Crypto glossary
Order flow and footprint charts
Order flow analysis studies executed trades by aggressor side, often with footprint charts, to read short-term buying and selling pressure inside each candle.
Order flow traders look beneath the candle. A footprint chart splits each candle into price levels and shows how much volume traded at each level as market buys and as market sells. From that they read imbalances, where one side heavily outweighs the other, absorption, where large passive orders soak up aggressive trades without the price moving, and exhaustion at the end of a move.
Related tools include the time and sales tape, cumulative volume delta, heatmaps of resting orders and large-trade alerts. In crypto, order flow is used mostly by active traders of bitcoin and ether futures and perpetuals, where data is plentiful and markets are deep enough for these signals to mean something.
Order flow data is noisy and fragmented across exchanges, so a footprint from one venue shows only part of the picture. Interpreting it requires practice, and many signals are visible only in hindsight. Specialised platforms and data feeds also add cost.
Example
On a footprint chart, BTC drops to a support level where sellers hit the bid heavily, but price stops falling as a large passive buyer absorbs every sell. A trader reads the absorption and enters long.