips (5). When they are tangled the alligator is said to be sleeping; when they stack up in order and fan apart it is eating, and that is the trend you are supposed to ride.

One thing separates it from any other three-average system: each line is displaced forward — eight, five and three bars into the future. Nineteen indicators into this series, nothing else has moved a line along the time axis.

So that is where this starts. The displacement is not a forecast. It is a delay. A line drawn eight bars ahead carries the value it had eight bars ago, so reading it today means reading a staler average — never a newer one.

And the second thing the measurement said before any trading happened: the alligator is eating for four bars in five.

displaced (the published indicator)no displacementUSD/JPY, share of bars with all three lines stacked

What the Alligator is made of

All three lines are built the same way:

1. Median price = (high + low) ÷ 2
2. A smoothed moving average (SMMA) of it over 13, 8 or 5 bars
3. Each line drawn 8, 5 or 3 bars to the right

Three arbitrary choices sit in there: the median price, the smoothed average, and the displacement. Each one is checkable.

The shift is a lag

The implementation is literal: compute the 13-bar SMMA at bar i, then draw that value at bar i + 8. Read the other way round, the jaw drawn at bar i is the average computed at bar i − 8.

No future data enters. Only age does. Comparing the displaced lines against the undisplaced ones, shifted back by their own displacement:

A displaced line is an undisplaced line fetched from that far back. Everything below is about whether the delay is worth anything.

Median price, and the smoothing

Swapping the two other choices out, with no displacement, in 2025:

A correlation of 0.999 and an order that disagrees on nearly half the bars. The three lines sit close together, so lines that overlap almost perfectly can still swap places constantly. Reading the correlation and concluding "close enough, the setting doesn't matter" gets this exactly backwards.

The price input barely matters (3.7–4.6%); the averaging method matters a lot (26.7–45.2%). The smoothed average is the choice doing work here.

Setting it up and reading it

It ships with everything. Adding it draws three lines over the price candles.

The eight fields in the settings dialog

MT4 opens it pre-filled with these. Every platform exposes the same eight.

MT4 colours them jaw blue, teeth red, lips green by default. The names are only a metaphor; the maths is identical for all three. Slowest to fastest: jaw, teeth, lips.

Three lines, three market states

Everything the Alligator says comes from where the three lines sit relative to each other.

Eating upward means lips (green) on top and jaw (blue) at the bottom; downward is the mirror. Where this article says "stacked in order", that is the state it means.

How people trade it

The most widely published rule is: buy when the lips (5) cross above the teeth (8), sell when they cross below. This article measures that as "lips crossing teeth".

Two other readings are common:

• Ride the stack: instead of the crossing moment, hold while the three stay in order
• Ride the break: buy when a candle closes above all three lines, sell when it closes below

All three are tested here as separate systems.

Which fields are worth touching

Periods change how fast the lines move; shifts slide them sideways. The method and the applied price are editable too, and the article compares those on the lines themselves further down: swapping the smoothing changes the stacking order on 26.7–45.2% of bars, swapping the price input on 3.7–4.6%.

Where the shifts can be set to zero, that is the "three plain moving averages" version. This article compares the two.

How this was measured

All three readings are symmetric — each one opens longs and shorts off mirror conditions — so entry and exit share a rule set.

The alligator eats for four bars in five

The share of bars with the three lines stacked in one direction, lips through jaw:

Over 80% in all six cells, and 85.9–88.3% with the displacement removed. "Stay out while the alligator sleeps" means staying out for 16–19% of the year.

That is not a filter. The GMMA test found the same shape — its long ribbon was in order on 85% of bars — and the lesson is the same one: count how rare a state is before measuring what it separates.

The up-and-down split tracks the market honestly. USD/JPY rose 1,632 pips in 2024 and the hourly split was 50.27% to 30.58%; 2025 closed 56 pips lower and the split was 41.65% to 39.20%.

Taking the displacement out

Same reading, same periods, displacement varied:

lips x teethall three in orderprice breaks all threedashed line: 11 of 22, where the two are even

Each cell is 11 period sets × 2 years, counting how often removing the displacement finished with more pips.

Across all 198 it is 103 — a coin toss. The displacement has no general effect.

But it splits by reading. On the published lips-and-teeth entry it is 52 of 66 in favour of removing it. On price-outside-all-three it is 20 of 66, so there the displacement earns its place.

The concrete version, hourly chart, periods 13/8/5, lips crossing teeth:

Williams' own displacement is last of the four in both years. Trades go from 298 to 404, the win rate climbs from 34.56% to 43.07%, and the money falls. The series signature again: the higher win rate is the losing one.

The break-even spread makes it plainer. With the shift, 0.59 pips. Without it, 2.79. The first does not survive a 0.6-pip spread.

Price alone says the same thing

With no strategy in the way: every bar where the lips crossed the teeth, the move over the next 10, 20 and 50 bars, minus the unconditional drift over the same horizon.

The undisplaced lines gave the better forward move in 16 of 18 cells. They also cross less often — 294 times against 410 on the hourly chart in 2024. Delaying both lines produces more crossings carrying less.

The standard entry never looks at the jaw

"Buy when the lips cross the teeth" reads the lips and the teeth. The jaw is not in it.

