Settings

Settings

Axiom DC Pro has ten independent Donchian Channel slots, a blended channel section, and per-slot power-user parameters. That is a lot of surface area. This page teaches the settings by walking through one slot's anatomy in full, then noting what repeats, what changes, and where the interactions get tricky.

Every slot follows the same pattern. Once you understand how DC 01 works, you understand all ten. The differences between slots are only in their default values — which timeframe, which weight, whether they start enabled.

Slot anatomy (using DC 01 as the reference)

Enable

Default: ON for slots 01-03, OFF for slots 04-10.

This controls whether the slot computes its Donchian Channel and participates in the blended channel calculation. When a slot is disabled, it does nothing — no computation, no plotting, no blend influence.

When to change it: enable a slot when you want to add a structural timeframe to your stack. Disable it when you want to remove one. There is no benefit to enabling slots you are not actively using.

Watch out for this: Enabling many slots with overlapping timeframes (say, 5m, 6m, and 10m) adds visual clutter without adding genuine structural diversity. Each slot should cover a meaningfully different time horizon. If two slots are looking at nearly the same data, the second one is not giving you new information — and worse, their agreement in the blend will feel like confirmation when it is really just redundancy.

Hide Plot

Default: OFF for all slots.

This controls whether the slot's lines are drawn on the chart. It does not remove the slot from the blend.

That last sentence is the single most important thing to understand about this setting, and it trips up almost everyone at first. If a slot is enabled with a non-zero weight and you hide its plot, the slot disappears from your chart but continues to pull the blended channel. You will see the blend moving in a way that does not match the visible channels, and unless you remember that a hidden slot is still feeding in, you will think something is broken.

When to change it: hide a slot when you want its structural influence in the blend without the visual noise on your chart. This is a legitimate workflow — see Workflows for the "hidden structural influencer" pattern. Just know what you are doing.

TimeFrame

Default: "5" for DC 01, "15" for DC 02, "60" for DC 03, chart timeframe for DC 04-10.

This sets the timeframe for the slot's Donchian Channel calculation. The slot requests data from this timeframe using TradingView's higher-timeframe data mechanism.

Hard constraint: The slot timeframe must be equal to or higher than your chart timeframe. If you set it lower, the indicator throws a runtime error. That guard is enforced by this script. If you are on a 15-minute chart, a 5-minute slot has to be raised or disabled.

When to change it: when you are designing your structural stack. The default three-slot setup (5m / 15m / 60m) is a reasonable starting point for intraday work, but it assumes you are on a chart timeframe at or below 5 minutes. If you trade on higher timeframes, raise the slot timeframes to match your workflow. A swing trader might use 1H / 4H / 1D; a position trader might use 1D / 1W / 1M.

Watch out for this: Setting all slots to the same timeframe defeats the purpose of the multi-timeframe architecture. The blend just averages different lookback windows on the same data — that is not useless, but it is not what the tool is designed for.

Length

Default: 20 for all slots.

The Donchian Channel lookback — how many bars on the slot's timeframe are used to compute the highest high and lowest low. A length of 20 on a 5-minute slot means the channel covers the last 20 five-minute bars (about 100 minutes of price action).

When to change it: increase the length when the channel feels too tight for the structural question you are asking — when it reacts to minor swings you do not care about. Decrease it when the channel is too wide and washes out meaningful structure.

Watch out for this: Very short lengths (below 5) create noisy, jittery channels. Very long lengths on short timeframes can exceed available bar history on some instruments, producing flat lines or gaps. Length changes affect only the upper and lower bounds; the basis (midpoint) moves as a consequence.

Basis MA Length

Default: 1 for all slots.

This smooths the channel's midpoint line using the selected MA type. With the default combination of SMA + Basis MA Length = 1, the basis is simply the raw average of the upper and lower bounds: (highest high + lowest low) / 2.

When to change it: increase the length when you want the basis line to be smoother and less reactive to individual bars. This can help in reading structural trend direction from the basis, but it introduces lag — the basis no longer tracks the actual midpoint of the channel, it tracks a smoothed version of it.

Watch out for this: Over-smoothing (setting this to, say, 50) makes the basis lag far behind the channel. This can mislead you about where the channel's center actually sits right now, especially after a sharp move.

Basis MA Type

Default: SMA for all slots.

Selects which moving average from the Axiom MA Library smooths the basis line. Options include SMA, EMA, ALMA, KAMA, FRAMA, Jurik, Laguerre, VAMA, and others.

The default SMA + Basis MA Length = 1 combination leaves the basis unchanged. But that does not make every MA type interchangeable at length 1. Some library modes still behave differently there — for example, SWMA uses its own fixed smoothing window and Laguerre is driven by its alpha setting instead of Basis MA Length.

When to change it: when you want adaptive, weighted, or phase-shifted smoothing on the basis instead of a plain average. Each MA type has different behavior: ALMA allows offset and sigma control, Jurik has phase and power parameters, KAMA adapts to volatility. These differences only matter if you understand the specific MA you are choosing. If you do not, SMA is a reasonable default and EMA is a reasonable second choice.

Watch out for this: Switching to an unfamiliar MA type without understanding its parameters (which live in the power-user settings section) can produce a basis line that behaves in ways you do not expect. ALMA's offset parameter, for example, shifts the weight distribution of the average — an incorrect offset can make the basis lead or lag in unintuitive ways.

