Cumulative Delta (CVD) as a Custom ATAS Indicator: It All Hangs on the Reset

Cumulative delta, often shortened to CVD, tracks the running sum of aggressive buying and aggressive selling - volume executed into the ask minus volume executed into the bid. Not to be confused with candle-level delta divergence, which we've written about separately: that one is about the delta of an individual candle, this one about a continuous line running across many candles.

What CVD measures

Every executed order has an aggressive side: whoever wants immediate execution takes the other side's price. CVD adds that aggression up continuously. When the line rises, aggressive buying dominates; when it falls, aggressive selling dominates. The value itself matters less than how it moves relative to price.

The central design question: when does it reset?

This is where it's decided what the indicator looks like and what it actually says. CVD can run continuously or start over at zero at a fixed point - and both produce completely different lines on the same data.

• Reset per trading day or session: the sum reflects only the current session's pressure, with no carryover from previous days. That makes absolute values comparable day to day - the obvious choice for intraday work
• Continuous with no reset: the line carries the entire history with it. More useful when broader shifts across several days are what matters
• And the follow-up question that's almost always overlooked: what exactly counts as a session? Regular trading hours only, or after-hours too? That definition moves the zero point and with it the entire line

CVD divergence

The most commonly used derivation: price marks a new high or low, but the CVD line doesn't follow. That's read as a move not backed by aggressive capital. Whether it becomes a signal depends on how tightly the criteria are drawn - across how many candles the comparison runs, how pronounced the deviation has to be, and whether only extremes count or local swings too.

What a custom implementation can define

• A freely configurable reset point instead of a hard-coded one - including your own session definition rather than the platform default
• Optional reference lines, such as the CVD value at the session open or the current session's extremes
• Divergence detection to your own definition, with a minimum deviation to filter noise during quiet phases
• Combining with context, for example only divergences at a volume profile level or within certain trading hours
• A Telegram alert on a detected divergence instead of continuous monitoring

CVD is quick to explain as a concept and still decision-heavy to build. Anyone having their own variant made should above all choose the reset point deliberately - it determines what the line is answering to in the first place.