Three period sets sharing the teeth and lips, with the jaw moved:

Identical to the pip on the first row. The 13-bar line the indicator is named around plays no part in its most popular entry.

The editor now hides the jaw's two settings when that trigger is selected. A knob that cannot change the result is worse than no knob.

Are 13, 8 and 5 right because they are Fibonacci numbers?

Jaw 13, teeth 8, lips 5; shifts 8, 5, 3. Every one is a Fibonacci number.

The Fibonacci retracement test established the shape for this: build a control group with no Fibonacci number in it and compare like against like. The controls here are 12/7/4, 12/7/6, 14/9/4 and 14/9/6 — the four corners around Williams' teeth and lips.

Matched one-to-one across every trigger, timeframe, displacement and year, 13/8/5 finished ahead in 136 of 288. Below half.

The controls are ahead in five of six — the lone exception is the hourly 2024 row, +1,399 against +1,293. No effect specific to the Fibonacci numbers showed up — the same answer the retracement article reached about the ratios.

Which readings survived, by timeframe

Settings profitable in 2024 and 2025:

Every hourly setting of the price-breakout reading made money in both years — the most uniform result in this series.

The four-hour chart inverted again: 40/44, 42/44 and 44/44 in 2024 became 4/44, 1/44 and 9/44 in 2025. GMMA and CCI both did this too.

Except in the first half of 2025

The same counts with 2025 split down the middle, hourly chart:

lips x teethall three in orderprice breaks all threehourly chart, profitable settings out of 44

44 of 44 is an 18-of-44 half added to a 43-of-44 half. "Profitable in both years" and "profitable throughout" are different claims.

Concretely: 13/8/5 with the published shift, price outside all three, hourly — 361 trades and +969.3 pips over 2025, made of −673.5 over 212 trades in the first half and +1,618.7 over 150 in the second.

All three readings sink together, so this is the half-year, not the reading. An annual figure averages those halves out of sight.

The lowest win rate was the most durable

Hourly chart, 2025, settings with at least one trade:

The lowest win rate is the most durable reading, because its wins are 2.6 times its losses. Nineteen articles, nineteen times.

Does a wider mouth precede a bigger move?

This is the one claim that held. Entry bars split into quartiles by the distance between the outermost lines, then the absolute move over the next 20 bars:

The widest quartile leads on all three timeframes, and the narrowest is below the all-bars average everywhere.

Read it carefully, though. The lines are apart because price just moved, so this is volatility persisting, not direction being predicted — and the edge is +19% on the 15-minute chart.

Filters, stops and cost

An ADX filter breaks it, for the fourth time

Filtering a trend rule for trend duplicates the condition. GMMA and CCI found it first; this is the fourth time.

Stops and targets

A 100-pip stop with a 200-pip target improved both years on the crossing entry — no displacement went +742.5 → +2,236.7 in 2025 and +2,944.9 → +3,165.3 in 2024, and with the displacement +115.5 → +618.2 and +973.7 → +1,223.6.

It does not carry to the other readings. Price-outside-all-three went +969.3 → +1,248.1 in 2025 but +2,161.6 → +1,992.6 in 2024. Of the four settings measured, only the two crossing variants improved in both years.

Cost

Net pips fall linearly with the spread. Pips lost = trades × spread, with no error.

Removing the displacement moved the break-even from 0.59 pips to 2.79. 106 fewer trades to pay for, and more pips in each one.

What this test can say

1. The forward shift is a delay, not a forecast. A line eight bars ahead carries an eight-bar-old value — 196,578 comparisons across three timeframes and two years, zero mismatches
2. The delay has no general effect. Removing it won 103 of 198 matched settings. On the published lips-and-teeth entry it won 52 of 66, and took the break-even spread from 0.59 pips to 2.79
3. The alligator eats for four bars in five. All three lines are stacked in order on 80.5–84.0% of bars, or 85.9–88.3% without the displacement. Sitting out the sleep means sitting out 16–19% of the year
4. The Fibonacci periods are not special. Against four control sets containing no Fibonacci number, 13/8/5 won 136 of 288
5. "Profitable in both years" is not "profitable throughout." The hourly price-breakout reading was 44/44 in each year and 18/44 in the first half of 2025

Related

• GMMA line count — its long ribbon is in order 85% of the time; the same base-rate problem
• Fibonacci retracements — where the control-group method in this article comes from
• Moving average crossover periods — how much the averaging method is worth on its own
• CCI and its ±100 band — the same approach of swapping out one arbitrary choice inside a formula at a time

Limits of this test

• One pair, two years. The Alligator came from commodity futures; on another market even the share of time the mouth is open would change
• 2024 rose 1,632 pips, 2025 closed 56 pips lower — and 2025's two halves were different markets from each other
• Only four displacements were tried (0/0/0, 4/3/2, 8/5/3, 16/10/6), not a continuous sweep
• The averaging method and price input were measured on the lines only, never traded. Switching SMMA to EMA changes the stacking order on 27–29% of bars, so it must change the results too — this article does not have those numbers
• The spread is fixed at 0.3 pips. A setting with 0.59 pips of room does not survive that assumption breaking
• The mouth-width result has no direction in it. It is an absolute move, so it says "bigger", not "up"
• The four-hour samples are small (25 to 290 trades a year depending on the reading). It reversed completely between 2024 and 2025, and two years cannot say which was the exception