Quick Start

This page exists to put one correct chart in front of you and walk you through verifying it behaves the way the rest of the manual says it does. If you skip the verification drills at the end, you will eventually hit one of them in live conditions and wonder what happened. Better to hit them on purpose here.

A reminder before any knob gets touched: Axiom DC CTX is a multi-timeframe Donchian stack with a blended composite on top. It is not a signal, not a prediction, and not repaint-proof by property — it is repaint-honest when On Bar Close? is ON, which is the shipped default. Keep that default in place until you know specifically why you are changing it.

1. Load the indicator

1. Open a 1-minute chart of a reasonably liquid symbol. The exact symbol matters less than its liquidity; you want steady bars so the higher-timeframe steps are clean to watch.

2. Add Axiom DC CTX from the indicators dialog.

3. Leave every input at its shipped default. Do not change a timeframe, a length, a weight, or the On Bar Close? flag. Verify first, tune second.

2. Confirm what should be on your chart

If the load was clean, your chart now carries four visible layers:

• Teal lines — Slot 01 on the 5-minute timeframe. Three lines: upper channel, basis, lower channel. The upper and lower are the 5-minute Donchian extremes at a 20-bar lookback. The basis is the midpoint of those two, smoothed through an SMA whose length is 1 — which means at the default setting the basis is effectively the raw midpoint.

• Blue lines — Slot 02 on the 15-minute timeframe. Same three-line shape, now stepping on 15-minute bars.

• Purple lines — Slot 03 on the 60-minute timeframe. Same shape, stepping on 60-minute bars.

• Red blended channel — upper line, lower line, translucent red fill between them, and a lime basis line through the middle. This is a weighted composite of the three slots above, biased toward the faster timeframes (weights 40, 35, 25 on slots 01, 02, 03).

Watch the chart for a minute or two. On a 1-minute chart, you should see the teal 5-minute stack step forward exactly when the 5-minute bar closes — not gradually within the bar. The blue 15-minute stack steps less often. The purple 60-minute stack steps rarely. The red blended channel updates when any contributing slot steps; on the shipped defaults, that usually means the 5-minute slot is the first thing you notice.

If the 5-minute stack is visibly drifting between 5-minute closes, check On Bar Close? on Slot 01. It should be ON. If it is not, flip it back. A drifting intrabar read is what OFF looks like, and it is not what you want right now.

3. Do the three verification drills

These drills exist so you can tell the difference between "the tool is behaving as documented" and "I misconfigured something" when you are not in a calm state later.

3a. The hidden-plot drill

1. In the indicator's inputs, find Hide DC 01 Plot and turn it ON.

2. Confirm the teal 5-minute lines disappear from your chart.

3. Watch the red blended channel for a full 5-minute window. It should not jump because of the hide change. The blend still carries Slot 01's contribution — you only removed Slot 01's lines, not its voice in the math.

4. Turn Hide DC 01 Plot back OFF. The teal lines come back where they were.

The point of this drill is to see firsthand that hiding a slot's plot is a visual operation only. If you ever want a slot to stop influencing the blend, you set its Blended Weight to zero or turn Enable DC 01 off. Hiding never removes a slot from the blend or from alignment alerts.

3b. The On Bar Close? drill

1. Find On Bar Close? in the power-user group for Slot 01 (DC 01 PU). It is ON by default.

2. Flip it to OFF.

3. Watch the teal 5-minute stack for the next few minutes. You will see the lines shift inside the 5-minute bar as new 1-minute bars close and push the live 5-minute high or low around. The upper may climb or the lower may drop partway through the bar, then settle when the 5-minute bar finally closes.

4. Flip On Bar Close? back to ON. The teal stack once again moves only at the 5-minute close.

This is the live behavior of OFF. Nothing is broken. OFF is a legitimate posture — it just trades stability for responsiveness, and its historical/reloaded bars are not the posture to use for proof of what was available live. The rest of the manual (especially MTF & Repainting) explains how to decide whether you actually want that tradeoff.

3c. The runtime-error drill

1. Switch the chart to a 5-minute chart. Every default slot (5m, 15m, 60m) is still equal to or higher than the chart, so the stack renders cleanly.

2. Now change Slot 01's TimeFrame: from "5" to "1". A 1-minute slot on a 5-minute chart is asking the tool to read below the chart timeframe. The indicator refuses.

3. The chart goes blank. TradingView shows a red banner with the message: DC 01 timeframe cannot be lower than the chart timeframe.

4. Read the message. It names which slot tripped the guard — DC 01 here — so in live use you never have to guess which slot to fix. Change Slot 01's TimeFrame: back to "5" (or leave it empty to inherit the chart). The banner clears and the stack returns.

5. Switch the chart back to 1-minute when you are done so the rest of the pack's examples match what is in front of you.

The indicator refuses to read a slot timeframe below the chart timeframe. That is a deliberate guard against silently computing values whose meaning is undefined — there is no "previous HTF bar" for a timeframe that is smaller than the chart's own bars. When you see the banner in live conditions, the fix is always the same shape: raise the named slot's timeframe to equal or above the chart, or blank it to inherit.

4. The traps a first-load reader actually hits

Three things catch people in the first hour with this tool. They are worth reading now so you recognize them when they happen.

• The hidden-plot trap. Somebody toggles Hide DC 04 Plot to clean up the chart, leaves Slot 04's weight at a non-zero value, and later wonders why the blend is moving when "no slot is moving." The slot is moving — you just cannot see it. See drill 3a.

• The OFF-globally temptation. The tool feels snappier if every slot is set to On Bar Close? = OFF. It is not a speed upgrade; it is a repaint exposure. Read MTF & Repainting before you flip every slot.

• The lower-timeframe mistake. Setting a slot below the chart produces the named runtime error above, not a helpful warning. Know what it looks like so you are not startled.

5. What a good first chart looks like, in plain words

Three distinct color stacks (teal, blue, purple), each stepping on its own cadence. A red blended channel sitting somewhere inside the envelope of those three stacks most of the time. A lime basis in the middle of the red channel. No red error banner. On Bar Close? ON on every slot. Weights at 40, 35, 25. The chart looks like a deliberately arranged stack of ranges, not a crowd.

That is the baseline. Every configuration the rest of this manual discusses is a deliberate departure from it.

6. Three questions to answer before tuning

Before you change any default, it helps to write down — even on scratch paper — your answers to three questions. The rest of the pack is much easier to apply when you have them.

1. What question am I using this stack to answer? "Where does the 5-minute range sit inside the 15-minute range?" is a real question. "I want a better chart" is not. The tool is much better at the former than the latter.

2. Which timeframes genuinely inform the decision I am making? If you trade off 5-minute closes, a 240-minute slot is context at best. If you swing-trade across sessions, the 5-minute is noise. Weights should follow from this answer, not the other way around.

3. Where is the repaint posture going to cost me if I get it wrong? Historical bars, backtests, and alert logs are the places where the ON-vs-OFF choice leaves a trace. If you are going to review any of those, default ON. If you are strictly reading now, live, and never looking back, OFF can be the right posture on specific slots.

You do not have to answer these perfectly. But having rough answers keeps you from tuning knobs to make the chart look better at the cost of the read becoming less honest.

Where to go from here

Before you tune anything beyond defaults, read MTF & Repainting. That page teaches the one choice — ON or OFF per slot — that shapes everything else you do with this tool. After that, Settings walks every knob in detail, and Workflows names five setups that are consistent with the tool's design and four anti-patterns you can save yourself from.