Quick Start

A one-sentence reminder before you touch a knob: Axiom MA is a three-slot multi-timeframe MA overlay with a declared blended line alongside the slots. It does not emit signals and it is not repaint-proof. The goal of this first walk is a clean chart you can verify, not a setup you can trade off of.

This page assumes you already have a TradingView account, have added the indicator to your chart, and have opened its input dialog. From there, you can be on a correct first chart in under five minutes. What takes longer — and is worth doing while the tool is still uncluttered — is running the four small drills at the end. Each one provokes a behaviour this manual will keep referring to, and running them once now means the behaviour is not a surprise when you meet it in the middle of a session.

Give the whole page ten to fifteen minutes the first time through. That is the full cost of getting the tool onto your chart on terms you chose rather than terms you inherited.

1. Set up the chart

1. Open a 1-minute chart of a liquid, regular-session symbol. Any ticker you watch often will do. Futures and large-cap equities both work; avoid a thinly-traded instrument where the 60-minute candles are sparse and the longer-timeframe slot cannot accumulate enough history to produce a value.

2. Add Axiom MA to the chart. Leave every input at its default.

3. Confirm the three slot lines and the blended line are rendered. On the shipped defaults you should see:

• a teal line tracking the 5-minute SMA of close with length 20 — that is Slot 01;

• a blue line tracking the 15-minute SMA of close with length 20 — that is Slot 02;

• a purple line tracking the 60-minute SMA of close with length 20 — that is Slot 03;

• a single thicker line among them in lime or red — that is the blended MA, drawn at line-width 3.

1. Hover the crosshair over any of the four lines and open TradingView's Data Window (Alt+D). The plot title under the cursor should read MA 01, MA 02, MA 03, or MA Blended. Those are the titles the script declares, and they are the fastest way to confirm which line your eye is on when the lines are close together.

If the chart came up blank with a red error strip instead of four lines, skip ahead to step 5. That error surface is by design, and this page teaches you to provoke it on purpose so it is not a surprise later.

What should be on your chart now

• Three slot lines, visibly separated, each stepping on its own higher-timeframe cadence. On a 1-minute chart, Slot 01 advances when the 5-minute bar closes, Slot 02 when the 15-minute bar closes, Slot 03 when the 60-minute bar closes. Between closes, each slot line holds flat.

• A blended line among the three slots, drawn thicker (line-width 3 versus the slots' default 2) and coloured lime or red. It has no half-opacity middle state and no neutral state.

• A clean status bar with no runtime error.

If all four pieces are visible and none of them are running in fast-forward inside a higher-timeframe candle, you are on a correct first chart.

A one-sentence framing before you change anything

Slot lines fade on their own down state — teal becomes a half-opacity teal, blue becomes a half-opacity blue, purple becomes a half-opacity purple. The blended line never fades. It is lime or it is red; there is no dimmed middle. That asymmetry is deliberate and it means "a dim slot" and "a dim blend" are not the same kind of signal at all. We return to this on Visuals & Logic; for now, register it and move on.

2. First verification drill — the hidden plot is not an exclusion

The first drill teaches the single most consequential trap on this tool.

1. Open the input dialog and find the MA 01 group.

2. Note where the blended line is sitting on the chart right now. Mark it mentally against a round price level, or widen the right-hand price scale until the blend's current value is easy to read.

3. Toggle Hide MA 01 Plot on and click OK.

4. Observe: the teal Slot 01 line disappears from the chart. The blended line does not move. Not by a hair, not by a tick. Whatever price level it was on is exactly where it still is.

5. Toggle Hide MA 01 Plot off again. The teal line returns.

What the drill proved:

• Hiding a plot is a visual action, not an arithmetic one. A hidden slot is still computing. It is still voting in the blended trend rule if its weight is non-zero. It is still counted in the alignment alerts once its MA value is non-na.

