Quick Start

The goal of this page is to get Axiom DC on a chart, get a picture you can reason about, and get you through the handful of first-load traps that will otherwise eat your afternoon. Do the steps in order. The verification drill at the end is short, and doing it once will save you from a specific kind of confusion later.

Before you touch any inputs, note the posture this tool ships with: three Donchian slots, a user-weighted blended channel on top, and a single global switch that decides whether higher-timeframe values are confirmed or live. That switch is the one you want to understand before you tune anything else. MTF & Repainting teaches it in depth — come back here once you have read it.

Step 1. Add the indicator to a 1-minute chart

Open a liquid symbol on a standard-candle 1-minute chart and add Axiom DC. A 1-minute chart is chosen on purpose: the shipped defaults point the three slots at 5m, 15m, and 60m, so you will see every slot step on its own cadence without being too fast to follow. Standard candles matter because the tool reads the chart's high and low series; synthetic chart types feed it synthetic highs and lows.

Step 2. Confirm the default picture

With no inputs changed, you should see:

• A teal Donchian slot stepping on 5-minute closes. Three lines: upper, basis, lower.

• A blue slot stepping on 15-minute closes. Same three lines, in blue.

• A purple slot stepping on 60-minute closes. Same three lines, in purple.

• A red blended channel with a translucent red fill between its upper and lower lines, and a lime basis line running through the middle.

The channel lines use a half-opacity version of each slot's color, and the basis lines use the fully opaque version. That color split is how you tell a basis from an outer bound when the stack is stacked close together. If the picture does not match this description, something has been changed from the shipped defaults — Hide DC NN Plot, an Enable toggle, or a slot weight — and it is worth tracking down before moving on.

Step 3. Watch one full 5-minute bar close

The teal slot is the fastest. Look at the upper and lower lines on Slot 01 during a live 5-minute bar. With On Bar Close? on — the default — those lines will not move between 5-minute closes. At the 5-minute close, they step to whatever the next confirmed value is, and they hold until the next 5-minute close.

This is the ON posture at work. Every slot behaves this way under ON, each on its own timeframe. Slot 02 steps on 15-minute closes; Slot 03 steps on 60-minute closes. The live 1-minute bar does not shift any of them. That stability is the point of ON, and it costs you one higher-timeframe bar of latency per slot.

Step 4. Flip the switch and watch the same window

Open the settings dialog. Under the PU Settings group, turn On Bar Close? off. Now watch the same 5-minute window again. The teal lines will move during the live 5-minute bar. Slot 02 and Slot 03 will also move during their live bars — the switch is global, so all three slots flipped posture at once. The 60-minute slot is the easiest place to watch this happen: the live bar is long enough that you can sit with the lines for a minute and see them drift, rather than having to catch them at a faster cadence.

This is the OFF posture. Faster in the sense that the lines reflect the live higher-timeframe bar, at the cost of those lines being provisional — they can redraw until each slot's higher-timeframe bar closes. Flip the switch back to on before you move on.

What Steps 3 and 4 are teaching is not "this switch exists." It is the difference between the value the chart currently shows and the value the chart will remember later. Under ON those two values are the same — once a line is drawn on a chart bar, it stays. Under OFF, the line you are looking at right now is not necessarily the line that will sit on this chart bar when you review it tomorrow. That distinction is the entire repaint conversation. See it once with your own eyes and the rest of the pack's repaint language lands without translation.

If you ever find yourself tempted to leave the switch off because "it looks more responsive," read MTF & Repainting before you commit to it. The tradeoff is real, it applies to every slot at once on this trim, and it is worth understanding with both eyes open.

Step 5. Provoke the timeframe guard on purpose

Still in the settings dialog, temporarily switch the chart itself to 5 minutes, then set Slot 01's TimeFrame: to "1". Now the slot is asking for a 1-minute read below a 5-minute chart. The indicator will stop rendering and TradingView will show an error banner:

DC 01 timeframe cannot be lower than the chart timeframe.

Read that message. You will see it again when you set a slot to the wrong timeframe in a hurry during a live session, and it is faster to recognize if you have seen it deliberately. The fix is to set Slot 01's TimeFrame: back to "5", or to any timeframe equal to or higher than the chart's. Put the chart back on 1 minute before continuing the first-load drill.

Step 6. Hide a slot — but understand what "hide" means

Turn Hide DC 02 Plot on. The blue slot's three lines disappear. The chart feels a little cleaner. Now look at the red blended channel.

