Cumulative volume delta (CVD)

What CVD is

Every trade has a buyer and a seller. What differs is who crossed the spread: one side was resting in the book, the other took it, and the exchange marks that second side, the aggressor, on every print. A bar’s delta is the aggressive buying in it minus the aggressive selling. CVD keeps adding: each bar’s delta on top of the total so far.

So where delta answers “who pushed harder in this bar?”, CVD answers “who has been pushing, and is it still going their way?”. Three bars of +120, −40 and +60 leave CVD 140 higher than where it started. Traders call it cumulative delta, CD or the CVD line. Its level means little on its own, because it depends on where the count began. Its direction and shape are the reading, and above all how they compare with price.

How Klustra builds it

Your browser connects to the exchange’s public trade stream and receives every print with its size and aggressor side. A Web Worker adds each print to its bar, keeping the running delta after every print, and the CVD is arithmetic over those same bars: the footprint, the delta panel and the CVD can never disagree about a bar, because there is only one copy of it.

• Open: where CVD stood when the bar opened, the previous bar’s close.
• Close: the open plus the bar’s delta.
• High and low: the open plus the highest and lowest the running delta reached inside the bar. A bar that ran to +300 and closed at +40 has a long upper wick, and that wick is the information a line would throw away.

We checked the indicator before writing this page, on 1 October 2026. Auditing the delta panel the same day, every bar’s delta and volume compared equal to Binance’s own trade record, and each bar’s highest and lowest running delta equal to that record replayed print by print; the CVD adds those numbers up and draws them. The audit did find things to fix in the pane, all fixed before this page was written: on exchanges that publish no buy/sell split it had drawn a flat zero across their history, its histogram measured nothing, and on Bybit and Hyperliquid minutes the exchange could not supply had been drawn as minutes in which nothing traded.

Where each number comes from

The recent stretch of the chart is built from trades: six hours of order flow on Free, more with the Pro archive. Further back, bars are the exchange’s own candles, which carry less. The pane draws only what each kind of bar actually records.

Where the count starts

By default the pane counts from the first bar the chart loaded, so its numbers move when you reload, change timeframe or scroll into older history. Switch on Reset each UTC day and it restarts at zero at every 00:00 UTC instead, on any timeframe shorter than a day: the pane then reads as the day’s CVD, and at the live edge it gives the same number as the CVD in the status bar at the bottom of the chart. Wherever a stretch of bars was never measured, the next measured run starts from zero as well, because carrying the level across would claim the gap netted nothing.

Anatomy of the pane

One CVD candle per price candle, in the same column. Open each mark on the picture below.

Candles, line or histogram

Three ways to draw the same numbers. The candles are the default because they keep what happened inside each bar.

Four things to look for

CVD is most useful as a comparison with price. Each of these is a question to ask at a level you already care about, not a trade on its own.

What the dots mean

A red dot above a CVD candle marks a bar whose price went higher than the highest high of the 14 bars before it, while its CVD closed below the highest close CVD made over those bars. A green dot below marks the mirror image: a new low in price on a CVD that stayed above its low. The 14 is the Divergence lookback setting; 0 switches the dots off.

• They are frequent on short timeframes. On the BTCUSDT perpetual on 1 October 2026 the default lookback marked 43 one-minute bars in six hours and twenty minutes, about one every nine minutes, and 7 five-minute bars in six and a half hours. On a one-minute chart, raise the lookback.
• The newest bar’s dot can come and go. It is judged on the bar still trading, so a dot that appears mid-bar can vanish by the close. Every dot to its left is final.
• The daily reset never makes one. Dots compare the unbroken running total, so restarting at midnight cannot pass for a divergence.
• They need measured bars. A comparison that would reach a bar with no buy/sell split is not made.

Using it in your trading

CVD earns its place at the edges: a range high, a level price has turned at before, yesterday’s low. In the middle of a range, price and CVD wander together and disagree often, and it means little.

1. Choose the level first

   Mark where a reaction would matter on candles or a higher timeframe, before you look at CVD.

2. Watch how CVD arrives

   Is price reaching the level on rising CVD, with aggression behind it, or drifting there while CVD flattens?

3. Treat a dot as a prompt

   A divergence at your level is a reason to look closer, not to act. Away from a level, ignore it.

4. Look inside the bar

   The footprint shows where at the high the buying printed, and the delta panel whether it held to the close.

5. Let price confirm

   The next bars failing to extend is the confirmation; a stop goes beyond the extreme the divergence was made at.

Set it up in Klustra

1. Open the chart

   Go to the free chart and choose an exchange and instrument. No account is needed.

2. Add the pane

   Open Indicators in the toolbar and pick CVD under Order flow. It docks under the price, below the delta panel if that is on.

3. Size and scale it

   Drag the pane’s top edge to make it taller. Drag inside the pane to move its scale, drag the scale or use the wheel to stretch it, and double-click to hand it back to the automatic fit.

4. Choose the display

   The gear beside CVD in the chart’s legend opens its settings: candles, line or histogram, the daily reset and the divergence lookback. The eye hides the pane without removing it.

Every setting

Common mistakes and limits

• Reading the number. CVD’s level depends on where the count began. Compare its direction with price’s, or switch on the daily reset if you want a number that means the day.
• Trading every dot. A dot is a fact about the last few bars. At the default lookback on a one-minute chart there is one every few minutes.
• Reading it as buyers against sellers. Every trade has both. CVD counts the aggressive side, and an aggressive side can be absorbed and lose.
• Comparing exchanges. Klustra’s CVD is one exchange and one market at a time. Spot and perpetual are separate tapes, and so is each venue.
• Expecting wicks everywhere. Only bars built from trades have them. Exchange candles from before the order-flow window are bodies only, and on most exchanges they are not drawn at all.

Free and Pro

The CVD is part of the free chart, with the delta panel and the footprint. Pro reaches further back with order-flow history and adds the live book and tape tools.

Questions