Quick Start

This page exists to get Axiom CVD Osc STR drawing correctly on your chart, to tell you what "correctly" should look like, and to name the three or four places a new reader reliably gets hurt before the pack has a chance to teach them. It is not a tour. It is a short, deliberate setup run you can work through in one sitting on a chart you already know well.

Read the whole thing before you change anything. Every step is here for a reason, and some of the reasons only land after you see the pane misbehave on the next one. The order matters: defaults are the validated configuration, and changing things before you have seen what defaults do is the most efficient way to confuse yourself about what each control is actually responsible for.

Before you start

• You are adding STR to a chart that already makes sense to you. Use an instrument and a timeframe you read comfortably. Do not debug STR on a market you barely look at.

• Pick a liquid instrument for the first session. Thin names will make the slots behave oddly on older bars where intrabar data has aged out; that is a real effect you will eventually learn to read, but it is not what you want on day one.

• Pick a 5-minute chart. This aligns with the first slot's default and keeps the early behavior predictable.

Step 1 — Add the indicator

Add Axiom CVD Osc STR to the chart. It opens in its own pane below price.

What you should see on a clean install:

• A bounded pane with horizontal guides at 0 (green), 20 (dashed gray), 50 (gray), 80 (dashed gray), and 100 (red).

• Three enabled slots by default — slot 1 on 5-minute, slot 2 on 15-minute, slot 3 on 60-minute — each weighted equally into the blend at roughly 33.3 each. By default, the per-slot lines are hidden so the pane is not crowded on first load. That is deliberate. You will turn them on in Step 3 once you know what to look for.

• A lime-or-red blended CVD line against a gray blended signal line, with a translucent fill between them. The fill is lime when the blend is above the signal and red when it is below. The fill is a state cue. It is not a read on conviction or proximity.

• BBWP columns along the bottom of the pane. These are enabled by default because they answer a useful second-order question about the blend's own width regime. Do not assume they are telling you about price.

• A stepline Donchian channel wrapping the blend. Enabled by default.

• Lime up-triangles and red down-triangles from the divergence module. Enabled by default. These will be sparse. They should stay sparse.

If the Keltner envelope is not drawing, that is correct. Keltner is off by default. You will turn it on in Step 4.

Step 2 — Confirm the pane is bounded

Scroll through the chart for a minute or two. Everything inside the pane — every slot line the blend the BBWP columns the Donchian steplines — must stay inside 0 and 100. If anything leaves that band, something is wrong with the install and no other step will rescue it.

Now switch to two unrelated instruments. A major index future, a liquid equity, a high-volume crypto pair — anything the market treats differently. The pane should stay bounded on each. This is the single most important early check: the 0-to-100 normalization is what makes STR portable across instruments, and the first time you trust a cross-instrument comparison, you need to have already seen it hold.

Step 3 — Look at the slots underneath

Open the indicator's Settings, go to CVD 01, and uncheck Hide CVD 01 Plot. Do the same for slots 2 and 3.

The pane now shows three per-slot CVD lines in addition to the blend. Each is colored by its own state — it colors up when that slot's own CVD is above its own signal, down when below. The 5-minute slot will move the most. The hourly slot will move the least and will feel slow; that is the point of having it there.

Watch the three slots against each other for a while. Notice:

• When all three agree on direction, the blend line is confidently lime or confidently red.

• When one or two disagree, the blend color flickers and the blend itself drifts toward the middle of the pane. The pane is telling you there is an argument between contexts. The blend's number is not resolving that argument. It is summarizing it.

• When all three are near 50, none of them is saying anything strong. Pay attention to how often that is actually what the chart is doing — it is more often than the eye expects.

Hide the slot lines again if you prefer a cleaner default pane. Just remember that hiding a slot line does not remove the slot from the blend. The slot is still active and still contributing its weight. Hide Plot is only a drawing switch.

Step 4 — Turn on the Keltner envelope as the explicit fifth move

Keltner is the one default-off structure feature on STR, and the deliberate reason it is off is that a reader who wants it on should turn it on themselves. Go to Blend KC and check Show Keltner.