Nothing about the blend has changed.

This is a trap. Hide DC NN Plot suppresses the slot's plotted lines and nothing else. The slot is still computing, still contributing to the blended channel at whatever weight you gave it, and still participating in the alignment alerts. If you assume "hidden" means "out of the math," you will eventually read a blend and not be able to explain what is moving it.

If your goal is to take a slot out of the blend, change its Blended Weight to zero or turn the slot's Enable off. If your goal is to keep the blend as-is but stop looking at the slot's lines, then hiding the plot is the right move — just know that the slot is still doing its job. Turn Hide DC 02 Plot back off when you are done.

Step 7. Send a slot to zero weight

Set Slot 03's Blended Weight to 0. The purple slot's three lines stay on the chart. The red blended channel recomposes — it is now the weighted composite of Slots 01 and 02 only, at weights 40 and 35. Slot 03 is visible, but silent in the vote.

This is the drawn-but-silent posture: keep a slot visible because you want to read its lines, without letting it steer the blend. Some readers run the entire stack this way once they decide the composite is not doing what they want. It is a valid posture. Restore the weight to 25 when you are done.

What a good first chart looks like

After Steps 1 through 7, the chart should look like this:

• Three colored slot stacks, each stepping at its own cadence (5m for teal, 15m for blue, 60m for purple).

• A red blended channel sitting inside the envelope of the slots most of the time, with a lime basis running through the middle.

• No red error banner at the top.

• On Bar Close? on unless you are deliberately testing the other posture.

• Default Basis MA Length: 1 with default SMA across every slot — which means the basis is the raw midpoint of the upper and lower, not really smoothed yet. That is fine for now. When you raise Basis MA Length above 1, the length-based Type: choices start to matter more. SWMA is the exception in the Lite library: it uses TradingView's fixed SWMA behavior rather than the user length.

Traps to avoid on first load

This trim has a handful of first-load confusions that are worth naming explicitly. Each one is phrased as what the trap costs you when you fall in, not just as a warning to look out for.

• The hidden-plot trap. Hide DC NN Plot removes lines from the chart and nothing else. The slot is still computing, still steering the blend at its current weight, and still voting in alignment alerts. Cost when you miss it: the blended channel moves or an alignment alert stays silent and you cannot point at a slot on the chart that explains it. Step 6 above is the drill; keep the shape of it.

• The global-OFF temptation. On Bar Close? off feels snappy. It is snappy the way a work-in-progress is snappy — things can redraw. Cost when you miss it: a 60-minute slot sitting in the middle of its hour is reporting a value that may move for the next 50 minutes, and any screenshot you take of that state can resolve differently on review. Understand the tradeoff in MTF & Repainting before you leave the switch off.

• The timeframe-below-chart error. A slot's timeframe must be greater than or equal to the chart timeframe. Drop it below and you get the red error banner from Step 5. Cost when you miss it: the whole indicator stops rendering and readers sometimes blame the chart symbol, the network, or a platform glitch before checking the slot's timeframe. Read the banner. The fix is on the named slot.

• The degenerate-smoother surprise. At Basis MA Length = 1, the length-based MA choices mostly collapse to the raw midpoint — SMA, EMA, RMA, WMA, and VWMA have almost nothing to shape. Cost when you miss it: you switch SMA to EMA, see nothing change, and conclude the knob is broken. Raise the length above 1 first. SWMA is different because its TradingView function is fixed-length.

• The equal-weights reflex. A 33 / 33 / 33 blend is not "neutral." Equal weighting across three slots is a statement that each timeframe is equally informative for whatever you are reading right now. Cost when you miss it: the blend starts behaving in ways you did not predict, and the reason is a weighting choice you did not realize you had made. Make the call deliberately or leave the shipped 40 / 35 / 25 posture alone for now.

Where to go next

Once the chart above is rendering cleanly and the first-load traps feel familiar, the next pages to read are Settings — for every knob this trim carries — and Visuals & Logic, which teaches how to read the chart you just set up. Alerts, the repaint posture, and the deeper mechanics pages come after those.

One parting note before you leave this page: the verification drill you just did is the shape of every verification drill in this pack. A claim the pack makes, a chart state you can produce, a one-minute confirmation with your own eyes. If a later page makes a claim and you cannot see it on your chart, the claim is wrong or the chart is wrong — both are worth finding out about. Treat the drills the same way you just treated Steps 3 through 6.