Settings

Settings

This page covers every user-facing setting in Axiom BB Lite, organized in the same order you will see them in TradingView's settings panel. For each setting, you will find the default value, what it changes, when you might want to change it, what depends on it, and where it can go wrong.

The settings panel is organized into five groups:

1. BB 01 — Slot 1 settings

2. BB 02 — Slot 2 settings

3. BB 03 — Slot 3 settings

4. BB Blended — Blended band settings

5. PU Settings — Power User settings (On Bar Close, ALMA parameters)

BB Slot Settings (Slots 01, 02, 03)

Each of the three slots has the same set of controls. The defaults differ only in timeframe (5m / 15m / 60m) and color. Everything else is identical across slots.

Enable BB 0X

When you disable a slot, two things happen: the slot's lines disappear from the chart, and the slot stops contributing to the blended band. The blend recalculates immediately based on whichever slots remain active.

If you disable all three slots while the blend is enabled, the blend will draw a flat line at zero. That is not useful — it just means there is nothing to average.

Hide BB 0X Plot

This is the most important settings-level distinction in the tool. Hiding a slot is not the same as disabling it. When a slot is hidden:

• Its lines disappear from the chart.

• It still computes its Bollinger Band values.

• It still contributes to the blended band, using its full weight.

This means the blend can reflect information from slots you cannot see. If you hide Slot 3 and forget it is still enabled with a weight of 33.3, the blended band will include Slot 3's values — but you will not be able to see Slot 3's individual lines to understand why the blend sits where it does.

The practical test: If the blended band does not make sense relative to the visible slots, a hidden active slot is almost always the reason. Before assuming the indicator is wrong, open settings and check whether any slot has "Hide Plot" on with "Enable" still on. If so, that slot is feeding the blend from behind the curtain.

If you want a slot out of the picture entirely — not computed, not in the blend, not on the chart — disable it. If you want it in the blend but off the chart, hide it, and make a point of remembering it is active. The Visuals & Logic page walks through a concrete scenario where this interaction surprises the user and how to diagnose it.

Source

The source affects both the basis MA calculation and the standard deviation. A more volatile source (like high) will produce wider bands than a smoother source (like close) at the same length.

Most traders leave this on close unless they have a specific reason to change it. If you are not sure, leave it alone.

TimeFrame

Hard constraint: The slot's timeframe must be at or above the chart timeframe. If you are on a 15-minute chart, you cannot set a slot to 5 minutes — the indicator will throw a runtime error. This script enforces that as a guardrail instead of trying to improvise around a lower-timeframe request.

Practical guidance:

• Set timeframes that represent meaningfully different scales. A 5m/15m/60m stack gives you intraday structure, short-term context, and hourly context. A 1H/4H/D stack gives you hourly structure, medium-term context, and daily context. The idea is that each slot shows you something the others do not — if two slots are showing nearly the same thing, one of them is not earning its place.

• Setting a timeframe only slightly above the chart (e.g., a 5-minute slot on a 3-minute chart) will produce bands that look almost identical to chart-timeframe bands. The MTF value comes from the difference in scale. If the bands overlap, the timeframes are too close together to tell you anything distinct.

• The higher the slot's timeframe relative to the chart, the more pronounced the stepping pattern will be. A 60-minute slot on a 1-minute chart updates only once per hour. This is normal and expected — the stepped look means the values are confirmed, not that they are stale. See MTF & Repainting for why this matters.

Length

This is standard Bollinger Band behavior. A length of 20 with a 2.0 standard deviation multiplier is the textbook default and works well as a starting point for most instruments.

Practical limits: Very short lengths (below 5) on high timeframes can produce erratic bands that whip around on individual bars. Very long lengths (above 100) can produce bands so smooth they stop responding to meaningful volatility changes. Neither is inherently wrong, but both require you to understand what you are getting.

The length interacts with the MA type — some types (like ALMA) have additional parameters that modify how the length is used. See the PU Settings section below.

StdDev Mult

At 2.0, roughly 95% of price action falls within the bands under normal distribution assumptions (which markets violate constantly, but the approximation is still useful as a reference frame).

• Multipliers above 3.0 produce bands so wide that price rarely touches them. This can be useful as a volatility ceiling reference but produces almost no actionable band-touch events.

• Multipliers below 1.0 produce bands so tight that price exits them constantly. Every exit is a "signal," and that many signals means none of them carry much weight.

The multiplier is a pure scalar — it does not interact with other settings beyond the source and length that determine the standard deviation.

Type (MA Type)

The available MA types come from the Axiom Moving Average Library. The full list appears in the dropdown when you open the setting. Options include SMA, EMA, WMA, VWMA, ALMA, and others defined by the library.

The MA type affects how the basis responds to price changes. An EMA weights recent bars more heavily than an SMA, so the basis will react faster to new price action. A WMA distributes weight linearly. ALMA has additional tuning parameters (Offset and Sigma) configured in PU Settings.

