Chaikin Money Flow (CMF)
Chaikin Money Flow measures buying and selling pressure by where each session closes within its range, weighted by volume and averaged over 20 bars — positive readings suggest accumulation, negative distribution.
CMF starts from a per-session judgment: a close near the high means buyers controlled the day, near the low means sellers did, scored on a scale from +1 to −1. Each score is weighted by the session's volume, and the 20-bar total is divided by total volume, giving a ratio that normally lives between roughly −0.3 and +0.3. It is Marc Chaikin's accumulation/distribution idea made comparable across stocks and across time — a normalised answer to who has been winning the closes, and with how much size.
Zero is the working line: persistently positive CMF means volume keeps arriving on days that finish strong, the accumulation profile, and readings above 0.1 to 0.2 mark it emphatic. On NSE dailies the natural companion is delivery percentage — CMF infers conviction from where closes land, delivery reports how much stock actually changed hands and stayed changed — and when the inferred and reported measures agree, the signal is worth more than either alone. Divergence is the other classic read: price pushing higher while CMF sinks means the advance is winning on shrinking pressure.
The known flaw is that CMF sees only the close's position, never the journey. A stock that gaps down 4% and claws back to close mid-range scores as neutral-to-positive pressure, though holders lost money all day — gaps are invisible to it entirely. A single enormous-volume session can also dominate the 20-bar window for a month. It is an inference engine, and its inputs miss things the tape saw.
Against OBV, the other flow accumulator here, the split is memory: OBV is a running total from the beginning of the data, so its level is meaningless and only its trend readable, while CMF is windowed and normalised, so its level means the same thing on every stock. OBV answers "is the tide coming in?"; CMF answers "how hard, lately?".
In Sift
Written as cmf(20). A working scan — stocks with emphatic positive money flow while price holds its 50-day average:
where cmf(20) > 0.15 and close > sma(50)1
of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 20 Aug 2026
Scans that use it
Prebuilt scans in the library whose query reads this value — each with a hit-rate replay over the last 250 sessions.
Common questions
What is a good CMF value?
Above zero means volume has favoured strong closes over the last 20 sessions; readings past +0.1 are conventionally read as clear accumulation and past +0.2 as emphatic, with the mirror holding below zero. Most stocks live between −0.3 and +0.3. As with any threshold, its actual hit rate on NSE history is testable on each scan page.
What is the difference between CMF and OBV?
OBV keeps a running total of volume signed by each day's direction — an unbounded line whose slope is the signal and whose level means nothing. CMF is windowed and normalised: it scores each close's position in its range, weights by volume, and averages over 20 bars, so its level is comparable across stocks. OBV shows the tide's direction; CMF measures its recent force.
Why does CMF disagree with price sometimes?
That disagreement is the point. CMF tracks where closes land within their ranges, volume-weighted — price can grind higher while CMF sinks if the up-days close weakly on thin volume, the classic distribution divergence. It can also mislead: gaps are invisible to it, so a gap-heavy chart can carry a CMF that flatters or slanders the real flows.