What is CVD (cumulative volume delta)?

Aggressive versus passive

Every trade has a buyer and a seller, so raw volume cannot tell you "who won". What can be separated is who was in a hurry.

A taker crosses the spread to get filled now. A maker sits in the book and waits. CVD counts taker volume with a sign: taker buys positive, taker sells negative, accumulated over time. The line is the running balance of urgency.

What the line shows

A rising CVD means aggressive buyers have been paying up. A falling one means aggressive sellers have been hitting bids. The slope matters more than the absolute value, which depends on where the count started.

On its own the line mostly confirms what price already showed. Its value is in the cases where the two disagree.

Divergence — the reason to watch it

Price making a new high while CVD does not is the classic case: the move up is happening without aggressive buying behind it. Someone is lifting price, but the volume balance says the urgency is not there.

The mirror case — price making a new low while CVD holds — says selling pressure is fading even though price is still dropping.

Divergence is a description of a disagreement, not a signal. It says "this move is not supported by flow", which is a reason to look closer, not a reason to act.

Where CVD is blind

CVD only sees the venue it is measured on. Money moving on another exchange, or in spot while you watch futures, is invisible to it.

It also cannot see intent. A large taker buy might be a trader taking a position, or a hedge against something that has nothing to do with a directional view.

And it needs the taker split to exist at all: when a data source does not report which side was aggressive, CVD cannot be computed — which is a genuinely missing number, not a zero.

Common questions

Is CVD the same as volume?

No. Volume is how much traded. CVD is the running difference between aggressive buying and aggressive selling — the same volume can produce a rising or falling CVD depending on which side was crossing the spread.

What does it mean when price rises but CVD falls?

That the move up is not being driven by aggressive buying. It is a reason to check what else is happening — thin book, passive bids being pulled — rather than a signal in itself.

Why is CVD sometimes unavailable?

Because the data source did not report the taker split for that period. Without knowing which side was aggressive there is nothing to compute, and showing zero would be inventing a balance we did not measure.