Visuals & Logic

This page answers two questions. What is every pixel on the pane telling me? And when the pane is showing me something ambiguous, how do I read it honestly instead of inventing a story?

The indicator does not announce itself. Three lines could look like three lines to an outsider; to a reader using this pane daily, those three lines are three different windows into participation, each normalized into the same 0-to-100 scale so the reader can actually compare them. The blend on top is a summary of that comparison, not a verdict. If you only take one habit from this page, let it be this: read the slots first, the blend second. Reading the blend first is the most common way a well-designed multi-slot pane gets used as if it were a one-line indicator. The whole reason to run more than one slot is so that the agreement or disagreement between them is visible. A reader whose eye jumps straight to the blend is ignoring that information and then complaining that the tool did not show it to them.

What is on the pane

With three default slots and the blend enabled, you are looking at seven visual elements plus the reference furniture. Here is what each one is and what it encodes.

The slot lines

There is one line per enabled slot, drawn in that slot's assigned color.

• CVD 01 — teal

• CVD 02 — aqua

• CVD 03 — blue

• CVD 04 — orange

• CVD 05 — yellow

• CVD 06 — fuchsia

• CVD 07 — purple

• CVD 08 — gray

• CVD 09 — silver

• CVD 10 — white

Each slot's line encodes a single value on every bar: that slot's smoothed CVD estimate, normalized into 0-to-100 against its window's observed high and low. A reading of 80 on CVD 01 is not a universal "80 means buying pressure." It means "inside CVD 01's current window, this bar's CVD is near the top of the range CVD 01 has seen in this window." Portable across instruments, specific to the slot.

The slot line also carries state through its color opacity. A slot shows at full opacity when its CVD is above its own signal line; it shows dimmed (at about half opacity) when its CVD is below its own signal line. The flip happens at the crossing.

The blend lines

If Plot Blended CVD/Signal is on, three more elements appear.

• The blended CVD is drawn in lime when it is above its own blended signal, and in red when it is below. The color flip happens at the crossing.

• The blended signal is drawn in gray. It is the weighted mean of the enabled slots' signal values, and functions as the reference the blend crosses against.

• A translucent fill is drawn between the blended CVD and the blended signal. The fill takes the blend's current up or down color at high transparency. Its role is to make the blend's side of the signal legible at a glance, without forcing the reader to squint.

The blend is a weight-weighted mean of the enabled slots whose Blended Weight is non-zero. If three slots are at weight 33.3, the blended CVD is roughly the average of their three normalized CVD values, and the blended signal is the same kind of average applied to their signal values. Add a fourth slot at weight 33.3 and the means are now over four values; the blended pair will shift accordingly. If Master Smoothing is enabled, a final smoothing pass is applied to both blended lines after that averaging.

The reference levels

Five horizontal guides are drawn on every pane.

• 0 at the bottom, in green, marks the lower boundary of the pane. Nothing is allowed to print below it.

• Oversold (default 20), in gray dashed, is a cosmetic reference.

• 50 in gray, is the middle of the pane.

• Overbought (default 80), in gray dashed, is a cosmetic reference.

• 100 at the top, in red, marks the upper boundary. Nothing is allowed to print above it.

The oversold and overbought levels do not drive any alert or color change inside the indicator. They are there so your eye has a reference line when reading the slots and the blend. Move them if a different reference serves your eye better.

The session markers

When a slot is in Session mode, a dashed vertical line drops in that slot's color at each window rollover — the edge where the session accumulation resets to zero. On a daily window, that is the start of each trading day. On a weekly window, the start of each week.

These markers are accounting events, not trade events. Each one marks "this slot's CVD just restarted from zero." If you read a color flip or a crossing that happens inside the first bar or two after a reset, remember that the slot is also starting a new accumulation cycle; transitions near a reset edge are noisier than transitions in the middle of a session and deserve less weight until the window has had a chance to develop.

In Rolling mode, there are no session markers. There is no reset; the lookback slides continuously.

What the pane guarantees, mechanically

A few properties are not accidents of the defaults. They are hard guarantees of the tool and are worth knowing because they are what makes the pane comparable across instruments and regimes.

• Every line stays in 0 to 100. Slot lines, the blended CVD, and the blended signal all clamp into the pane. There is no condition under which a line is allowed to leak above 100 or below 0. If you ever see one, it is a defect — capture the symbol, timeframe, and settings, and report it.

• Each slot is normalized to its own window, not a global one. Slot 01's zero-to-hundred is defined against CVD 01's window. Slot 03's zero-to-hundred is defined against CVD 03's window. On a chart where slot 01 uses a daily session window and slot 03 uses a weekly session window, their 50-levels represent different things even though they sit at the same vertical position on the pane.

