Quick Start

This page gets you from "just installed" to "I can trust what this pane is reporting on a default configuration." No tuning. No opinions about weights, sensitivity, or which extras to run. You are verifying that STR is drawing honestly against your chart before you introduce any personal choice, because a verification habit practiced on defaults is the one you will reach for months later when a live chart is behaving strangely and you need to separate "the tool is misreading" from "the market is doing something unfamiliar."

If something on your chart does not match what this page describes, do not tune your way out of it. Every symptom below is covered in Troubleshooting, and the cause is almost always setup, history, or a misread of what the indicator is reporting — not a defect. Tuning to make the pane look correct before you understand why it looks incorrect is the fastest route to a configuration you cannot trust.

STR imports the Axiom Moving Average Library (Pro) for every baseline, slow line, and basis filter. If your account cannot resolve that library, STR will not compute anything and the pane will stay blank. Rule that out first on any install where the pane arrives empty.

The setup path, ordered

Run these steps in order on a chart with enough history. "Enough" here means several hundred bars of confirmed data — more on why in a moment.

1. Open a chart you already know. Avoid using STR to learn a new symbol. You want to be able to tell the difference between the indicator behaving oddly and the instrument behaving oddly. Pick a liquid name on a timeframe you actively watch.

2. Add the indicator. Apply Axiom MA Osc STR to the chart. It will open into its own pane beneath price.

3. Leave every setting at its default. Do not touch the Oscillator group. Do not touch Blend Core. Do not touch the per-slot timeframes. Do not turn extras on or off. Defaults exist as a starting point that lets you confirm the tool is drawing correctly before you introduce any personal choice.

4. Give the pane a few seconds to paint. On low-history charts, some elements will wait until enough confirmed bars exist.

5. Walk through the sanity checks below. Do not move on until the pane passes them.

What the first-load pane should look like

You should see a pane with a y-axis from 0 to 100. Five horizontal guides are drawn: 0 at the floor, 100 at the ceiling, 50 in the middle, an overbought guide at 70, and an oversold guide at 30. These are guides, not thresholds that the oscillator enforces. They orient your eye.

Inside that pane, on a default install:

• Three slot lines are contributing to the read. MA 01 runs on the 5-minute timeframe, MA 02 on the 15-minute, and MA 03 on the 60-minute. Slots 04 and 05 are off by default.

• A blended fast line and a blended slow line are visible in the middle. The blended fast line is lime when it is above the blended slow and red when it is below. The blended slow is a steady grey. There is a soft area fill between them, tinted the same way as the blended fast.

• Divergence triangles appear occasionally on confirmed pivots, not on every bar. Bullish triangles sit at the pane floor. Bearish triangles sit near the pane ceiling.

• BBWP columns sit at the base of the pane and grow upward, colored depending on whether the current oscillator width is ranking above or below its threshold.

• Donchian is on and Keltner is off by default. The Donchian wrap should be visible around the blended fast; leave Keltner off until you deliberately want that extra envelope.

If that is roughly what you are seeing, STR is behaving. If not, the sanity checks below will tell you which piece to look at.

The first-load sanity checks

These five checks are worth running the first time you install the indicator, and are worth re-running any time you suspect something is off. They take maybe sixty seconds together.

1. The pane is bounded

Look at the blended fast line, the blended slow, the per-slot lines, the default Donchian lines, and the Keltner lines if you have enabled them. Every one of those should stay inside the 0 to 100 band. They are drawn to stay there on purpose. If anything appears to spike past the ceiling or floor, the chart is misreading the plot space; rescale the pane and confirm.

2. The blend responds to active slots

By default, slots 01, 02, and 03 are enabled and weighted equally. Flip the Enable MA 01 toggle off and on. The blended fast line should visibly shift when MA 01 drops out of the blend and shift again when you re-enable it. If it does not move at all, check that MA 01's Weight: is not set to zero — a hidden or forgotten weight-zero slot will stay alive but contribute nothing to the blend.

3. The repaint switch is on

Every slot's On Bar Close? should be true at install. Leave it on. This is the honest default. It makes the slot wait until its higher-timeframe bar closes before it updates the oscillator. You will pay for that with a one-bar lag on confirmed history, and the MTF and Repainting page explains why that trade is worth it.

4. The divergence markers print only on confirmed pivots

Watch a live bar form. You should not see a divergence triangle appear on a developing bar. When a triangle does appear, it marks a pivot that has already confirmed. By default, the triangle prints on the confirmation bar, not on the pivot bar itself, because Plot On Pivot? is off. That is intentional; the page on MTF and Repainting explains the tradeoff between the two positions.

5. BBWP columns eventually appear

BBWP needs a lot of history before it can rank anything. By default it needs 252 confirmed bars of the blended fast line before it has any percentile rank to report. On a short chart, or on a chart with gaps, the columns may be missing until enough history builds up. This is the tool telling the truth, not a defect.

What "looks normal" on real data

Once the pane is drawing correctly, it helps to have a rough picture of what a calm pane looks like versus a busy one so you can tell which state you are in.

