Alligator Settings for MT4: The Shift Helped in Exactly 24 of 48 Tests, and 0 of 24 Settings Made Money on EURUSD M5

The Alligator has more inputs than most built-in indicators: a period and a shift for each of its three lines, plus the type of average and the price it is built on. That invites tinkering, and forum threads are full of “better” Alligator settings. Below is where to find each input in MT4, and then what happened when I changed them on real bars instead of on a screenshot.

How do you add the Alligator in MT4?

1. Open a chart, then Insert, Indicators, Bill Williams, Alligator. You can also drag it from the Navigator under Indicators, Bill Williams.
2. On the Parameters tab you will see Jaws period 13 and Jaws shift 8, Teeth period 8 and Teeth shift 5, Lips period 5 and Lips shift 3.
3. Leave MA method on Smoothed and Apply to on Median Price ((High+Low)/2). Those are the values Bill Williams used and the ones tested here.
4. On the Colors tab the jaw is blue, the teeth red and the lips green. Press OK.

The lines sit to the right of the last candle, because of the shift. If you also want the Awesome Oscillator under the chart, it lives in the same Bill Williams menu. For a clean chart to start from, see MT4 first chart setup.

What do the Alligator settings do?

How were the settings tested?

• Grid: all six periods and shifts multiplied together by 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.5, 2 and 3 (so 1.5 means 20/12/8 with shifts 12/8/4), each with the shift on and with it set to 0, and two entries: the Alligator waking up (lines become stacked) and the lips crossing the teeth. 24 settings per chart.
• Data: EURUSD M5, 16,926 bars from June 3 to August 26, 2026; gold M5, 13,736 bars from June 16; M15 built from them.
• Exit and cost: stop 1.5 ATR, target 3 ATR, 48 bars at most; 1 pip on EURUSD, $0.30 an ounce on gold, as in spread and swap costs in MT4. Halves split at July 15.

Which Alligator settings made money?

EURUSD M5 is a wall: 4 settings had an edge before cost and the spread erased all of them. Gold M15 looks generous, but every trend rule looks generous on a chart where gold rose for most of the period, and the best 5% of random-entry runs with the same exit made more than $2.70 an ounce a trade there. The walk-forward row is the one to read twice. The setting that did best in June and early July fell to the lower half in late July and August on all four charts. On gold M15 the first-half winner, triple-length lines without the shift, made $13.12 an ounce a trade and then lost $1.99. That is the trap described in optimized vs default settings.

Does the Alligator shift help?

The shift does what Bill Williams wanted in one sense: it makes the Alligator sleep more, about 20% of bars instead of 14%. It does that by delay. The shifted lines woke up a median of 3 bars after the unshifted ones, and they lost their stacked order faster. Across the whole grid the shifted version won 24 times and lost 24 times. If you prefer it on or off, nothing in these bars argues with you, and nothing proves you right. Why later signals are not automatically safer is covered in indicator lag and whipsaw in MT4.

Are faster or slower Alligator settings better?

Trades in brackets. There is no slope you could trade on. On EURUSD M15 the faster half of the grid did better, on gold M15 the slower half, and on gold M5 everything sat within a few cents of zero. Triple length was the worst or near the worst on three charts. A pattern that changes direction from chart to chart is noise, not a setting. The same result for the plain moving average crossover is in MA crossover test 2026.

What Alligator settings would I use?

• Keep the default 13/8/5 with shifts 8/5/3. No other setting held its place from one half of the test to the next.
• Use M15 or higher. On EURUSD M5 not one of 24 settings beat the spread.
• Trade the lips and teeth cross rather than the wake-up, with a stop and a target set in ATR, and compare it with an EMA 9/21 cross as in Alligator vs moving average crossover.
• Turning the shift off is a matter of taste. It gives signals 3 bars earlier and changed the result as often for the better as for the worse.

Frequently asked questions

What are the default Alligator settings in MT4?

Jaws period 13, shift 8; Teeth period 8, shift 5; Lips period 5, shift 3; MA method Smoothed; Apply to Median Price.

What are the best Alligator settings for a 5-minute chart?

On EURUSD M5 none of the 24 settings tested made money after a 1 pip spread, from half to three times the default length, with or without the shift. On gold M5, 8 of 24 did, but only 2 in both halves.

Should I set the Alligator shift to 0?

It is your choice. Without the shift the Alligator woke up 3 bars earlier in 85% to 88% of cases and slept less. Across 48 like-for-like tests, the shifted version did better 24 times and worse 24 times.

Can I change the Alligator to exponential moving averages?

Yes, MA method offers Simple, Exponential, Smoothed and Linear Weighted. Exponential reacts faster for the same period. In a related test, EMA 5/13, built from two of the Alligator’s lengths, lost after cost on all 4 charts.