• Slot state and blend state are defined by line-vs-signal, not by threshold. A slot is bullish when its CVD is above its own signal. The blend is bullish when the blended CVD is above the blended signal. Neither is defined by crossing the oversold or overbought guide.

These three facts together are the reason this pane is portable. Learn to lean on them.

Reading the slots first

The temptation, on a busy pane, is to read the blend first because it is the biggest line. Resist it. The blend is a summary. The slots are where the information lives.

A useful reading order, in the first minute of looking at the pane:

1. Scan the slot colors. Which slots are at full opacity (their CVD is above their own signal)? Which are dimmed (below their own signal)? That gives you a count — for example, "two bullish, one bearish" on the default three-slot stack.

2. Scan the slot positions. Are the slots clustered together in the pane, or spread out? A cluster near 80 with three slots bullish is a different regime from three slots clustered near 30 with one bullish. The positions tell you where, the colors tell you how.

3. Then, and only then, look at the blend. The blend's color tells you which way the weighted stack is leaning. Its distance above or below its signal, and the intensity of the fill, tell you how cleanly that lean holds together. If the blend is lime but three of your four slots are dimmed, the blend is being steered by one heavy-weighted slot; that is a reading the blend alone does not surface.

This is the conversation metaphor made concrete. The blend will always agree with itself — it is a mean. What it cannot do is tell you whether the slots were agreeing when that mean was computed.

Reading the blend — agreement versus cancellation

The blend line is most informative in its extremes and least informative in its middle. Here is how to think about that.

Blend near 80 or above, fill intensely colored

The blended CVD is near the top of its scale and well above its signal. Usually the slots are clustered high and coloring up. The blend is saying "the stack as a whole is leaning hard up right now." Worth your attention as pressure context; not a trigger.

Blend near 20 or below, fill intensely colored

Mirror image. The stack as a whole is leaning hard down. Same treatment.

Blend near 50, fill pale, slots spread out

This is the important case, and it is the one most often misread. A blend at 50 with disagreeing slots — say slot 01 at 70, slot 02 at 50, slot 03 at 20 — is not "neutral." It is "the slots are actively canceling each other." That is real information, and it happens to be the kind of information the blend line alone is mathematically incapable of surfacing, because the mean of 70, 50, and 20 is 47 and the mean of 47, 50, and 53 is also 50. Both produce the same blend. Only the slots reveal which world you are in.

The right response is to look at the slots individually and interrogate the disagreement. Which timeframe does your current trade idea actually depend on? If your intended entry is on the chart's own cadence, slot 01's read is the one with the strongest claim to weight. If you are positioning into a regime and intend to hold through several sessions, slot 03 is the one you should lean on. A pane that reads as contested on the blend and as agreement on the timeframe you actually care about is a legitimately supportive context — it is just not the context the blend alone is describing.

A second question worth asking: is the disagreement fresh or has it been persistent? A 60-minute slot leaning bearish while a 5-minute slot leans bullish for thirty minutes is a different signal from the same disagreement that has held for two trading sessions. The pane does not compute this for you, but the slot lines are right there and your eye can read the duration on the chart.

Blend near 50, fill pale, slots also clustered near 50

This is the case that looks like the previous one to a careless eye but means something different. Here the slots are agreeing — they are just agreeing that nothing much is happening. Tape is quiet, normalized CVDs are clustered in the middle of their windows, the blend is in the middle because its inputs are in the middle. Not disagreement; low signal.

The visual cue is cluster-versus-spread. A tight cluster near 50 says the slots are quietly aligned. A wide spread near 50 says the slots are canceling. The blend line alone cannot tell you which.

Color flips on slots

A slot flips color when its CVD crosses its signal. On the up-cross, the line goes to full opacity. On the down-cross, it dims.

Useful things to know about these flips:

• They are the basis of the per-slot alerts. CVD NN Is Bullish fires on every confirmed bar where the slot's CVD is above its signal, not only on the flip bar. See Alerts for the exact repeat-fire behavior.

• Length interacts with flip frequency. A slot with Signal Length: at 3 will flip more often than the same slot at Signal Length: at 10. If your slot feels "jumpy," the signal length is where to reach first, before tuning Pressure Sensitivity.

• MA family interacts with flip character. A KAMA-smoothed slot flips differently from an SMA-smoothed slot at the same length. KAMA will delay flips during chop and snap through them during a trending move; SMA treats both the same.

Flips happen on the slot's own timeframe, not the chart's. A flip on CVD 03 (a 60-minute slot) is a 60-minute event; waiting for it on a 5-minute chart means you will see the line step and hold for eleven 5-minute bars and then shift on the twelfth. MTF & Repainting explains the timing in full.

The fill — what it encodes and what it does not

The translucent fill between the blended CVD and the blended signal is a visibility aid. It takes the blend's up or down color, at high transparency, so you can read "which side of the signal is the blend on?" without tracing the lines.