Line Width

Default: 2 for all slots.

Cosmetic. Controls the thickness of the slot's plot lines. No effect on calculation or behavior.

Blended Weight

Default: 40 for DC 01, 35 for DC 02, 25 for DC 03, 0 for DC 04-10.

This sets the slot's influence on the blended channel. The blend computes a normalized weighted average of all enabled slots with non-zero weights. That means the absolute numbers do not matter — weights of 40/35/25 produce the same blend as 80/70/50. What matters is the proportion.

Key interaction — weight zero: Setting a slot's weight to 0 keeps it plotted on the chart but excludes it from the blend entirely. This is the intended way to use a channel as a standalone visual reference without it pulling the composite. It is the weight — not the Enable toggle and not the Hide Plot toggle — that controls blend inclusion.

When to change it: when you want to rebalance which timeframes dominate the structural summary. If you want the blend to emphasize longer-term structure, increase the weight on your wider-timeframe slots and decrease it on the shorter ones. If you want the blend to track shorter-term structure more closely, do the opposite.

Watch out for this: A single slot with dramatically more weight than the others makes the blend converge toward that slot. At that point, the blended channel is essentially a decorated copy of one channel and provides no aggregation value. Also: the script does not clamp this field to positive values. Negative weights are accepted, and they can push the blend outside the visible slot channels or collapse it to zero if the total weighted mix goes non-positive.

Optional Ticker

Default: Empty (uses the chart symbol) for all slots.

Overrides the data source for this slot to a different instrument. When set, the slot computes its Donchian Channel on the alternate ticker's data, then scales the result into your chart's price space using a ratio-based approximation.

When to change it: when you want to see another market's structural context on your chart — for example, SPY's Donchian structure overlaid on an ES chart, or DXY structure on a gold chart. The scaling brings the alternate instrument's channel into the right price neighborhood so it is visible and readable on your chart.

Watch out for this: Cross-ticker scaling is approximate. It uses the ratio between the two instruments' closing prices, and that ratio updates every bar. When the instruments trend together, the scaling tracks well. When they diverge, the scaled channel drifts relative to your chart's price. This is not a bug — it is an inherent property of ratio-based scaling. If the two instruments have no structural relationship, the scaled channel is just a line on your chart, not a meaningful structural reference. See For the Geeks for a deeper explanation of how the scaling works and when it breaks down.

Blended channel settings

The blended channel has no timeframe, length, or MA settings of its own. It inherits everything from the individual slots. Its only direct controls are whether it is on, whether it is visible, and how thick the lines are. Everything else — what it computes, where it sits, how it moves — is a consequence of the enabled slots that actually carry weight and the settings behind them.

Power-user MA parameters

Each slot has a secondary settings group labeled with "PU" (power user) that contains parameters for specific MA types. These parameters only affect the basis line, and they only matter when the corresponding MA type is selected. Some of them do nothing until the basis is doing real smoothing, but others — like Laguerre alpha — can still matter even when Basis MA Length remains at 1.

Most users will never need to touch these. They exist because the Axiom MA Library provides full control over each MA type's behavior, and some traders have specific reasons to use non-default parameters. If you are not sure whether you need to change these, you do not need to change them.

The exception is On Bar Close, which sits in this section but is not a cosmetic parameter. It controls whether the slot uses confirmed higher-timeframe data (safe for backtesting) or the current building bar's data (faster updates, but repaints). This setting defaults to ON — the safe option — for every slot. Do not change it without understanding the tradeoff. See MTF and Repainting for the full explanation.

Settings interactions worth knowing

These are the non-obvious ways settings interact with each other. Understanding them prevents the most common configuration mistakes.

Enabled + hidden + weighted = invisible blend influence. A slot that is enabled, hidden, and has a non-zero weight will not appear on your chart but will pull the blended channel. This is by design — it is how the "hidden structural influencer" workflow works. But if you hide a slot and forget it has weight, you will see the blend moving in ways that do not match the visible channels.

Weight zero = blend exclusion. The weight is the only control that removes a slot from the blend calculation. Not the Enable toggle (which removes the slot from everything, including the chart). Not the Hide Plot toggle (which only hides the visual). If you want a slot visible on the chart but excluded from the blend, set its weight to 0.

Default SMA + Length 1 is raw midpoint. That specific default combination leaves the basis unchanged. But it does not make every MA type irrelevant at length 1. Some library modes, including SWMA and Laguerre, can still alter the basis even while Basis MA Length stays at 1.

Upper and lower are never smoothed. The MA type and Basis MA Length only affect the basis line. The upper bound is always the raw highest high and the lower bound is always the raw lowest low over the slot's length and timeframe. No amount of MA configuration will change the upper or lower lines.

A single repainting slot contaminates the blend. If even one enabled slot has On Bar Close turned off and carries non-zero weight, the blended channel incorporates that slot's repainting values into its average. The blend has no way to distinguish confirmed data from building-bar data — it just averages what the slots give it. This means a blend that looks historically reliable may not be, and there is no visual indicator on the chart to warn you. If you turn On Bar Close off for a specific slot's live workflow, either set that slot's weight to 0 so it stays out of the blend, or accept that the blend's historical record is no longer trustworthy for backtesting or strategy review.