Delta is buying minus selling. Buying is the volume of trades where the buyer crossed the spread, and selling the volume where the seller did. A positive delta means aggressive buyers traded more; a negative delta means aggressive sellers did. OpenMarket draws it three ways, each in its own pane under the chart: Volume Delta for each bar, CVD as a running total, and CVD Flow Dominance for a coin's spot flow against its perpetual futures flow.
Add them to your chart
- Open Indicators in the top bar, or press
/. - Search for Volume Delta, CVD or CVD Flow Dominance and click it once. It opens in a new pane under the chart.
The settings open from the gear on the indicator's legend row. There is no indicator named "total delta": for the delta of one bar use Volume Delta, and for the total over time use CVD. The footprint can also show delta and cumulative delta under every candle (Meet the footprint).
Volume Delta
Volume Delta draws one bar per candle: that candle's buying minus selling. Bars above the zero line show more buying, bars below more selling, in the buy and sell colors (your theme's candle colors by default).
Its settings pick the market it reads, the chart's own by default, and the Unit: US dollars by default, or coins. CME futures count contracts.
CVD
CVD (cumulative volume delta) adds each bar's delta to a running total, so the line shows whether buyers or sellers have had the upper hand over time. Traders often compare it with price: price making a new high while CVD does not is commonly read as buying fading behind the move.
- Plot type: Momentum, the default, shades the gap between the line and its 26-bar average: the up color while above it, the down color below. Line draws one plain line per market. Candles draw one candle per bar for all markets together.
- Predefined groups: which markets the CVD reads. Custom, the default, starts with this chart's market, and the icons below it open the market picker. Spot and Perps take this coin's markets on every exchange.
- Unit: US dollars by default, or coins. CME futures count contracts.
- Anchor period: Continuous, the default, keeps one running total. Pick a period to start the total again from zero at the start of each one. Periods follow the UTC clock, or the trading day's open on CME futures.
- Only last N bars (0 for all): draws the CVD over the newest bars only, starting from zero at the first of them.
- Session hours (CME futures): Follow chart, the default, uses the chart's own session; RTH keeps only the day session; ETH (all hours) keeps every hour.
For one line that adds several exchanges together, add Agg. Cumulative Volume Delta instead.
CVD Flow Dominance
CVD Flow Dominance compares who leads a coin: its spot markets or its perpetual futures. For each bar it adds up buying minus selling on each side, over the exchanges you pick, and turns each side into a z-score: how unusual that bar's flow is against the flow before it. The bar is the two scores added together, colored by who leads:
- Consensus buying: spot and perps both buying.
- Consensus selling: spot and perps both selling.
- Spot-led: spot buying while perps sell.
- Perp-led: perps buying while spot sells.
Settings:
- Spot Exchanges: the spot markets summed into the spot side: Binance, Coinbase, Bybit, OKX and Bitstamp, all on by default.
- Perp Exchanges: the perpetual futures summed into the perp side: Binance Futs and Bybit Futs, both on by default.
- Unit: US dollars by default, or coins.
- Breakdown Mode: off, the default, draws the one bar above. On draws the spot and perp bars apart.
CVD Flow Dominance works on crypto only: it needs a coin with spot and perpetual markets.
Which markets they cover
Volume Delta and CVD work on crypto and on CME futures, and CVD also at one-second intervals on CME futures. CVD Flow Dominance works on crypto only.