On calm, trending data. The blended fast moves in broad arcs between roughly 20 and 80. The per-slot lines track the same general direction without fanning apart much. Divergence triangles are rare. BBWP columns drift near or below their threshold for a while, then rise when the oscillator starts swinging harder.

On active, whippy data. The per-slot lines fan apart. The fastest slot (MA 01 on 5m by default) whips toward the boundaries while the slower slots hold closer to the middle. The blended fast swings more aggressively, and the BBWP columns rise to reflect the expanding oscillator width. Divergence triangles can appear more often, especially at pivots inside the whip. This is not a failure mode; it is the indicator reporting what is actually happening.

On a saturated pane. If the blended fast is glued against 0 or 100, or is flat-lining within a few points of one of the guides for long stretches, you are looking at saturation. The bounded mapping that converts each slot's price-vs-baseline distance into a 0 to 100 read has a ceiling; once ATR Sensitivity is pushed past the useful range, most of the movement ends up pressed against that ceiling and the oscillator stops reporting anything inside the body of moves. The pane will often look more decisive in this state — big swings, sharp-looking edges — which is the trap. A decisive-looking saturated pane is not a more informative pane; it is the same information squashed into less resolution. Drop ATR Sensitivity back toward 1.0 and confirm the pane comes alive inside the middle band. If the resulting pane feels less exciting, that is the point: the tool has more to say when it is not pinned to its edges.

The four first-time traps

These are the situations that make new readers think the tool is broken when it is working exactly as designed. Learning to recognise them on sight saves time.

Trap 1 — Saturated oscillator. The blended fast or one of the slots sits at 100 or 0 for a stretch. The cause is almost always ATR Sensitivity cranked too high. The sigmoid that converts distance to a 0-to-100 read has a hard ceiling; if you push the input hard enough, the output stops telling you anything inside the body of the move. Fix: move ATR Sensitivity back to 1.0 and leave it there until you have a specific reason to change it.

Trap 2 — Late divergence triangle. A triangle prints several bars after what you remember as the pivot. This is expected. By default, the triangle prints on the bar that confirms the pivot — that is, Pivot Len: bars after the pivot itself. If you want the triangle pinned to the pivot bar, enable Plot On Pivot?; the marker will back-offset. But remember, you are not seeing it "earlier" — the information still did not exist until the confirmation bar. The MTF and Repainting page unpacks this carefully.

Trap 3 — Empty BBWP columns. You enabled BBWP, the other elements are drawing, but the BBWP columns are missing. The cause is history. BBWP defaults to a 252-bar percentile lookback and refuses to paint until that full window is populated with confirmed data. On a short chart, load more history. On a chart with replay or an illiquid symbol, confirm there are enough confirmed bars in the window.

Trap 4 — Slot timeframe below chart timeframe. If you set a slot's Timeframe: to a value lower than the chart timeframe — say, running MA 01 on 1m while the chart is on 5m — the indicator will stop with a runtime error naming the slot. This is a hard stop, not a warning. It is there because higher-timeframe-to-lower-timeframe requests cannot be served honestly. Fix: raise the slot timeframe to at least the chart timeframe or leave it blank to use the chart timeframe.

When to stop leaving defaults alone

Defaults are a stable starting point that were picked to draw a legible pane on most instruments without any tuning. Staying on them for several sessions is not laziness; it is how you build the reference that later tuning works against. The three honest reasons to change something are:

• You have an articulable belief about timeframe leadership on your instrument. After enough sessions to notice that, say, the 60-minute slot tends to set the tone for what the 5-minute slot eventually confirms, you have a weight decision to make. Settings covers the conviction-weighted blend, and Workflows covers Routine B, which is the disciplined form of that change.

• You have a specific question the current pane is not answering. If you keep wishing you could see the envelope the blended fast is pressing, turn on Keltner and live with it for several sessions before adding anything else. Turning on multiple extras at once is the fastest way to lose attribution — you will not be able to tell which new element is producing which effect, and everything you learn in that session becomes unreliable.

• A setting is unambiguously wrong for the instrument or regime. A liquid index at default sensitivity may feel correct; the same sensitivity on a thin small-cap with rare outliers may saturate. Regime shifts can also surface mismatches. Tuning in response to a real mismatch is different from tuning toward a prettier pane.

If none of those three reasons applies yet, the discipline is to stay on defaults. A reader who keeps tuning before any of the three reasons is actually true is almost always chasing an aesthetic, and the pane is not built to reward that.

What you now have

By the time you finish this page with all five checks passing, you have verified four specific things: that the indicator loaded against its library, that the default slot configuration is contributing to a visible blend, that the repaint switch is set to the honest default, that divergence detection is waiting for confirmed pivots before marking anything, and that BBWP is refusing to rank widths it does not yet have enough history for. That is more than a working install. That is a working install whose behavior you have already confirmed with your own eyes — which is the foundation every later page in this pack is written on top of.