Settings

Axiom DC's inputs dialog groups controls by slot (DC 01, DC 02, DC 03), followed by a DC Blended group for the composite, and a PU Settings group at the bottom for the single global repaint switch. This page walks the knobs in a different order — slot lifecycle, not GUI order — so a reader who is setting up a slot from scratch does not have to bounce between sections. If you want to follow along in the inputs dialog, open it now; most of what this page teaches is easier to hold with the actual knobs in front of you.

Before the knob-by-knob walk, two structural facts. Both are the kind of thing you will catch yourself forgetting later and that are cheaper to internalize once than to re-learn three months in.

1. Only the basis is smoothed. The upper and lower channel lines are raw Donchian levels — the highest high and the lowest low across the slot's Length. Basis MA Length and Basis MA Type smooth the midpoint basis line only. They never touch the outer bounds. This is the single most missed structural fact about this tool. Every time you read a draft of your own configuration, ask yourself whether you are still thinking of the channel as "smoothed." It is not. The basis is. The bounds are raw. When the outer channel looks wrong, Length is the only knob that can fix it — not anything in the basis group.

2. The repaint switch is global. On Bar Close? is a single control that decides whether every enabled slot uses the previous confirmed higher-timeframe bar or the current live one. You cannot run Slot 01 on ON and Slot 03 on OFF on this trim. If that is the feature you need, the CTX trim is the right tool — no configuration on this trim will produce it. The global scope is deliberate; the cost is that your posture decision covers the whole stack at once, not a slot at a time.

Keep those two facts in the back of your head as you read the rest of this page. Most of the "this knob is not doing what I thought" confusion on this indicator comes from forgetting one of them.

Slot-lifecycle walk

Every slot carries the same eight primary controls plus two cosmetic ones. The useful order to reason about them is: is this slot on, is it drawing, what timeframe, how wide is the channel, how smooth is the basis, what trend window, and how strongly does it steer the blend.

1. Is the slot on at all

Enable DC NN — boolean. Default: on for Slots 01, 02, and 03.

Turns the slot on or off at the top level. A disabled slot does not compute, does not plot, does not contribute to the blend, and does not count in the alignment alerts. It simply is not in the picture.

Use this when you genuinely do not need the slot's timeframe in your current read. If a slot is on "because it was on when I got here," the chart is carrying a computation that is doing nothing for you and may dilute the blended channel on top of cluttering the chart.

2. Is the slot drawing

Hide DC NN Plot — boolean. Default: off.

Suppresses the slot's three plotted lines while leaving everything else running. A hidden slot still computes, still contributes its weight to the blended channel, and still participates in the alignment alerts.

This is the knob most commonly misread on the Base trim. "Hide" means "stop drawing," not "stop counting." If the intent is to remove the slot from the blend, either set Blended Weight to zero (drawn but silent) or turn Enable DC NN off (gone entirely). Hiding is for readers who want a cleaner chart without changing the math.

3. What timeframe does the slot run on

TimeFrame: — timeframe string. Defaults: "5" for Slot 01, "15" for Slot 02, "60" for Slot 03.

The higher timeframe the slot resolves its Donchian channel at. The slot requests its values from this timeframe on the chart symbol, every bar.

Two constraints:

• The slot's timeframe must be equal to or higher than the chart's. Set it lower and the indicator raises a runtime error of the form DC NN timeframe cannot be lower than the chart timeframe. — the error names the specific slot, not just the tool. Fix the offending slot's timeframe to clear the error.

• An empty string inherits the chart timeframe. That is a legitimate configuration, but be deliberate about it: with On Bar Close? OFF, a chart-timeframe slot behaves like a same-timeframe Donchian read of the same Length; with On Bar Close? ON, the slot deliberately reports the previous confirmed chart bar's values.

4. How wide is the channel

Length: — integer. Default: 20 on all three slots.

The Donchian lookback. It drives the upper channel (highest high across Length bars), the lower channel (lowest low), and the raw midpoint that the basis is smoothed from. A single number, three consequences.

A short Length produces a tight channel that chases local extremes, and because the outer bounds are raw, short lengths put noise directly on the upper and lower lines. A long Length produces a wide channel that smears the range across a longer window. Neither extreme is "better" — they are two different reads. The shipped 20 is a reasonable middle for most chart timeframes.

A common misread: the basis looks clean when you raise Length, and a reader concludes the channel is fine. Raising Length does not smooth the outer bounds. A clean basis can sit inside an outer channel that is tracking micro-noise if Length is short, and it can sit inside a correctly smeared channel if Length is long. Always check the upper and lower before trusting a "clean-looking" basis.

