Most charts answer one question: where did the price go? A candle shows the open, high, low and close. It does not show who pushed the price there, or how hard. Order flow fills that gap.
Two kinds of orders
Every trade needs two sides. A limit order waits in the order book at a chosen price: it is passive. A market order trades straight away at the best available price: it is aggressive. Price only moves when aggressive orders use up every waiting order at a level.
- A buyer in a hurry pays the ask, so the trade counts as buying pressure.
- A seller in a hurry hits the bid, so the trade counts as selling pressure.
The footprint chart
A footprint chart opens up each candle. At every price inside it you see two numbers: how much was sold at the bid and how much was bought at the ask. A red candle can hide strong buying near its low, and a green candle can hide sellers absorbing every push at the top.
Delta: who pushed harder
Delta is the volume bought at the ask minus the volume sold at the bid. If 6,200 contracts were bought at the ask and 11,450 were sold at the bid, delta is −5,250: sellers were more aggressive in that candle. Add up every candle's delta through the day and you get cumulative delta.
Location comes first
The same delta means different things in different places. A volume profile shows where the market traded the most (the point of control) and where 70% of the day's volume sat (the value area). Strong buying into a thin area often travels; the same buying into heavy waiting supply often gets absorbed.
A simple order of thinking
- Location: mark the key levels before the open.
- Liquidity: where are orders and stop-losses waiting?
- Aggression: is the footprint showing unusual pushing for today?
- Response: did price move, or did the push get absorbed?
- Execution: entry, stop and targets written down before you act.
Order flow does not predict the future. It shows what is happening now, in more detail than a candle can. Like every method, at best it tilts the odds, and it needs practice on a simulator before real money.
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