• If you want a slot out of the blend, set its Blended Weight: to 0. If you want a slot out of everything — including the alignment alerts — toggle Enable MA 01 off. Three distinct actions with three distinct meanings.

The cost of not internalising this is real. A reader who hides a slot because four lines feel like clutter, then wires All MA Slots Uptrend, will get a silent alert on bars where the two visible slots are both up — because the third slot, which they cannot see, is still a voter. See Visuals & Logic and Limitations & Trust Boundaries.

3. Second verification drill — watch the global repaint switch

This drill shows you the single most consequential input on the tool, and the scope of that input — which surprises almost every first-contact reader.

1. In the input dialog, find the PU Settings group. There is exactly one input there: On Bar Close?, shipped to ON.

2. Leave ON for now. Watch across one 5-minute cycle. The teal Slot 01 line should sit on a horizontal step through the entire 5-minute bar and advance only when the 5-minute bar closes. Slot 02 does the same on each 15-minute bar. Slot 03 on each 60-minute bar.

3. Now flip On Bar Close? to OFF. Click OK. Stay on the 1-minute chart. Watch across the next 5-minute cycle.

4. The teal line now moves continuously inside the 5-minute bar. As each 1-minute candle completes, Slot 01 drifts to a new value. Its colour can change inside the 5-minute bar and change back before the bar closes.

5. Widen your attention. Slot 02 is doing the same thing inside each 15-minute bar. Slot 03 is doing the same thing inside each 60-minute bar. All three slots are drifting at once.

6. Flip On Bar Close? back to ON and confirm the slots settle back onto confirmed-bar steps.

What the drill proved:

• One switch, three slots. You did not loosen "just the 60m." You loosened every slot at once. That is the Base trim's deliberate shape, and it is the single largest distinction between Base and CTX.

• Under OFF, a mid-bar colour flip on any slot is provisional. The bar that produced the flip has not closed yet. A decision based on a mid-bar flip is a decision based on a value that can un-flip before the bar finishes forming.

• Under ON, the slot does not move on the live HTF bar. What you see is what was already confirmed at the last HTF close. You pay one bar of latency for stability.

MTF & Repainting teaches this switch end to end — what repainting is in this context, what each posture costs, the scope explicitly, a verification walkthrough, and the shape of reads where OFF is genuinely the right choice. Read that page before you flip the switch in production. OFF is not a free speed-up.

4. Third verification drill — weight zero is not the same as disabled

Four slot states are worth keeping straight. This drill walks you through all four in one sitting.

1. Set Blended Weight: on Slot 01 from 33.3 to 0. Click OK.

2. The teal Slot 01 line stays on the chart. The blended line shifts — it is now a composite of Slot 02 and Slot 03 only. Depending on how price is behaving, its colour may also flip.

3. With Slot 01 at weight zero, toggle Hide MA 01 Plot on. Click OK. The teal line disappears. The blended line does not move again — Slot 01 was already silent in the blend.

4. With both of the above still set, toggle Enable MA 01 off. Click OK. Now the alignment alerts (if you had any wired) will stop considering Slot 01 — Slot 01 is fully gone.

5. Restore Enable MA 01 on, Hide MA 01 Plot off, and Blended Weight: to 33.3.

The four states:

Most first-contact misreads come from assuming that any two of those rows are equivalent. They are not. Settings explains each row's input anchor; Alerts documents what each row means for the ten alert conditions.

5. Provoke and read the runtime-error guard on purpose

The guard that fires this error is not a bug surface. It is the tool refusing to render a read it cannot compute safely. Meeting it once, on purpose, removes it from the category of scary surprises and puts it in the category of named, documented behaviour.

1. Temporarily switch the chart to 5 minutes. In the input dialog, find Slot 01's TimeFrame: input and change it from "5" to "1", which is strictly below the 5-minute chart cadence. Click OK.

2. The chart goes blank. TradingView displays a runtime error along the top reading MA 01 timeframe cannot be lower than the chart timeframe.