5. How smooth is the basis

Basis MA Length: — integer. Default: 1 on all three slots.

Smoothing length applied to the midpoint only. Upper and lower are never touched by this knob.

At 1 with the default SMA, the basis is effectively the raw midpoint — a one-bar MA of a value is the sample itself. This is the shipped default, and it is a shipped default because the raw midpoint is a useful baseline read. Raise the length above 1 when you want a calmer basis line. The shape of the length-based smoothers starts to matter more once the length is above 1. See Basis MA Type below.

A reader who changes this knob and sees the outer channel move is not seeing the outer channel move because of this knob. The outer channel is changing because Length: is set short and the highs and lows are moving around underneath the smoothing layer. The basis MA length cannot smooth that.

Type: (Basis MA Type) — enum from the Axiom MA Lite library. Default: SMA on all three slots.

The MA family used to smooth the midpoint. The catalog is the MA Lite library — SMA, EMA, RMA, WMA, VWMA, and SWMA. It is a deliberately narrower set than the Pro catalog used by the wider DC trim. This page does not re-teach MA semantics.

A gotcha lives here: at Basis MA Length = 1, the length-based MA choices mostly collapse to the raw midpoint. A reader who changes Type: from SMA to EMA with the length still at 1 will see no change in the basis, because there is nothing to smooth yet. SWMA is the exception: the Lite library routes it to TradingView's fixed SWMA function, which ignores the user length. Raise the length above 1 before judging whether a length-based Type change is doing anything.

6. What trend window decides "rising" or "falling"

Basis Trend Length: — integer, minimum 1. Default: 3 on all three slots.

Bars-back the current basis is compared against to decide whether it is rising or falling. "Rising" means the current smoothed basis is greater than or equal to its value that many bars ago, where the bars are the slot's own higher-timeframe bars. The resulting boolean is what the per-slot basis-trend alerts fire on and what the alignment vote uses.

This is the knob most commonly conflated with Length:. They are two different lookbacks for two different jobs. Length: is the Donchian window that defines the channel itself. Basis Trend Length: is a separate lookback on top of the smoothed basis that decides the trend state.

Shorter Basis Trend Length reacts faster to a basis change; longer asks for a more deliberate move before the state flips. A value of 1 is permitted but produces a flicker-prone trend read: it is effectively "is the basis greater than or equal to its last value," and that will toggle on small wiggles. If the alerts from a length-1 setup look noisy, the length is the cause, not a bug.

7. Cosmetic

Line Width: — integer. Default: 2 per slot.

Thickness of the slot's three plotted lines. No mechanical effect. Raise it if the three slot stacks are crowding each other; lower it if the chart feels heavy.

8. How strongly does the slot steer the blend

Blended Weight: — float. Defaults: 40.0 on Slot 01, 35.0 on Slot 02, 25.0 on Slot 03.

How much the slot contributes to the blended channel. The blend sums weight x slot value separately for upper, lower, and basis across every enabled, non-zero-weight slot, then divides by the total contributing weight. Direction for the blended basis-trend is decided by comparing the total weight voting rising against the total weight voting falling (ties resolve as rising). Keep weights at zero or above. The input does not enforce a minimum, but negative weights are not a documented operating pattern and can produce a composite that is no longer a plain weighted summary.

A weight of zero is a special, meaningful configuration: the slot's three lines remain on the chart, but the slot is excluded from the blend's vote. This is the "drawn but silent" posture. If every contributing slot is at zero, the blended output has no useful contributor behind it.

The shipped 40 / 35 / 25 split leans the blend toward the faster timeframes. That is a posture, not a ranking. If you want equal voice across the three slots, set them to equal values — and do it as a conscious statement that each timeframe is equally informative, not as a reflex because "equal feels neutral." Equal weighting is a claim, same as any other.

The DC Blended group

Three controls sit in the DC Blended group, all cosmetic or top-level.

Enable Blended DC — boolean. Default: on. Turns the red blended channel on or off as a drawn object and as the source for the two blended basis-trend alerts. Turning it off is a legitimate choice if you are reading the slots directly and do not want a composite at all. It does not disable the per-slot alerts or the all-slot alignment alerts; those are driven by the enabled slot states.

Hide Blended DC Plot — boolean. Default: off. Suppresses the blended lines and fill while leaving the blend's computation running. Rarely useful outside the specific case where you want the blended alert to fire without the blended lines on the chart.

