Quick Start

The goal of this page is a correct first chart. Not an impressive one. Not an optimized one. A chart where you can look at the pane, read what it is telling you, and know which parts you trust and which parts still need the rest of the pack to explain.

Budget: ten minutes on a 1-minute chart of a liquid instrument you already know well. If you pick something you never watch, the sanity check at the end will not tell you anything.

Before you add it

Two things to have in place.

1. A 1-minute chart. The defaults ship with a 60-minute slot enabled. On a 1-minute chart you can watch the 60-minute slot actually behave like a higher-timeframe read. On a 1-hour chart those defaults collapse onto the chart's cadence and the multi-timeframe shape of the pane disappears. That is not a tool failure; it is a real configuration trap, and it is easier to meet it once here than to discover it mid-session.

2. A quiet mind about defaults. The three-slot defaults are scaffolding. They exist so there is something on the screen to read, not because they are the right configuration for your instrument. The pack spends many pages on that distinction. Your job in the next ten minutes is to see the pane breathe, not to commit to a setup.

Install and first look

Add the indicator. You should see:

• Three colored slot lines inside a 0-to-100 pane.

• A thicker blended fast-and-slow pair with a tinted fill between them.

• Columns rooted at the 50 midline, colored green or red depending on which side of 50 they sit on and whether they are growing or shrinking.

• Five horizontal guides — a green 0, a dashed 30, a solid 50, a dashed 70, a red 100.

If you see the lines wandering inside the pane and occasionally pressing against 100 or 0 without camping there, the pane is behaving. If you see lines flat at one boundary on a flat market and nothing else happening, wait longer; the 60-minute slot takes time to warm up before the 26-bar slow length has any history to chew on.

Reading order for the first minute

Once the pane has something on it, learn the order to read it in. Get this right on day one and the rest of the pack is easier.

1. Start with the histogram. The columns at 50 are a four-state speedometer. Bright green means the blended histogram is above 50 and rising — the convergence story is bullish and accelerating. Faded green means above 50 and falling — bullish and losing thrust. Bright red is below 50 and falling — bearish and accelerating. Faded red is below 50 and rising — bearish but losing thrust. The transitions between these states are often more informative than the absolute level.

2. Then check the slot lines. Each slot colors itself by whether that slot's fast sits above or below its own slow. When a slot is full-tone, it is in its bullish posture for its own timeframe. When it is faded, it is in its bearish posture. You are looking for whether the three slots agree, disagree, or tell a progression story from the fastest timeframe to the slowest.

3. End with the blend. The blended fast-and-slow pair is a summary of what the three slots voted on. Use it as a headline. If the headline and the slot evidence disagree, trust your eye on the slots until you can explain what the blend is averaging over.

That order — histogram, slots, blend — is deliberate. Beginners lead with the blend because it is the loudest element on the pane. That habit hides the deceleration beat inside the histogram and makes the slots feel like decoration.

Two "looks broken but isn't" traps

These trip almost everyone on the first session.

Trap 1: the 60-minute slot is not moving

You put the indicator on a 1-minute chart and the 60-minute slot sits flat for a while. That is almost never a bug. With On Bar Close? on (the default), the 60-minute slot only updates when a 60-minute bar closes. So if you drop the indicator on at 10:07 and you are watching slot 03 at 10:23, you have had zero 60-minute closes inside that window. The slot is showing the confirmed read from the previous 60-minute bar and waiting for the next one at 11:00. That is the switch behaving correctly.

If you cannot wait an hour and you want to see the slot move sooner, you are reaching for the repaint tradeoff. That tradeoff is a legitimate choice, but it is a choice with a cost, and it is not a choice you want to make in the first ten minutes before you have read MTF and Repainting. Leave the switch alone for now, and let the hour pass. The goal of the first session is to see what the tool actually does when it is configured honestly, not to rush the slot into an apparent liveliness that comes with a bill attached.

Trap 2: a slot is pinned against 100 (or 0) while price looks ordinary

You see slot 01 sitting against 100 for bars at a time while the actual price action on the chart looks unremarkable. Your first instinct will be to read that as "the instrument is maximally bullish." It is not. It is the pane telling you the sensitivity dial and the current volatility regime have combined to push the sigmoid into its flat region, where a range of different underlying MACD/ATR ratios all compress to roughly the same number near the boundary. Saturation, not intensity.

Two ways to sanity-check this in ten seconds. First, look at the chart bars themselves — are the candles actually outsized relative to the session, or are they ordinary? Second, scan across the three slots — is only one pinned, or are all three? A single slot pinned while the others breathe is almost always an ATR effect on that slot's own timeframe, not a market event the pane is straining to express.

The fix, when you are ready for it, is covered in Settings under ATR Length and ATR Sensitivity. Do not touch them yet. Watch the pane for the rest of a session before you change anything, and if you reach for sensitivity, reach down rather than up. The instinct to "fix" a pinned slot by cranking sensitivity higher is the exact opposite of the correct move — pushing sensitivity up widens the flat region and produces more pinning, not less. Reflex-tuning before you understand the dials is how readers produce a pane that appears permanently saturated and stops being readable at all.

Optional: the one sanity check worth running

If you have time for it, spend a minute watching the On Bar Close? behavior directly. It is the most honest way to internalize what the switch does.

1. Keep the default On Bar Close? = true on. Watch slot 03 (the 60-minute slot) across several 1-minute bars. It should not change inside a 60-minute candle.

2. Turn On Bar Close? off. Watch slot 03 again on the same chart. The slot now drifts during the 60-minute bar as new 1-minute bars print.

3. When the 60-minute bar closes, the off-switch value should settle into the value that the on-switch posture will use as the next confirmed 60-minute reading. The point is not a perfect tick-for-tick match on your screen; the point is seeing live evidence become confirmed evidence.

If that lands as expected, you have directly observed what the switch controls. Put it back to on before you go do anything else — off is for readers with a specific reason to accept repaint, and you do not yet have one.

What to read next

• Every knob you will eventually touch, with a named cost attached — Settings.

• The colors on the pane, the four-state histogram, and the reading order in detail — Visuals and Logic.

• The higher-timeframe switch and the slot-timeframe rules — MTF and Repainting.

• The ten alerts, what they do and do not confirm — Alerts.

Three quick self-checks before you move on. Can you point at a column and name its four-state color (bright/faded, green/red, above/below 50)? Can you tell, from the slot line tone, whether each slot thinks its own fast sits above or below its own slow right now? Do you know whether On Bar Close? is currently on or off on your chart? If any of those three come back as "I think so," spend another few minutes on the pane before you open Settings. The rest of the pack is written on top of that vocabulary, and it gets heavier quickly if the vocabulary is shaky.