If you are not sure which MA type to use, leave it on SMA. SMA is the standard Bollinger Band basis and produces the most familiar behavior. Change the type only when you have a specific reason and understand how the alternative type weights its inputs.

Line Width

No functional impact. Purely visual.

Blended Weight

How weights work: In the normal positive-weight case, weights are normalized — only the ratios between them matter, not the absolute numbers. Setting all three slots to 33.3 gives equal weight. Setting them to 100/100/100 gives exactly the same blend. Setting them to 60/30/10 gives Slot 1 six times the influence of Slot 3.

A weight of zero is a special case. It keeps the slot's lines on the chart (if not hidden) but removes the slot entirely from the blend calculation. This is useful when you want to see a slot's bands for visual reference without letting them influence the composite.

What the field does not block: The script does not set a minimum on the weight inputs. You can enter negative values. When you do, the blend becomes subtractive rather than purely additive, and if the active weights sum to zero or below, the blended plot falls back to zero because the blend function only resolves when total active weight is greater than zero. The rest of this manual assumes normal non-negative weighting unless stated otherwise.

The normalization means there is no way to "turn down" the blend's overall responsiveness by lowering all positive weights equally. If you set all three to 10 instead of 33.3, the blend does not change at all. The ratios are the same. If you want the blend to behave differently, you need to change what feeds it — different timeframes, different lengths, different slot selection — not just the weight numbers.

Interaction with hidden slots: If a slot is hidden but enabled and has a non-zero weight, it still contributes to the blend. The weight applies regardless of plot visibility. This point appears several times in this manual because it is the single most common source of confusion. A user who sets weights to 50/30/20, then hides the slot with weight 20, will see a blend that appears to be weighted 50/30 — but it is still 50/30/20. The hidden slot's 20% share is real and active. If you want a two-slot blend, disable the third slot or set its weight to zero.

Optional Ticker

When you enter a ticker, the slot computes its Bollinger Bands using the specified symbol's data at the slot's configured timeframe. The result is then scaled into your chart symbol's price range using a dynamic ratio so the bands sit at a visually meaningful level on your chart.

The scaling is approximate — it adjusts the foreign values based on the price relationship between the two instruments. This works well when the instruments tend to move together (e.g., SPY and QQQ, or two stocks in the same sector). The overlay looks meaningful because the underlying relationship is real. When the instruments move independently, the scaling still produces bands that look like they belong on your chart, but the relationship they appear to show may be an artifact of the ratio shifting rather than actual volatility structure. The overlay does not warn you when this is happening.

The For the Geeks page explains how the scaling works at a deeper level. The Limitations & Trust Boundaries page maps where it breaks down and how to check.

Blended BB Settings

Enable Blended BB

Disabling the blend has no effect on the individual slots. They continue to compute and plot as configured.

Hide Blended BB Plot

Unlike hiding an individual slot, hiding the blended band has no downstream consequence. The blend does not feed into anything else.

Line Width (Blended)

The default is slightly thicker than the individual slots (3 vs. 2) to make the blend visually distinct. Purely cosmetic.

PU Settings (Power User)

These settings affect all three slots globally.

On Bar Close?

This is the single most consequential setting in the indicator. It is a global switch — it applies to all three slots at once. There is no per-slot repaint control.

• On (default): Values come from the last completed higher-timeframe bar. History is stable. What you see on past bars is what you would have seen live. This introduces lag — the bands always reflect the previous HTF bar, not the one currently building.

• Off: Values come from the current building higher-timeframe bar. The chart is more responsive, but historical values may not match what was visible in real time. Backtests and scrollback analysis are unreliable.

The lag cost of leaving it on is real but predictable. On a 1-minute chart with a 60-minute slot, the bands reflect the 60-minute bar that closed up to an hour ago. On a 5-minute chart with a 60-minute slot, the lag is up to 60 minutes of confirmed data.

The repainting cost of turning it off is also real but harder to see. The chart will look fine — the bands will be smooth and responsive. The problem is that the values shown on past bars may have been different when those bars were live. You cannot tell by looking.

If you are not sure, leave it on. The lag is a known cost you can account for. The repainting is a hidden cost you cannot.

ALMA Floor Offset?

ALMA Offset

If you are not using ALMA as the basis type for any slot, this setting has no effect. If you are using ALMA, change this only if you understand how ALMA's Gaussian weighting works.

ALMA Sigma

Settings interaction summary

Most settings do one thing and one thing only. But a few interact in ways that produce behavior you would not predict from looking at each setting individually. The three you are most likely to encounter first are the hidden-slot-still-feeds-blend interaction, the all-disabled-but-blend-on state, and the On Bar Close + cross-ticker combination. The rest are situations you may hit as you push the tool's configuration further.