3. Note what the error message does: it names the offending slot. MA 01, MA 02, or MA 03 — not a generic "input error" and not silent defaults.

4. Restore Slot 01's TimeFrame: to "5" and return the chart to 1 minute if you want to keep following the default walkthrough. The chart returns.

What the drill proved:

• The guard is intentional. Asking a "higher-timeframe" slot to run on a timeframe lower than the chart's is a configuration that does not make sense. The tool refuses it rather than silently returning values that will not match the slot's posture semantics.

• The error is addressed to you. It names the slot. You do not have to guess which of the three is misconfigured.

• The fix is small. Raise the slot's TimeFrame: to the chart's or above. The chart returns.

Troubleshooting has the full procedure for this surface in operational terms; MTF & Repainting explains why the guard has to exist given the posture semantics the tool is promising.

Traps first-time readers hit

• "I hid the line, so the slot is gone." It is not. The plot is hidden; the slot is still running. Per-slot trend alerts still fire once the slot has a value, the blend still sees the slot's value if the weight is non-zero, and alignment alerts still count the slot once its MA value is non-na. If you mean "out of the blend," set Blended Weight: to zero. If you mean "out of everything," flip Enable MA NN to off.

• "I flipped On Bar Close? off to loosen up the 60-minute slot." You also loosened 01 and 02. The switch is a single global. If your use case genuinely needs mixed posture — confirmed 60m with a live 5m, for example — the CTX trim is the right tool. Approximating mixed posture by flipping the global Base switch and then "mentally ignoring" the slots you meant to keep confirmed is not a workflow; it is a trap.

• "Slot 01's timeframe below the chart's, chart blank, tool must be broken." The tool is operating as documented. The runtime error is a guard. Raise the slot's timeframe to the chart's or above, or restore the default, and the chart returns.

• "The blended line is lime, so the stack is bullish." It means the up-voting weights outweighed the down-voting weights. A lime blend is compatible with two slots disagreeing and one heavy-weight slot carrying the vote. Read the three slot lines underneath before reading the blend as consensus.

• "Length and Trend Length are the same input, right?" No. Length is the MA's smoothing window. Trend Length is the bars-back comparison that decides whether the MA is rising or falling — which is what colours the line. They are two different knobs for two different jobs. The banner at the top of Settings explains them side by side.

• "I set Trend Length to 0 to disable the trend filter and all my slots went dim." Zero disables the trend read entirely, which resolves as false — the down state — not as "no colour." If you want a very fast trend read, start at 1 and lengthen from there, not at 0.

Before you flip the repaint switch in production

Read MTF & Repainting end to end. It is a short page. It teaches what repainting is in this context, what each posture costs, the one-switch-three-slots scope, a verification walkthrough you can run in under a minute, and the handful of reader shapes where OFF is genuinely the right choice. Flipping the switch without reading that page is the most common way someone walks into a trust problem with this tool.

What you just did

Five minutes of setup, ten minutes of drills, and you now know four things that will not need to be re-learned under pressure:

• The blended line does not move when you hide a slot's plot. Hiding is visual; the slot is still in the math.

• The global repaint switch moves every slot at once. One switch, three slots.

• Weight zero, hidden plot, and disabled are three different states with three different consequences for the blend, the per-slot alerts, and the alignment alerts.

• The runtime-error guard is named and addressed to you. When it fires, the fix is one input away.

Those four facts are the spine of the rest of this manual. From here, the pages in the pack thicken each one into working knowledge.

Where to go next

• Settings — every input, in slot-lifecycle order, with the Length versus Trend Length banner up front.

• Visuals & Logic — what every on-chart element means, the hidden-plot trap in detail, and how to read slot disagreement rather than flatten it.

• Alerts — the ten shipped alerts, the chart-bar-confirmed gate, and the two hidden count plots you can reference inside your alert messages.

• Workflows — five named setups, four named anti-patterns, each with a verification move.

• MTF & Repainting — read this before you flip the global repaint switch in production.