You should now see an upper and a lower line wrapping the blended CVD line. A fill draws between them at high transparency.

What the envelope is: a smoothed midpoint of the blend plus and minus a multiple of the blend's own one-bar absolute change, all clamped to the 0-to-100 band. The envelope describes how far the blend is from where it has recently been sitting. It is derived from the blend, not from price.

What the envelope is not: an overbought-or-oversold call. A touch of the upper line is stretch, not exhaustion. The blend can ride the upper line for a long time in a strong one-sided pressure regime. Read the envelope as distance-from-midpoint and leave exhaustion inference to other parts of your process.

If the envelope looks too tight or too wide, do not change KC Mult before you understand the indicator. The default of 2.0 is intentionally a familiar Keltner width. Live with it for a session.

Step 5 — Watch the divergence module on confirmed bars

The divergence module will already be running. Leave Plot On Pivot set to OFF — the default — for this first session. That means the triangle marker will print on the bar where the right-hand pivot completes (the confirmation bar), not on the pivot bar itself.

When a triangle appears:

• Note the bar it printed on. That is the confirmation bar.

• Count back Pivot Len bars (default 20). That is where the actual pivot sits.

• Resist the urge to act on the marker. Look at the slots underneath. Are they already reversing, drifting, or still trending? Is the blend stretched on the envelope, or mid-range? Is the BBWP column low (blend width compressed recently) or high (blend width expanded recently)?

A divergence triangle is the geometry confirming. It is not a turn. Treat every triangle as an invitation to read the rest of the pane, not as a decision. This is the most important single habit you can build with STR in the first week.

Step 6 — First sanity check

Find a recent spot on your chart where price made a clear lower low or higher high, and look at the pane at that moment.

• The slot on chart cadence (5m) probably moved quickly. It is the closest thing in the pane to a real-time pressure read.

• The 15m slot probably moved, but lagged. It carries one regime up — slower to commit, slower to release.

• The 60m slot probably barely moved at the same instant. It updates once per hour. If it had moved sharply at exactly the price extreme, you would be looking at coincidence rather than a hourly pressure shift.

• The blend moved somewhere between the three, weighted. With equal weights and three enabled slots, no single slot can drive the blend on its own.

• If the moment coincided with a divergence triangle, the triangle printed on the confirmation bar and the pivot itself sat Pivot Len bars earlier. Count the bars from the triangle backward; the pivot should be sitting at exactly that offset.

If any of that is wrong — for example, if a slot did not move when the chart did, or moved much more than the other slots, or the triangle is sitting somewhere you cannot account for — go back through Steps 1 through 3 before you change anything. The most common cause is a hidden setting from a prior session: a slot pointed at an Optional Ticker, a Window Mode that does not match what you expected, or a slot timeframe set during testing and forgotten. Defaults are the validated configuration. Changes to Pressure Sensitivity, Wick Weight, Pivot Len, the BBWP threshold, the Keltner multiplier, or the slot timeframes will all behave better when the defaults have been verified first.

A quick rule for this stage of learning: change one control at a time, give it a real session — at least an hour of live behavior or several days of historical replay — and only then decide whether you understood what it did. Stacking changes is the fastest way to lose track of which control is responsible for which effect.

What normal looks like

• The pane is alive but readable. The blended CVD line moves through the middle region. The fill under it flips hue on clean crossings.

• The Donchian stepline channel hugs the blend's recent extremes. It widens on strong one-sided moves and pinches when the blend goes quiet.

• BBWP columns sit somewhere across their range — low at compressed points, high at expanded points. The column hue flips around the threshold. The flip tells you the blend's own width percentile crossed the threshold you set; it is not a price signal.

• If the Keltner envelope is on, it expands when the blend's one-bar change is large and compresses when the blend goes still.

• Divergence triangles are sparse. In a liquid intraday session, you might see a handful. If you are seeing dozens, your pivot lookback is too low.

