Visuals and Logic

This page is the single reference for what you are actually looking at on the chart and for the state transitions that matter. Settings tells you which knob produces which line. This page tells you what those lines mean when they move, when they disagree, and when they quietly cancel each other out.

Every visible element

Twelve lines and one fill make up the full default surface.

• Slot upper band. One per enabled slot. Drawn at the slot's basis plus StdDev Mult: standard deviations of Source: over Length: bars — computed inside the slot's chosen timeframe. At default colours: teal for Slot 01, blue for Slot 02, purple for Slot 03.

• Slot basis. The moving-average at the centre of the slot's Bollinger band, smoothed with the moving-average type you chose under Type:. Same colour as the slot.

• Slot lower band. Mirror of the upper band, at the basis minus StdDev Mult: standard deviations.

• Blended upper band. Red. A weighted average of every enabled slot's upper band, where a slot's weight is its Blended Weight: input and a slot with weight zero is excluded from the average.

• Blended basis. Lime. The same weighted-average rule applied to the slot bases.

• Blended lower band. Red. Mirror of the blended upper.

• Blended fill. Translucent red-tinted region between the blended upper and blended lower. Visual only — no math depends on it, no alert reads from it.

Two things are worth saying directly about this list, because they are both easy to misread at a glance.

First, the blended band is a composite you configured. It is not a classifier. It averages agreement and averages disagreement the same way, and it uses the weights you set. The lime basis is the weighted middle of whatever is currently feeding it. Read it that way.

Second, the slot colours and the blended colours are fixed on the Base trim. If you need a different palette, you are asking for the CTX trim's palette controls, not this one.

What drives changes in the visible elements

Several distinct events can cause lines to move. Reading the chart well is partly a matter of knowing which event is responsible for a given shift.

• A new chart bar. Repaints the x-axis position of everything and advances alert evaluation. The chart bar's close is what gates every alert this indicator fires.

• A higher-timeframe bar closing on a slot. Under On Bar Close? ON, this is the only event that causes a slot's lines to step forward. Under OFF, this is the event that stops the slot redrawing on the current chart bar.

• Changes to any of a slot's primary inputs. Source:, TimeFrame:, Length:, StdDev Mult:, Type:, or Basis Trend Length: — any of these recomputes the slot.

• Changes to Blended Weight: on any slot, or to Enable Blended BB / Enable BB 0N. Any of these recomputes the blended band.

• Flipping On Bar Close?. Every slot's repaint posture changes together. The blended band recomposes once the new posture propagates through each slot.

If a line moves and you cannot identify which of those caused it, that is a prompt to check — not a prompt to rationalize. A slot redrawing with no new higher-timeframe close is a strong hint that On Bar Close? is OFF, or that a slot input changed, or that the chart bar just closed and the evaluation advanced.

State transitions that matter

Not every visual change is a state transition worth reading. A few specific ones are:

• A slot's basis crossing price. Meaningful only in the context of that slot's timeframe. "Price crossed the 60-minute basis" is a different event from "price crossed the 5-minute basis," and they happen on different cadences.

• A per-slot basis-trend flip. The slot moves from "basis greater than or equal to its value Basis Trend Length bars ago" to "basis less than," or the other way. Alerted, confirmed at chart bar close. Read the Basis Trend Length: value before you read the flip.

• A blended basis-trend flip. The weight-majority vote across enabled, non-zero-weight slots tips from uptrend to downtrend or back when the contributing weights sum above zero. Alerted, confirmed at chart bar close. See For the Geeks for the tie-break behaviour and the zero-total edge.

• An alignment event. Every enabled slot with a non-na basis is in uptrend (or every one is in downtrend). Alerted, confirmed at chart bar close.

All four of these are gated by the close of the chart bar, not the slot's higher-timeframe bar. Under On Bar Close? OFF, that means a slot's state can tip during a live higher-timeframe bar, be reported at the chart bar's close, and then un-tip before the higher-timeframe bar itself closes. Alerts covers that carefully.

The hidden-plot trap

The Hide BB 0N Plot toggle is a cosmetic control. It removes the slot's three lines from the chart and does nothing else. In particular:

• The slot is still computed.

• The slot still contributes to the blended band at its assigned weight.

• The slot still participates in the alignment alerts and in per-slot basis-trend alerts.

• The slot still shows up in the hidden alert count plots.

The failure mode is predictable. A reader decides a slot is "not helping" visually, hides the plot, and then interprets blended-band movement as if the hidden slot is not part of it. It is. If you want the slot excluded from the blend, set its Blended Weight: to zero. If you want it excluded from the alignment alerts, disable the slot entirely with Enable BB 0N.

