Parabolic SAR vs Supertrend: 78.7% Agreement, and a 2.9-Pip Split at Hour Eight

Parabolic SAR and Supertrend are sold as different things — one is a 1978 trailing-stop mechanism, the other a modern ATR channel — but on a chart they do the same job: sit on one side of price, flip to the other when the move turns, and tell you which way to lean. I ran both over the identical 16,926 EURUSD 5-minute bars, June 3 to August 26, 2026, with identical measurement rules, and asked the only question that matters: when they disagree, who is right?

How were the two indicators compared?

• Parabolic SAR: Wilder’s original, step 0.02, maximum 0.2 — the MT4 and MT5 default.
• Supertrend: ATR period 10, multiplier 3.0 — the default in nearly every published version, and the same settings used in my ADX against Supertrend test.
• Signal: the bar on which each indicator changes side. Nothing else, so the comparison is of the indicators and not of a strategy wrapped around one of them.
• Measurement: pips gained in the signal direction after a fixed hold, before spread. After a signal the clock skips forward by the hold length, so no move is double-counted.
• Direction agreement is measured bar by bar over all 16,916 bars where both indicators have a value.

How often do they actually disagree?

Two things fall out of this table. First, running both on one chart is close to running one indicator twice — a confirmation that agrees with you 79% of the time is not confirming much, which is the same trap I documented when stacking trend filters in my moving average settings test.

Second, SAR flips 60% more often than Supertrend on the same price. That is the mechanical difference between the two: SAR’s acceleration factor pulls its level toward price every time a new extreme prints, so it tightens relentlessly and gets touched; Supertrend’s level only moves when ATR allows and is otherwise frozen. Same idea, different patience.

Which one wins on the same data?

Read the column of averages downward and the ranking flips halfway. At two hours SAR is 1.34 pips better. At eight hours Supertrend is 2.89 pips better. Both are negative in all four cells, so this is not a hunt for a winner — it is evidence that the question “which indicator is better” has no answer without a holding time attached to it.

The reason is visible in the flip counts. SAR reacts fast, so its signal describes something that just happened and has a short shelf life; my full Parabolic SAR test found the effect had entirely decayed by hour eight, turning into a -3.47 pip loss. Supertrend reacts slowly, so its signal only fires once a move is established, and an established move is exactly the kind of thing still worth something eight hours later. Fast indicators need short holds. Slow indicators need long ones. Pairing a fast signal with a long hold, or the reverse, is how most published systems quietly lose money.

Which is the better filter for someone else’s system?

Most traders do not use either of these as an entry. They use them to veto entries from another system. So I took a plain EMA 12/26 crossover and let each indicator supply the veto: take the crossover only if the trend indicator already points the same way.

Both filters remove the same 20 signals out of 324, and they produce opposite outcomes. Supertrend cut the loss in half. SAR made it worse than no filter at all. Notice too that the win rates barely move — 43.8% and 44.1% against 44.8% unfiltered. The filters are not changing how often you are right. They are changing the size of what you keep, which is why judging a filter by win rate is close to useless. My crossover test ran into the same illusion.

Why does the faster indicator make the worse filter? Because SAR flips every 13 bars at the median, so by the time an EMA crossover completes, SAR has frequently already turned against it and vetoes the signal at the worst possible moment — right at the pullback. Supertrend, having flipped only 739 times, is usually still holding the older, broader read, which is what a filter is supposed to contribute.

So when should each one be on the chart?

The last row is the one worth pinning up. Adding a second trend indicator to a chart that already has one buys you a fifth of an opinion, and it costs you the signals that arrive during that fifth — which, as both this test and my ADX study show, are disproportionately the early ones.

What I would actually do with this

• Pick one, not both. 78.7% agreement means the second one is decoration.
• Match the indicator to your holding time. Fast SAR with short holds, slow Supertrend with long ones. Crossing them over was worth up to 2.9 pips a trade in the wrong direction.
• Use Supertrend for filtering, not SAR. One halved the loss on an EMA system, the other deepened it.
• Do not read win rate as quality. All three filter variants sat within one point of each other while the pip result moved by 0.58.
• Remember every cell here is negative before spread. Neither indicator was profitable alone on 5-minute EURUSD. This comparison is about which loses less, and why.

Frequently asked questions

Is Supertrend better than Parabolic SAR?

At long holds and as a filter, clearly yes on this data: -0.58 against -3.47 pips at eight hours, and -0.35 against -0.93 when filtering an EMA crossover. At a two-hour hold SAR was the better of the two, at -0.04 against -1.38. There is no answer that survives without naming the hold.

Can I use Parabolic SAR and Supertrend together?

You can, but they agree 78.7% of the time, so the combination mostly restates one indicator while deleting the minority of signals where they differ. In my testing that subset is where the early entries live, and removing them cost more than the false signals it saved.

Why does Parabolic SAR flip so much more often?

Its acceleration factor climbs each time price makes a new extreme, dragging the stop level toward price until something touches it — 1,182 flips against Supertrend’s 739 on identical bars. Supertrend’s band only moves when ATR permits and otherwise stays put, as covered in my Supertrend guide for MT4.

Which one is the better trailing stop?

SAR trails tighter — a median 5.1 pips from price, with a quarter of all bars inside 3 pips. That locks profit faster and gets stopped by ordinary noise more often, the exact trade-off measured in my ATR trailing stop article and my stop distance test.

Do either of them repaint?

Neither does. Both are computed from closed bars plus the current high and low, and neither revises history once a bar closes. Not repainting is a floor, not a recommendation — everything in the tables above happened to two indicators that are perfectly honest about their own past.

What data was this run on?

16,926 EURUSD 5-minute bars, June 3 to August 26, 2026, the same set behind my Ichimoku cloud breakout test and my spread and swap cost breakdown. 16,916 of those bars had a value for both indicators and were used for the agreement figure.