• Slots disagree sometimes. That is not noise. That is the pane doing its job.

First traps, in priority order

• Reading a divergence triangle as an entry. This is the single most common and costly misread STR invites. A triangle is a confirmed pivot pair between price and the blend. It is a description of geometry at a specific bar. It does not predict a reversal. Many confirmed divergences print directly into the continuation they appeared to be signaling against — that is not a malfunction; it is what a strict pivot-geometry test does on a market that was not turning. Every page in this pack will reinforce this. The triangle is a question about the rest of the pane, not an answer.

• Trusting Plot On Pivot ON to tell you when the script actually knew. Plot On Pivot back-shifts the triangle marker to the original pivot bar so the geometry is easier to study in replay. The alert still fires only on the confirmation bar, which is Pivot Len bars later. A reader who learns the pane with Plot On Pivot ON will form the instinct that the triangle appeared at the bar where it visually sits — and that instinct does not survive live trading. Leave Plot On Pivot OFF in your working configuration. Use ON only for post-session study, and only after you have internalized the timing honestly. If you ever teach someone else to read this pane, do not teach them with ON; you will train the wrong instinct in another person.

• Reading BBWP as price volatility. BBWP columns look like a familiar price-BBWP indicator, but these columns read the blend's own band-width percentile, not price's. A low column says the blend's own Bollinger width has been compressed recently. It says nothing about whether price has been compressed. Two readers can stare at the same column and reach opposite conclusions if one of them mentally substitutes "price" for "blend." This is a habit you have to build deliberately, and the easiest way is to say the qualifier out loud the first dozen times you read the column: "the blend's width is low" — not "things are quiet."

• Treating the Keltner envelope as overbought or oversold. It is a stretch envelope. The upper and lower lines are clamped to 0-to-100, which makes a touch look like a ceiling or a floor. It is neither. The blend can ride either side for long stretches in a strong pressure regime; that is a feature of one-sided pressure, not a sign of exhaustion. Read the envelope as distance-from-basis and leave exhaustion calls to the rest of your process.

• Dropping Pivot Len to see more divergences. More triangles is not more information. It is the same information rebinned at a noisier scale, and the noisier scale will print triangles through regions where the pivot definition is barely meeting itself. If you already feel like you want more divergences, the correct move is almost always to watch the slot stack more carefully on the ones you have, not to lower the pivot bar.

• Treating multi-feature agreement as confluence. Keltner stretched, Donchian touching, BBWP expanding, and a divergence triangle on the same bar feels like four reads pointing the same direction. It is not. All four read from the blended CVD line. They are four constructions on the same underlying line. Coherent? Yes. Independent? No. Independent corroboration lives in the slot stack underneath the blend, in price itself, or outside the pane entirely.

• Setting a slot timeframe lower than the chart timeframe. The indicator will throw a runtime error with the slot's label in the message. That is deliberate. The guardrail prevents you from asking for higher resolution than the chart bar can carry.

• Pushing five slots to defaults and treating the blend as consensus. The blend is a weighted mean of the enabled slots. If you enable slots 4 and 5 without assigning thought to what they are reading, the blend is now averaging two contexts you did not consciously add. Weight zero is a legitimate choice; it keeps a slot active for its own alerts without letting it steer the blend.

• Turning Master Smoothing on early. It will calm the blend before you have learned what the blend is trying to show you. The right time to consider master smoothing is after you have read the pane through several sessions and the blend's twitching has become a specific, recurring problem you can name — not a vague unease.

Where to go next

You have a working pane, a correct first read, and the early traps named. From here:

• For the knob-by-knob reference and what each setting trades off, Settings.

• For reading the pane in layers and handling ambiguous states (including the divergence-as-question walkthrough), Visuals and Logic.

• Before you wire any alert, Alerts — especially the divergence-alert subsection, which has honesty implications the per-slot alerts do not.

• Before you tune anything beyond defaults, MTF and Repainting. This is where the On Bar Close switch, the lookahead posture, and the divergence confirmation timing are explained in full.