Visuals & Logic

Before you map any color to any meaning, you need the mental model under the pane. The Base trim's whole job is to turn a messy thing — "how far has price stretched from a baseline" — into a bounded number that is easier to compare across instruments and timeframes without pretending regimes stop mattering. Everything visual in the pane is that one idea, expressed three ways at once, then folded together into a fourth.

What the pane is actually measuring

Three things happen inside a single slot, in order.

First, the slot takes a price series — the chosen Source, close by default — and compares it to a baseline moving average of that series. The raw difference is a distance. It is signed (price above baseline is positive; below is negative) and it is in whatever unit the instrument trades in.

Second, that raw distance is normalized by ATR measured over the global ATR Length. That gives you a number that roughly answers the question "how many units of recent volatility is price away from its baseline?" A one-dollar move on a calm instrument and a ten-dollar move on a violent one can end up looking similar in ATR terms.

Third, that ATR-scaled distance is multiplied by the global ATR Sensitivity dial and pushed through a bounded transformation that lands it inside 0..100, with 50 as equilibrium. The pane sits at 50 when price is sitting on the baseline, above 50 when price is stretched above, below 50 when it is stretched below. The closer the reading gets to 0 or 100, the more the clamp is doing work to hold it inside the bounds. See For the Geeks for the shape of the transformation at a mental-model level.

Two things to internalize about that shape:

• It is a stretch read, not a trend read and not a momentum read. It does not know whether price is accelerating. It does not know whether the trend is getting older. It knows where price is relative to the slot's baseline, expressed in a volatility-scaled way.

• It is bounded by design. The 0..100 range gives you a common pane for different slots and sessions. That legibility is the benefit. The cost is that above a certain stretch the reading saturates, and different volatility regimes still deserve your attention. The pane cannot tell "very stretched" from "extremely stretched" once the clamp is engaged.

The slow line is a read on regime

Each slot also carries a slow line, which is a short smoothing of that slot's fast value. By default, the slow is an EMA over three bars of the fast. Because the fast is already a bounded 0..100 series, the slow is too.

The slow has one job: give the fast a reference to flip against. When the fast sits above the slow, the slot is in a bullish regime — stretch is running higher than its own recent memory. When the fast sits below, the slot is bearish. When fast and slow cross, the regime flipped. Because the default slow length is short, crossings happen often. Treat them accordingly; one-bar flips do not carry much weight.

Warm-up matters here. Early bars can include missing Fast/Slow values or fallback behavior before the slot has enough data to give you the settled Fast-vs-Slow read. That is why the first bars after the indicator loads can behave differently from the rest of the session. It is not a bug. It is the pane refusing to pretend warm-up data is mature data.

The blend is a weighted summary of slots, not a vote

The blended fast and blended slow are weighted averages of the enabled slots' fast and slow lines. Slots with weight zero are excluded from the average, which is how the observer-slot pattern in Workflows works. The blend is then clamped back into 0..100 defensively, and if master smoothing is on, a final MA pass replaces the blended pair with a smoothed version (also clamped).

The blend is the headline of the pane. It answers: "if you tell me which slots steer this, with what weights, what is the composite stretch saying right now?" The key word is composite. It is the average of the slots you chose to include. It is not a democracy; it is a weighted summary. It is not evidence about what the market thinks; it is a reading shaped by your configuration.

That distinction is the root of several confusions downstream. The alignment alerts in Alerts live at the sharpest end of it.

Visual grammar, piece by piece

Slot fast lines

• Slot 01 plots in teal. Full teal when slot 01's fast sits above slot 01's slow. Light teal when the opposite is true. During warm-up, do not over-read the first few colors.

• Slot 02 plots in aqua, with the same light/full convention keyed to slot 02's own fast-vs-slow relationship.

• Slot 03 plots in blue, with the same convention on slot 03's pair.

The color on a slot is local to that slot. Slot 02 being bullish is slot 02's fast above slot 02's slow. It says nothing about slot 01 or slot 03.

Chart themes, publication backgrounds, and accessibility settings can shift how teal and aqua and blue render in practice. If you cannot reliably tell teal from aqua on your monitor, adjust your chart theme or increase the line width via Line Width on each slot. The color logic is unchanged; only the perceived contrast is.

