Quick Start

The point of this page is not speed. It is getting to a first configuration you can actually defend, verifying that the pane behaves the way it promises to, and absorbing two misreads before they get their first chance to bite you.

Budget fifteen minutes. Ten if you have used a stacked MACD before. Do not skip the two traps at the bottom, and do not skip the first-bar sanity check — both exist because readers who skip them pay for it later, not because the pack wants to pad a walkthrough.

Before you touch a knob

Open the indicator on a one-minute chart of a liquid, familiar symbol. Leave defaults alone on the first load. Defaults are not the answer — they are a defensible starting point chosen so the pane teaches you what it is before you start arguing with it.

Out of the box you should see, below the price chart:

• A bounded pane from 0 to 100 with guides at 30, 50, and 70.

• A histogram painting four-state columns around 50.

• A thick blended MACD line and a thinner blended signal line, with a tinted fill between them.

• Donchian steplines wrapping the blended line.

• BBWP columns rooted at the bottom of the pane.

• A divergence triangle if one has confirmed recently.

You should not see a Keltner envelope on first load. It is off by default because the pane is already visually dense with the three structure features that do show up.

First-bar sanity check

This is cheap and it catches an unreasonable number of setup mistakes. Do it before you change anything.

1. Confirm the pane stays inside 0 to 100 on every bar visible on your screen. If it does not, you are not looking at this indicator.

2. Confirm the 50 midline separates the green and red histogram columns. Columns above 50 should be one of the two green shades. Columns below should be one of the two reds. If you see green below 50 you are looking at a different oscillator.

3. Pull up two more symbols with very different price levels — a large-cap index, a low-priced name. The pane should stay bounded on both. That is the ATR-sigmoid normalization doing its job.

4. Glance at the bottom of the pane for BBWP columns. They will be blank for the first several months of a new symbol's history — BBWP needs its full percentile lookback before it returns any value. That is expected.

If any of the four checks fail, jump to Troubleshooting. Do not continue until they pass.

Defensible starter configuration

On the one-minute chart, the first three MACD slots are enabled by default at 5m, 15m, and 60m with EMA 12/26/9 and equal weights. That is a reasonable first stack. Two deliberate moves will make it easier to read:

1. In the MACD 01, 02, 03 groups, verify Hide MACD 0N Plot is ON for all three. Defaults already set it on. The blend is the headline; the slot lines are available when you want them, but they clutter the pane while you are still learning the reading order.

2. Leave On Bar Close? ON for all three slots. The chart-timeframe slot will be one-bar-lagged in this configuration. That lag is the honest cost of not letting the slot repaint. You can flip this later on specific slots deliberately; do not flip it now.

Do not enable slots 4 and 5 on the first session. Five slots at identical defaults produce the alignment trap described below, and the best way to avoid it is to not walk into it.

Read the pane in this order

For the first half hour, force yourself through the reading order rather than glancing at whatever catches your eye:

1. Histogram first. Bright green means above 50 and rising (bullish and accelerating). Faded green means above 50 and falling (bullish but losing thrust). Bright red means below 50 and falling (bearish and accelerating). Faded red means below 50 and rising (bearish but decelerating). The histogram is your cheapest speedometer on this pane.

2. Blend line position. Is it above or below 50? Is it hugging the blend signal line or stretched from it? The tinted fill switches hue when the blend crosses its signal; note the direction and move on.

3. Donchian channel. Is the blend pushing a new high or low in its own lookback? A touch means the blend is reaching its own range edge, nothing more. It is not a breakout signal for price.

4. BBWP column. The column at the current bar is saying whether the blend's own Bollinger band width is compressed or expanded relative to its own history. From the blend, not from price.

5. Divergence triangle if present. Up-triangle at the bottom for bullish divergence, down-triangle at the top for bearish. Read it as a question to ask of the slot stack, not as a trigger.

That order is repeated and defended on Visuals and Logic. Get it in muscle memory before you experiment.

The Plot On Pivot replay

Do this once, while you still remember the defaults. Find a recent confirmed divergence triangle on your chart. With Plot On Pivot OFF (the default), the triangle sits on the right-shoulder confirmation bar — the bar the alert fired on.

Now toggle Plot On Pivot ON in the Blend Div group. Watch the triangle back-shift to the original pivot bar. The alert did not fire again. The triangle was not visible at that back-shifted bar in real time. The setting changes the visual, not the alert's bar of record.

That is the Plot On Pivot honesty moment. If you keep the setting ON, keep the honesty moment in your head. You are looking at a truthful picture of where the pattern formed, not a retroactive record of what you could have acted on.

Enabling Keltner later

When you want a fourth structure feature, toggle Show Keltner ON. The envelope will wrap the blend with a stretch band. Keltner is off by default because Donchian + BBWP + divergence is already three layers on one line. Adding Keltner earns its place when you have a specific question to ask about stretch — not when you want the pane busier. Treat it as a question you are asking of the blend, not as a regime call or an overbought read.

Two traps before you walk away

Divergence triangles are not entries. You will see one in your first session. It will look clean. You will be tempted to act. Hold the line.

A confirmed triangle is the pane reporting a geometric fact: two confirmed pivots arrived in a particular order, and the blended MACD values at the matching offsets arrived in the reversed order. That is what the alert commits to. Nothing in that fact says the next bar is a reversal, nothing says the next ten bars are, and nothing says the triangle is even the most important moment on the pane right now. Readers lose real money turning that geometry into a trade call. Use the triangle as the moment to ask whether the slot stack underneath agrees with the triangle or argues with it. If all enabled slots are still confidently bearish while a bullish divergence triangle is printing, the triangle is a geometry note inside a continuation. Interesting. Not a turn.

Five slots aligned is not five independent votes. The visual alignment read is simple: count how many enabled slots have K above D, and how many have K below D, at the confirmed bar. That is all the read commits to.

If your five slots share source, share MA family (all EMA, say), and share length pair (all 12/26/9), differing only in timeframe, visual alignment is five cadences of the same measurement agreeing with itself. One observation, sampled five times. It will feel like evidence because "all five slots agree" sounds like five independent reads. It is not. STR makes this trap larger than Base does, not smaller — five-way self-agreement looks more convincing than three-way. Before you trust an alignment read, glance at the slot configurations underneath. If they are differentiated (at least one non-EMA family, distinct length pairs, ideally at least one cross-ticker slot), the alignment is more meaningful. If they are matched, the alignment is a bookkeeping artifact. One current source caveat: the built-in All MACD Slots Bullish/Bearish alert pair overcounts when slot 05 is enabled, so use visual alignment or keep slot 05 disabled for that alert until the source is corrected.

Ready to configure deliberately? Next stop is Settings. If you want to understand how the pane is built before you tune it, go to Visuals and Logic first.