What the fill does not encode:

• It is not a confidence score. A wide gap between the blend and the signal does not produce a more saturated fill color; the color follows state only, and the gap just produces a taller shaded area.

• It is not a distance metric. The fill hue is up or down, full stop.

• It is not a divergence indicator. The fill says where the blend is relative to its signal. It says nothing about price.

If your eye starts using fill saturation as a strength reading, re-ground by comparing it against the actual slot positions.

Window rollovers — what the dashed vertical is and is not

In session mode, a dashed vertical line drops in a slot's color at each window rollover. Three things to know:

• It is a bookkeeping marker. The slot's CVD just reset. Accumulation restarts on the next bar.

• It is not a trade event. No alert fires on the rollover. The pane is telling you what time it is for that slot, not what to do.

• It only appears in session mode. Rolling mode has no resets; you will never see a dashed marker for a slot in rolling mode.

If you are running mixed window modes across slots — CVD 01 in Session, CVD 03 in Rolling — the dashed markers will only appear in CVD 01's color. A reader sometimes wonders why CVD 03's marker is "missing." It is not missing. CVD 03 is in Rolling mode.

Hidden slots and what they still do

Set Hide CVD NN Plot to true and the slot's line disappears from the pane. Everything else continues:

• The slot's CVD is still computed.

• The slot's weight still steers the blend.

• The slot's per-slot alerts still fire.

• The slot's bullish or bearish state still counts in the All CVD Slots Bullish and All CVD Slots Bearish alerts.

Hiding is a visibility choice, not a math choice. The pane will feel cleaner; the blend will be unchanged. To actually exclude a slot from the blend, set Blended Weight to 0. To exclude it from alignment alerts and per-slot alerts, set Enable CVD NN to false. See Settings for the three levels of "quiet."

Optional-ticker slots — reading them on the same pane

A slot with Optional Ticker: pointed at a different symbol (say QQQ on a SPY chart) reads OHLCV from that symbol and plots its normalized CVD in the slot's assigned color, right alongside the chart's other slots.

Two things to read carefully:

• The two lines do not share a zero. The QQQ slot's 50 is the midpoint of QQQ's own window — not a midpoint you can compare directly against the chart symbol's 50. Use the optional-ticker slot to read "is QQQ's pressure aligned with SPY's pressure?" as a yes/no question (their directions agree or disagree). Do not use it as "QQQ is 10 points above SPY in CVD."

• Session-reset edges may not align. If SPY and the optional symbol trade on different session calendars, their daily reset markers land at different wall-clock edges. Do not read two dashed verticals at different bar indexes as "the symbols disagreed at this moment"; one slot just hit its rollover earlier.

An ambiguity walkthrough — blend at 50

You are on a 5-minute SPY chart. The default three-slot stack is enabled. The blend is sitting at 51, very close to its signal at 52. The fill is pale.

Case A — quiet cluster: all three slot lines are between 44 and 56. Colors are a mix — CVD 01 bullish, CVD 02 bearish, CVD 03 bullish. The stack is agreeing that nothing is happening. You are reading a low-signal regime. The right response is to wait for something to develop or to look for context elsewhere.

Case B — active cancellation: CVD 01 is at 74 (bullish color), CVD 02 is at 48 (bearish color), CVD 03 is at 28 (bearish color). The blend is at 50 because a high reading and two low readings are averaging. Here, the stack is not quiet — it is fighting. The right response is to notice that the 60-minute context is leaning down while the 5-minute is leaning up, and to ask yourself which of those timeframes your current trade actually wants to respect. If you take the blend alone at face value you will conclude "neutral" and miss the underlying disagreement entirely.

These two cases look the same on the blend line. They do not look the same on the slots. That is the whole reason the pane shows you both.

Three common visual misreads

1. Treating the blend's crossing of 50 as a direction flip. The blend's color flips when it crosses its signal, not when it crosses the 50 line. It can cross 50 and stay lime, or cross its signal and change color without going anywhere near 50. Use the color for state; use the level for location.

2. Reading fill intensity as conviction. The fill uses the blend's up or down color at fixed transparency. It does not get more saturated when the blend is stronger. Use the spread between the blend and signal lines for relative distance; use cluster-versus-spread on the slots for conviction.

3. Trusting a slot near a reset edge. A slot whose window just reset is showing a short accumulation history. The first couple of bars after the dashed vertical are noisier than bars in the middle of the window. Give the slot time to develop before leaning on its position.

Where to go next

• For the controls that change any of the visuals above, Settings.

• For how state on the pane translates into alerts, Alerts.

• For the timing posture of each slot and what the dashed reset means in context, MTF & Repainting.

• For the mental model behind what each slot is actually estimating, For the Geeks.

• For three documented workflows that use these visuals in practice, Workflows.