What Is Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD)?

Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD) is a running total of aggressive buy volume minus aggressive sell volume. 'Aggressive' means orders that cross the spread to execute immediately — market buys lift the offer, market sells hit the bid. CVD adds up that net pressure over time, giving you a single line that shows who is in control: buyers or sellers.

What CVD actually tells you

Price tells you where the market traded; CVD tells you the effort behind the move. When the two agree — price rising on rising CVD — the trend is healthy. The interesting signals appear when they disagree.

Divergence and absorption

• Bearish divergence: price makes a higher high but CVD makes a lower high — buyers are pushing with less conviction, hinting at a reversal.
• Bullish divergence: price makes a lower low but CVD makes a higher low — sellers are exhausting.
• Absorption: heavy aggressive volume (CVD moving hard) with little price movement means a large passive player is soaking up the orders — often near a key level before a turn.

Why CVD pairs well with a liquidation heatmap

A liquidation heatmap tells you where the resting orders are; CVD tells you how aggressively the market is being pushed toward them. Combined, you get both the destination and the momentum: a price sweeping into a dense liquidation cluster while CVD diverges is a far stronger reversal setup than either signal alone.

Ampeld models CVD from OHLCV alongside its liquidation clusters and gravity lines, so you can read effort and resting liquidity on the same chart. Open the web terminal to see CVD on live forex, crypto, and equity markets.