Cumulative Volume Delta: which side actually lifted the market
How CVD separates aggressive buying from aggressive selling using taker data, and why it is a genuinely different measure from every bar-based volume indicator.
Cumulative Volume Delta is free on Basis — the button opens a live crypto chart with it already applied. No account, no trial and no limit on how many indicators you add.
Open the chartWhat it measures
Cumulative Volume Delta separates each trade by which side was aggressive — whether a buyer lifted an offer or a seller hit a bid — and keeps a running total of the difference.
That is a fundamentally better measurement than any bar-based volume indicator, because it does not have to infer intent from where a bar closed. The aggressor side is a fact recorded by the exchange.
It answers the question OBV and A/D approximate: who was actually pushing.
The distinction between aggressive and passive matters more than it sounds. Every trade has a buyer and a seller, so volume alone cannot say which side wanted it more — only which side crossed the spread to get filled, which is what the taker flag records.
How it is calculated
These are the steps Basis performs, verified against the published definition.
- 1
For each bar, take the taker buy volume reported by the venue.
- 2
Subtract it from total volume to get taker sell volume.
- 3
The bar’s delta is buy volume minus sell volume.
- 4
Accumulate the deltas into a running total.
How to read it
- CVD rising while price stalls means buyers are lifting offers into supply that is absorbing them — often a sign of distribution rather than strength.
- Price rising while CVD falls means the advance is happening on passive buying, not aggression.
- Divergences here are much stronger evidence than OBV divergences, because the input is measured rather than inferred.
- The running total has no meaningful level, only slope — it starts wherever the loaded history starts, exactly as OBV does.
Where it misleads
CVD depends entirely on the venue reporting taker side data, and not every market does. Where it is unavailable the indicator has nothing to compute and will be empty rather than wrong — which is the correct behaviour, but means an absent CVD is a data limitation and not a market condition. It is also venue-specific: aggression on one exchange is not the whole market.
Plot Cumulative Volume Delta on a live chart
Basis is free. Every indicator, every chart type, order flow, derivatives, screening and backtesting — no paid tier and no account needed to open a chart.
Open a chart with CVDRelated indicators
Updated 2026-08-22 · Educational reference, not financial advice.