Volume

Volume paints the per-bar traded amount as vertical bars in a strip docked at the bottom of the chart. A moving-average line rides over the bars so it's obvious at a glance which bars are above or below the recent norm. Heavy bars are auto-tinted brighter, and the indicator can flag volume climax — a heavy bar that also covers a wide range and closes near one extreme — with a small CLX marker on the main chart so you can spot likely exhaustion candles without reading the bars manually.

Settings reference

The hint under the settings is the one-line definition the dialog itself reminds you of: CLX = volume climax — a heavy bar that also covers a wide range.

What it draws

Volume has two view-style choices and one optional overlay; the rest of the strip is the same in every mode.

Bar colour — Classic mode

The default. Each bar is coloured by its candle direction — green for bars that closed up, red for bars that closed down — using the same bull / bear hue family as the candles themselves. On top of that, the strip auto-emphasises heavy bars:

• Normal bar — base bull / bear tint.
• Heavy bar — bar is meaningfully larger than the recent volume average; the tint brightens.
• Extreme bar — the brightest tint, plus a thin outline glow around the bar so you spot it without reading the height.

The MA line gives you the reference; the brighter tints highlight the bars that pulled away from it.

Bar colour — Pressure mode

Switch to Pressure when you want to read who won each bar rather than which way it closed. Each bar is tinted by where the close sat inside the bar's high-low range for that candle:

• Close near the top of the range — bar tints green. Buyers ate the offer and held the bar's high.
• Close near the bottom of the range — bar tints red. Sellers hit the bid and held the bar's low.
• Close near the middle — bar greys out. Neither side won; rejection or balance.

Heights stay the same as Classic — Pressure mode only changes the colour mapping. Use it on chop / sideways ranges where the green-up / red-down candle colours don't tell you much; the pressure tint shows which side actually paid up each bar.

Moving-average line

A line drawn through the tip of each bar at the moving-average value. The default of 20 bars works for most timeframes; raise it on noisy lower timeframes or compress it on weekly charts. Bars above the line = heavier than typical; bars below = lighter.

Climax markers — the CLX flag

When Show climax signals is on, the indicator scans for exhaustion candles — bars that simultaneously trade much higher volume than recent average, cover a much wider range than recent average, AND close near one extreme of their own range. Two flavours:

The detector deliberately keeps a cooldown between flags and waits for a local volume peak, so you don't get a wall of CLX markers on a single trend leg — each marker means the bar was the loudest of its immediate neighbourhood. A CLX is a candidate exhaustion bar, not a trade signal — pair it with a price-action confirm (a rejection wick, lower-high / higher-low next bar, a divergence on CVD) before acting.

How to read it

• Volume rising with price — trend has commitment behind it. Pullbacks against this trend should also trade on lower volume than the moves with it.
• Volume tapering into a high — buyers thinning at the top; the next leg up gets harder to fund. Distribution candidate.
• Heavy / extreme bars stacked at a level — a fight is happening at that price. Whichever side eventually wins the level usually wins the next leg.
• Pressure-mode green bar on a red candle (or vice versa) — the candle closed red, but Pressure-mode coloured it green because the close was actually near the high. The wick took price down, buyers reclaimed it by the close. Often more meaningful than the candle colour itself on choppy timeframes.
• CLX at a swing low or high — capitulation / blow-off candidate. Once flagged, watch the next 2–5 bars: if price fails to make a new low (or high), the climax bar is doing its job.
• Light bars on a trend day — drift; no real interest, prone to mean-revert.

Common pitfalls

• Comparing absolute volume across symbols — a heavy bar on BTC is not comparable to a heavy bar on a low-cap alt. Always read volume relative to its own moving-average line, not against another chart.
• Reading CLX as a reversal trigger — it isn't. CLX flags a candidate exhaustion bar; the reversal is confirmed by the next candles failing to extend. Treat CLX as a setup, not an entry.
• Climax false positives in news events — scheduled news (CPI, FOMC, broker outage) prints heavy + wide-range candles that have nothing to do with exhaustion. Turn Show climax signals off across known news windows or expect spurious flags.
• Conflating bar height with conviction — a heavy bar that closed in the middle of its range (Pressure-mode grey) is two-sided heavy volume, not one-sided conviction. Pressure mode separates these; Classic mode hides the difference.
• Reading Pressure mode on doji-heavy timeframes — when most bars print small ranges, the close-position fraction gets noisy and the tint flickers. Pressure mode shines on bars with real range; on tight ranges, fall back to Classic.

What's next

• CVD — volume split by who paid the spread; the time-series version of the buy / sell breakdown.
• CVD Profile — the same buy / sell split sliced by price level instead of time.
• VRVP — total volume by price level (no buy / sell split).
• Large Trades — the per-trade view of what makes up each volume bar.
• VPIN — a probability-of-informed-flow read derived from the same volume stream.