Voden — Operator Briefing
Voden runs on a handful of rules that fire in a fixed order. None of it is magic, and none of it is guesswork — once you can see the sequence, every trade it takes (and every one it skips) makes sense.
01 — The clock
A candle is a fixed slice of time — five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour. It records where price opened, how high and low it went, and where it closed.
Voden looks at the market once per candle, at the moment the candle closes. That single fact explains most of what people find surprising about it. Between closes, price can do whatever it likes and nothing is evaluated, because there is no new candle to evaluate.
02 — The captain
An EMA is a rolling average of recent prices that weights recent candles more heavily than old ones. Voden runs two of them.
The short EMA (40 candles by default) reacts quickly. The long EMA (120 candles) is slow and steady. When the short one rises above the slow one, recent prices are outrunning the longer trend — that's a bullish cross. When it falls below, that's a bearish cross.
To stop Voden reacting to two lines brushing against each other, there's a deadband — a neutral zone around the long EMA. The short EMA has to clear the band properly to count as a cross at all.
03 — Confirmation
A cross on a single candle can be noise. Confirm candles is how many closes in a row must agree before Voden acts.
This is a counter, not a timer. Voden still checks every single candle — the counter just has to reach your number before anything fires. And the closes must be genuinely consecutive: one neutral candle inside the deadband resets it to zero.
The rule that catches people out
Once a confirmed cross fires, Voden records that direction and will not fire the same direction again until the trend has flipped the other way and back.
But the reversing signal only has to fire — it does not have to result in a sale. If that sell is then blocked (an advisor veto, the profit gate, or simply no position held), the recorded direction has already flipped. The coin is free to buy again, with nothing having been sold.
This is why you can end up holding several lots of the same coin without ever seeing a sell between them. Those lots merge into a single position with one weighted-average cost basis, and the profit target is measured against that blend.
04 — First gate
RSI scores recent momentum from 0 to 100. High means price has been climbing hard and may be stretched; low means it has been falling hard.
Voden uses it as a veto, not a trigger. It never starts a trade. It only blocks one that the EMA cross already wants to make.
Blocked when RSI is above 65 — the move has already happened and you would be buying the top of it.
Blocked when RSI is below 35 — the drop is already deep and you would be selling into the bottom.
RSI only blocks the side that would be arriving late — buying after a rally has already run, or selling after a drop has already happened. Buying into weakness and selling into strength are left alone, because those enter ahead of a move rather than behind it.
05 — Second gate
MACD measures the gap between two momentum lines. The wider that gap — the "histogram" — the stronger the push behind the move.
Voden doesn't judge that gap in dollars, because a dollar means something different for Bitcoin than for a coin worth a fraction of a cent. It converts it to basis points of the coin's own price, then requires at least 2.00 bps before allowing a buy. That figure is the default, not a fixed rule — it is adjustable, as is every threshold on this page.
This threshold is measured against your candle interval
MACD looks back roughly 26 candles. On 5-minute candles that is about two hours of price action. On 1-minute candles it is twenty-six minutes — and a coin simply moves less in twenty-six minutes than in two hours.
So the same 2.00 bps setting is comfortable at 5m and very demanding at 1m. Nothing in your settings changed; the amount of market the measurement covers did.
| Candle interval | MACD spans about | Against the 2.00 bps floor |
|---|---|---|
| 1m | 26 minutes | rarely clears — most entries vetoed |
| 5m | 2 hours | calibrated here |
| 15m | 6.5 hours | clears normally |
| 1h | 26 hours | clears easily |
06 — The sequence
Every check runs in order, and the first failure ends it for that candle. A quiet log usually means a signal died partway down this list — not that nothing was happening.
07 — Getting out
Entries are deliberately slow. Exits are not — two of the three ignore confirmation entirely and act on the first candle close that qualifies.
| Exit | Fires when | Needs confirmation? | Order type |
|---|---|---|---|
| EMA cross sell | The trend flips bearish | yes — same counter as a buy | Maker (rests on the book) |
| Quartermaster | Profit target reached, or a position has been held too long without getting anywhere | no — first qualifying close | Market (immediate) |
| Hard stop-loss | Loss passes your stop distance | no — first qualifying close | Market (immediate) |
What "first qualifying close" really means
The stop-loss is checked at candle close, not continuously. A 3% stop does not exit you at exactly −3% — it exits at whatever price the first close below that floor happens to be. On long candle intervals that gap can be meaningful.
The same is true upward: a profit target of 3% is a floor, not a price. You get 3% or more, rarely exactly 3%.
08 — The one setting that changes everything
Indicators are counted in candles, not minutes. Change the interval and every one of them silently comes to mean something different.
| Interval | Warm-up covers | The "trend" it follows | Confirm = 3 takes | Stop-loss checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1m | 3.3 hours | 2 hours | 3 min | 1 min |
| 5m | 16.7 hours | 10 hours | 15 min | 5 min |
| 15m | 2.1 days | 30 hours | 45 min | 15 min |
| 1h | 8.3 days | 5 days | 3 hours | 1 hour |
| 4h | 33 days | 20 days | 12 hours | 4 hours |
Read the middle column. At one-minute candles Voden is trading a two-hour trend; at fifteen minutes it is trading a thirty-hour one. Same software, same settings — a completely different strategy.
Why very short intervals often trade less, not more
Round-trip fees are fixed per trade — roughly 1.2% at the standard Coinbase tier. A position has to clear that before it earns anything. Short intervals rarely offer moves that large, so the gates decline them.
A quiet run on a fast interval is usually the system refusing bad odds, not a fault.