Two sentences to repeat while you tune: hiding lines is cosmetic. Excluding a slot from the math requires either weight zero or disable.

Reading disagreement without averaging it away

This is the single most important reading skill for this indicator.

The blended band's width and direction are composed from the slots feeding it. That means a narrow blend can come from two entirely different states:

• Agreement. Three slots are all tight, on their respective timeframes, and the weighted composite is therefore also tight. A narrow blend here is a real reflection of tight bands across the stack.

• Cancellation. One slot is wide, another is tight, and the weights happen to average them into a narrow composite. A narrow blend here is an artifact of how the weights combined, not a reading about volatility.

Both states look the same if you are reading only the blended band. They do not look the same if you are reading the slot lines underneath it. That is the entire point of having the slots visible at all.

Two practical moves:

• When the blended band looks unusually calm, glance at the slot bands. If the three slot envelopes are visibly similar in width, you are in agreement. If one is noticeably wider than the others, you are in cancellation, and the blend is currently papering over that spread.

• When the blended basis looks flat, check the per-slot basis states or the alignment alert. A "flat" blend with two slots in uptrend and one in downtrend is a weight-majority composite of disagreement. The alert logic will not flag this as alignment — which is correct, because it is not alignment.

A small scenario to lock this in. Imagine a chart in the middle of a news-driven move on the lowest timeframe. Slot 01 (5-minute) has a wide envelope and a basis tilting up. Slot 02 (15-minute) has a moderate envelope and a basis roughly flat. Slot 03 (60-minute) has a narrow envelope and a basis tilting down because the higher-timeframe context has been drifting lower for an hour. The blended band, at equal weights, averages those three envelopes into something that looks moderate — neither particularly wide nor particularly tight — and the blended basis sits near horizontal because the three slot bases largely cancel. If you are reading only the blend, you see "nothing interesting is happening." If you are reading the slots, you see a very specific disagreement between what is happening on the lowest timeframe right now and the longer context inside which it is happening. The second read is almost always the one a serious reader wants. The blend compresses it; the slots preserve it.

The blend does a specific, declared job. It does not offer a verdict. When you want a verdict, you supply it, using the slots and the blend together — and you ideally ask yourself whether the blend is reporting agreement or cancellation before you let it influence a decision.

Agreement, cancellation, and the alignment alerts

The alignment alerts fire only when every enabled slot with a non-na basis agrees on direction. This is the one piece of the logic that does not average — it either fires or it does not.

Two consequences worth carrying in your head:

• Hidden slots still count. If Slot 02 is hidden but still enabled, Slot 02 must agree for the alignment alert to fire. Hiding a slot does not drop it out of the count.

• Disabled slots do not count. If Slot 02 is disabled, the alignment alert checks only Slot 01 and Slot 03. That is a two-slot alignment, not a three-slot alignment — which is probably fine, but you should know which one you are looking at.

The alignment alert is structurally the tightest read the indicator offers. When it fires, it is reporting that every voice in the stack — visible or hidden, as long as enabled — is pointing the same way under the Basis Trend Length: lookback each slot has. That is a clean condition, not a verdict. It is still your call whether it means anything for your process.

Early bars and na

On the first bars of a chart's history, a slot's Length: lookback has not accumulated enough higher-timeframe history to compute valid Bollinger values. The slot's own lines may be missing there. The blend does not skip those early na slot values cleanly; the script pushes nz(...) values into the blend arrays, so an enabled slot that is still warming up can contribute zero-valued bands until its BB values are available.

This is not a bug, but it matters for interpretation. Treat the earliest warm-up section as not ready for blended-band reading. If a slot's lines appear missing only on the earliest chart history, that is expected warm-up behaviour. If they remain missing later in the chart, check for a timeframe set below the chart's or a disabled slot.

Annotated state asset

A screenshot of a default three-slot chart with callouts for the teal, blue, and purple slot lines, the red blended upper and lower, the lime blended basis, and the translucent fill, is intended for this page. Placeholder for now; the final image should identify every line in the default palette and mark a state where the slots visibly disagree so the "agreement versus cancellation" paragraph above has a concrete visual reference. Until the image is in place, the fastest way to reproduce the teaching intent is to add the indicator to a 1-minute chart during any session with a visible higher-timeframe divergence and spend two minutes staring at how the three slot envelopes move relative to each other. The picture this pack wants to show you is ultimately the one in front of you when the tool is running.