Footprint chart

A candle, opened up

Each column is one bar. Each row is one price level inside it. The number on the left is volume sold at the bid; the number on the right is volume bought at the ask.

Read a footprint the way you read a candle, top to bottom, and then look inside: where was the volume heaviest? Did the sellers or the buyers carry the bar? Where did the trading thin out?

Imbalances

An imbalance is a price where one side heavily outweighed the other. The standard way to compare is diagonal: buying at the ask on one row against selling at the bid on the row below, because a buyer lifting the offer meets the price just above a seller hitting the bid.

When buying is at least three times the selling it is compared with, the cell is a buy imbalance; the reverse is a sell imbalance. AXL Charts uses the diagonal rule with a ratio of three.

Stacked imbalances

One imbalance can be noise. Three or more in a row, on the same side, are a stacked imbalance: a band of prices where one side overwhelmed the other repeatedly.

Stacked buying imbalances often act as support when price comes back to them, because they mark where buyers were in a hurry. Stacked selling imbalances often act as resistance. AXL Charts can extend these bands to the right until price trades back through them.

The bar's own POC and value

Each footprint bar has its own point of control, the price with the most volume inside that bar, and its own value area.

A bar whose POC sits near its high, on a down move, shows the business was done at the top and price slid away on light volume. A bar whose POC sits at an extreme with heavy volume and no follow-through can be the first sign of absorption.

Footprints in AXL Charts

AXL Charts draws footprints for NIFTY and BANKNIFTY futures and NSE stocks from recorded ticks, live and on past days. You can show bid x ask, delta or total volume, choose the row size, read numbers in lots, and add a heatmap, the bar POC and value area, imbalances, large prints and zero-volume gaps.