When cumulative delta and price disagree, such as price making a new high while net aggressive buying fails to confirm it.
If price grinds higher while cumulative-delta flattens or falls, the advance is being driven by a lack of sellers rather than by aggressive buying, or aggressive buying is being absorbed by passive supply.
It is one of the more mechanically grounded divergence concepts because it compares two genuinely different measurements rather than price against a transformation of price.
It is still not a signal. Absorption can continue for a long time, and a delta divergence that persists is often just evidence of a large passive participant working an order, which resolves when they finish. Treat it as information about who is doing what, paired with a level and a stop.
Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.
Delta across the range of prices. Delta says how much a call's price moves for a one-point move in the stock. Far below the strike it is near 0 and the option barely reacts; at the strike it is about 0.50; far above it approaches 1 and tracks the stock.Divergence between price and RSI. RSI measures how one-sided recent price moves have been on a 0–100 scale. Here price sets a higher peak while RSI sets a lower one, so the second push carried less momentum than the first.
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