Line Width: — integer. Default: 3. Cosmetic; applies to the blended upper, basis, and lower lines.

The PU Settings group — the global repaint switch

On Bar Close? — boolean. Default: on (true).

This switch is the most consequential control on the indicator, and its scope is where most first-time readers get tripped up.

• ON uses the previous confirmed higher-timeframe bar for every enabled slot. Every slot advances in discrete steps at each of its own higher-timeframe closes. Once a value is plotted on a chart bar, it does not redraw.

• OFF uses the live higher-timeframe bar for every enabled slot. Every slot's lines can redraw on the current chart bar until that slot's higher-timeframe bar closes.

Two consequences that every reader should internalize before leaving this section:

• The switch is a single global control. Flipping it changes the posture of every enabled slot at the same time. There is no per-slot override on the Base trim. If you came from the CTX trim expecting a per-slot switch, recalibrate — a single switch here rather than three.

• OFF is never "just faster." OFF trades latency for redraw exposure. ON trades redraw exposure for latency. Neither wins the argument in the abstract; you pick based on what hurts more in your particular read.

MTF & Repainting carries the full treatment. This section names the switch; that page teaches how to live with it.

The defaults are defaults, not a recommendation

Every shipped number in this indicator is a working baseline, not an optimized setup:

• Three enabled slots at 5m / 15m / 60m, weighted 40 / 35 / 25, are enough to render cleanly on the timeframes most readers already look at.

• Length: 20 is a reasonable middle for a Donchian lookback. It is not "the right" length. Your timeframe and your instrument may pull it in either direction.

• Basis MA Length: 1 with default SMA keeps the basis equal to the raw midpoint. It is the cleanest starting point because it defers the smoothing decision until you have a reason to make it. SWMA is the exception because it ignores the user length.

• Basis Trend Length: 3 is a short-but-not-flicker-prone window for the trend state.

• On Bar Close?: on is the honest starting posture. Make the OFF decision deliberately, not incidentally.

None of these are "best settings." They are the settings the tool renders cleanly at, out of the box, for a reader who has not yet decided what they want the stack to do for them.

A default is telling you something useful up until the moment you can describe a specific mismatch between what the stack is showing and what you need it to show for the question you are asking. When that sentence lands — "the 60-minute slot is too slow for the read I am doing because my average hold is eight minutes," or "the outer channel on Slot 01 is chasing wicks on this instrument" — change the default that is causing the mismatch and leave the others alone. "Optimize everything at once" is not a setup path; it is a way to lose track of which knob moved the thing you noticed. Change one knob. Let it settle on the chart for a session. Decide whether that change stuck, then move on to the next one.

Change them with a reason, leave them alone without one.

Dependency and interaction map

Read this list as a quick reference on which knob can reach which outcome. Most "why is this happening" questions resolve to one of these interactions.

• A slot's TimeFrame: must be equal to or higher than the chart timeframe. Lower fires a runtime error naming the slot. Empty inherits the chart's.

• Basis MA Type only becomes visibly different for the length-based smoothers once Basis MA Length is above 1. SWMA is the exception because it ignores the user length and uses TradingView's fixed SWMA behavior.

• Hide DC NN Plot suppresses the slot's lines only. The slot keeps contributing to the blend under a non-zero weight and keeps counting in alignment alerts. "Hide" is a chart statement, not a math statement.

• Blended Weight = 0 keeps the slot visible but removes its vote from the blend. This is a supported pattern — the drawn-but-silent posture — and is different from hiding the plot.

• Enable DC NN = off is the only control that removes a slot from everything at once: computation, plot, blend contribution, and alignment participation.

• Length: drives both the outer bounds and the midpoint that the basis is built from. Basis MA Length: smooths only the basis. The outer bounds are never smoothed. If the outer channel looks wrong, Basis MA Length is not the knob that can fix it.

• The global On Bar Close? applies to every enabled slot in one step. There is no per-slot repaint control on the Base trim. Flipping the switch changes the posture of the whole stack simultaneously.

• The blended basis-trend vote is resolved by comparing total weight voting rising against total weight voting falling across enabled, non-zero-weight slots; ties resolve as rising. This convention is defined; it is not a market claim. Visuals & Logic has the worked example.

• Hidden slots with non-zero weight still steer the blend without showing their lines. If the blend is moving in a direction that does not match any slot on the chart, the first place to look is the hide toggles.