Price Volume Trend: OBV weighted by how much price actually moved
How PVT improves on On Balance Volume by scaling each bar volume by its percentage change, and when that difference matters.
Price Volume Trend 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
Price Volume Trend accumulates volume like On Balance Volume does, but multiplies each bar volume by that bar percentage change rather than adding all of it or none.
OBV treats a bar that rose a tenth of a percent exactly like one that rose eight percent. PVT does not, and that is the entire difference between them.
The result is a cumulative flow line that responds to the size of moves as well as their direction.
How it is calculated
These are the steps Basis performs, verified against the published definition.
- 1
Compute the percentage change from the previous close.
- 2
Multiply that fraction by the current bar volume.
- 3
Add the result to the previous PVT value.
How to read it
- The slope is the sustained direction of volume-weighted flow, and it is what the indicator is for.
- Divergence against price carries the same meaning as on OBV and is somewhat more reliable because small drifting bars no longer count in full.
- The absolute level is meaningless — it depends entirely on where the calculation began.
- A flat PVT during a price advance means the advance is happening on bars that barely moved, one at a time.
- Between PVT and OBV, prefer PVT when the instrument has a mix of quiet drifting bars and violent ones, because that is exactly the case where OBV overweights the drift. On a market where nearly every bar moves a similar amount the two lines are close to identical.
Where it misleads
Because it is a running cumulative sum with no reset, the level depends entirely on how much history was loaded, and two charts of the same instrument will show completely different values. That is true of OBV as well, but PVT is worse: the percentage weighting means a single extreme bar early in the loaded history can dominate the level permanently. Only the slope and the divergences are comparable between charts.
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Updated 2026-08-22 · Educational reference, not financial advice.