Warmup & Alignment

Two operational caveats affect how closely IPDA signals match a TradingView chart of the same instrument.

Warmup

The Wilder-smoothed ATR needs history to converge to TradingView values. Request a generous DATA_LOOKBACK:

roughly 150 × TARGET_TF_MINUTES   (as 1M candles)

With the default TARGET_TF_MINUTES=5, that is about 750 1-minute candles. The forex example ships DATA_LOOKBACK=600 — raise it if early signals look thin vs the chart.

Signals are suppressed until the series is warmed.

Bucket alignment

Buckets align to UTC midnight so 5-minute bars fall on :00 / :05 / :10 like a chart.

If your feed’s session boundary differs, set BUCKET_OFFSET_MINUTES and verify against a known TradingView chart.

UTC midnight
│
├─ :00  bucket 0
├─ :05  bucket 1
├─ :10  bucket 2
└─ … (TARGET_TF_MINUTES = 5)

Confirm the timeframe took effect by checking that a signal_fired record’s bucket_start lands on a :00 / :05 / :10 boundary (see Operator runbook).

Chart vs MT5 divergence

Signals are computed from mt5-trader’s candles, so they will not line up exactly with a TradingView chart of the same instrument — different feed, different OHLC, different indicator values. Expect divergence when eyeballing the two side by side.

PIP_SIZE calibration on TradingView is still valid (unit conversion), but price levels differ between feeds — another reason hard targets travel as distances. See Hard Targets.