Blended fast, blended slow, fill

• Blended fast plots in lime when blended fast is above blended slow (bullish regime) and red when it is below (bearish regime). The thicker line — Blended Line Width defaults to 3 — is a visual cue that the blend is the headline.

• Blended slow plots in gray throughout. Gray is deliberate. The slow is a reference for the fast to flip against; it is not a signal of its own.

• Fill between blended fast and blended slow carries a faded version of the blend color. A lime band tells you the same regime as a lime fast line, in a form your eye can register at a glance.

If every enabled slot is at weight zero, or every enabled slot has an na fast value, the blend itself is undefined. In that case, the blended lines and the fill simply do not draw on that bar. The pane does not explode; it just stops drawing the blend. The slot lines are unaffected.

Reference lines

• 0 is a solid green line at the floor.

• Oversold level, dashed gray, defaults to 30 and moves when you change Oversold Level.

• 50 is a solid gray line. Equilibrium. Price sitting on its baseline.

• Overbought level, dashed gray, defaults to 70 and moves with Overbought Level.

• 100 is a solid red line at the ceiling.

The 30 and 70 lines are reference zones. They are not thresholds, not triggers, and not signals. The script does not fire an alert when they are crossed. Readers who expect RSI-style "overbought means reverse" logic have to deliberately let go of that habit to read this pane honestly. The 30 and 70 zones are useful because they tell you the reading is in the part of the range that typically warrants attention — not because they promise a reversal.

What to read first, what to read second, what to leave for last

A useful habit once the pane is live:

1. Read the blend color and the fill. Lime means the blend is in a stretched-above-its-own-average regime; red means the opposite. Read the color before the number.

2. Read whether the blend fast and blend slow are opening or closing. If the distance between them is widening, stretch is accelerating relative to its own memory. If it is narrowing, the regime is softening. This is the slope read, and it is where most of the useful information lives. A flat reading at 75 and a rising reading at 75 are different events; the number is the same, the story is not.

3. Glance at the slot lines to see who agrees and who does not. If slot 03 (the highest timeframe in defaults) is on the opposite side of slots 01 and 02, you are looking at a timeframe disagreement. That is information. Sometimes it is the thing that saves you from a bad read on the execution timeframe.

4. Only then look at the number. "Near 70" is useful context. It is not a conclusion. A reading of 70 on a calm day and a reading of 70 on a volatile day are not the same economic event; ATR is doing different work in each.

5. Leave the reference lines out of your trigger logic. Their job is framing, not calling.

How to read disagreement

Most new users look for agreement. The pane is usually more informative when it disagrees with itself. Three shapes of disagreement to learn to spot:

• Slot 01 disagrees with slots 02 and 03. The execution timeframe is doing something the slower timeframes have not yet picked up. That could be a real shift starting small, or it could be a head-fake. The context read (slot 03) is the one that resolves it — the question is whether the slower timeframes follow or the fast slot gives up.

• Slot 03 disagrees with slots 01 and 02. The context is on one side while the working timeframes are both on the other. This is usually the most honest warning the pane can give a trader who is about to lean hard into the blend. When the context is pulling against you, your execution edge on the blend is narrower than it looks.

• The blend and the slow line are opening while the slots are split. This looks like conviction on the blend but is partly an artifact of weights. If the two agreeing slots share most of the blend weight, the blend will lean with them regardless of what the third slot is doing. Read the weights before reading the slope.

None of these disagreements are "the pane is confused." They are the pane reporting genuine structural differences between timeframes, in a form that is easier to process than switching between three windows. Teach yourself to read them, and the pane starts earning its place.

Readings the pane cannot give you

Saying this plainly saves arguments with the pane later:

• It cannot tell you whether a trade will work.

• It cannot tell you how long a regime has been running.

• It cannot tell you whether stretch is about to accelerate or mean-revert. It tells you where stretch is right now, relative to the slot's own short memory.

• It cannot tell you whether three slots on similar timeframes with the same source agree because the market agrees or because the slots are three copies of the same measurement. You have to know that.

Where to go next

• You are ready to configure deliberately: Settings.

• The blend on your chart is doing something unexpected: Troubleshooting, and then Limitations & Trust Boundaries for the higher-order misreads.

• You want to understand what is happening across timeframes and whether the pane is painting confirmed history or a live higher-timeframe bar: MTF & Repainting.

• You want the mental-model shape of the math itself: For the Geeks.