Built by Braamskis, included with TQE membership.
Overview
Volume tells you how much traded. It doesn’t tell you who was in a hurry.
Delta does. Every trade happens because someone crossed the spread to get filled — a buyer lifting the offer or a seller hitting the bid. Delta is the running difference between those two, and it separates the trade that was chased from the trade that was patiently filled.
This plots that difference as candles in its own pane, accumulated from the start of each session, so you can see aggression build the same way you watch price build.
Read it as candles, not a line
That’s the design choice that makes it useful.
Each bar on your chart gets a matching delta candle — an open, a high, a low and a close, drawn from the accumulated delta over that period. You read it exactly like a price candle:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Long body | Sustained one-sided aggression through the bar |
| Long upper wick | Buyers pushed hard and got absorbed |
| Long lower wick | Sellers pushed hard and got absorbed |
| Small body, big wicks | Both sides fought, neither won |
A delta candle with a long upper wick and a small body is a bar where buying came in aggressively and someone sat there filling every one of them. That’s absorption, and it’s information a delta line would have hidden.
The zero line marks where the session’s accumulation is flat.
The divergence colour
This is the feature that makes it Braamskis’ rather than a stock CVD, and it’s the reason to run it.
When the delta candle disagrees with the price candle, it changes colour.
Price closed up, delta closed down. The bar was green, but the aggression underneath it was net selling. Buying moved price higher while sellers hit into it the whole way — a rally being sold.
Price closed down, delta closed up. The bar was red, but aggressive buyers were stepping in the whole time. Selling took price lower while buyers absorbed it — a decline being bought.
Every other bar is coloured normally: one shade for a delta candle that closed up, another for one that closed down. So the highlight colour only appears when price and flow disagree — you’re not scanning for it, it interrupts you.
A single divergence bar is noise. A cluster is a story. One bar where the flow leaned the other way happens constantly. Five in a row at the top of a run, all showing selling into green candles, is a different thing entirely — that’s a move being distributed into while it still looks strong.
The anchor period
Delta accumulates from the start of an anchor period and resets when a new one begins. The default anchor is the day, which is what makes it an intraday tool: what you’re reading is today’s aggression, building.
You can anchor to a longer period for a bigger-picture view, but the reset is what gives the reading meaning. Without it you’d be looking at a number dragging weeks of history behind it, and today’s activity would be invisible inside it.
Where the data comes from
Worth understanding, because it explains the tool’s one real limitation.
TradingView doesn’t publish true bid/ask data for most symbols. To build delta, the indicator drills into a lower timeframe than your chart and infers direction from how each of those smaller bars behaved — many small bars adding up to one delta candle on your chart.
The lower timeframe is chosen automatically to suit whatever you’re viewing, and you can override it.
A finer lower timeframe is more precise and reaches back less far. More sub-bars per candle means a better estimate, but TradingView limits how many it will fetch — so your history gets shorter.
A coarser one gives you more history and a rougher estimate. Useful when you want to study weeks rather than today.
On an expert plan, tick data is available. That’s the most accurate option, since it works from individual trades rather than inferring from small bars. It also has the least history depth of all.
This is an estimate, not the tape. Outside of true tick mode, delta here is inferred from lower-timeframe bar behaviour rather than measured from bid/ask. It’s good enough to show you which side is leaning and where absorption happened. It is not a precise measurement, and it shouldn’t be treated as one.
Using it
Confirmation, not a trigger. A breakout with delta pushing the same way has real aggression behind it. The same breakout with delta flat or leaning the other way is being sold into, and that’s the one worth being careful with.
Watch for absorption at levels. Price arriving at a key level with a big delta push and a long wick — aggression showing up and being eaten — is often more telling than the price bar itself.
New price high, lower delta high. Price making a new high while accumulated delta doesn’t is the classic divergence: the move is continuing but the money paying for it is thinning out.
Pair it with structure. Delta tells you about conviction, not direction. Trend Spine and the Futures Strategy supply the structure this reads against — a break of structure with delta agreeing is a very different trade from one without.
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Anchor period | When accumulation resets. Daily by default |
| Data aggregation | Time-based, or true tick data on an expert plan |
| Use custom timeframe | Override the automatic lower-timeframe choice |
| Timeframe | Which lower timeframe to drill into when overriding |
| Divergence Color | The highlight applied when delta disagrees with price |
FAQ
What does the highlight colour mean?
The delta candle closed in the opposite direction to the price candle — price up on net selling, or price down on net buying.
Why candles instead of a line?
A line only shows you where delta finished. Candles show you the fight inside the bar — the wicks are where aggression came in and got absorbed, which is usually the useful part.
It says there's no volume data for this symbol.
The data provider doesn’t publish volume for it. Without volume there’s nothing to split into buying and selling, so the indicator can’t compute anything.
I get an error about tick depth.
You’re in tick mode and the available tick history doesn’t reach back to the start of your anchor period. Either shorten the anchor period or switch the aggregation back to time-based.
Why does my history stop so early?
The finer the lower timeframe, the fewer bars TradingView will provide. Switch to a coarser custom timeframe if you need to study more history and can accept a rougher estimate.
Is this real order flow?
Only in tick mode, and even then it’s inferred rather than read from a bid/ask feed. Treat it as a good estimate of which side is leaning, not as a measurement.
Which timeframe should I run it on?
Anything intraday. With the default daily anchor it’s showing you today’s accumulation, so 1 to 60 minutes is where it’s most useful.
Where this fits
Every indicator in the engine is documented to the same standard.