What is a footprint chart?

A normal candlestick compresses a whole period into four prices: open, high, low and close. Two candles with identical shapes can hide very different trading. In one, buyers may have pushed steadily higher; in the other, heavy selling may have been soaked up at the lows before price turned.

A footprint chart keeps the time and price axes of the candle but fills the body with numbers. For each price level the bar traded through, it shows how much volume changed hands there. The most common layout, often called bid by ask, prints two numbers per level:

• On the left, volume at the bid: trades where a seller was willing to hit the best bid, so the seller was the aggressor.
• On the right, volume at the ask: trades where a buyer paid the best offer, so the buyer was the aggressor.

Other layouts show total volume per level, or delta per level (ask volume minus bid volume). Many footprints also highlight the price with the most volume in the bar, the bar's own point of control, and print the bar's total delta underneath.

Every trade has a buyer and a seller, so total buying always equals total selling. What a footprint measures is aggression: which side crossed the spread to get filled. A market order to buy that fills at the ask is counted as buying; a market order to sell that fills at the bid is counted as selling.

To build a true footprint you need every trade, its price, its size and which side initiated it. That tick-level data is available from centralised exchanges such as the futures markets. It is harder in markets without a single exchange, such as spot forex, where no one sees every trade, and in crypto, where volume is split across many venues. That is worth remembering whenever you look at a footprint: it is only as good as the data under it.

Imbalances. An imbalance is where one side heavily outweighs the other. Most platforms compare diagonally: ask volume at one price against bid volume one level below, because that is how the book is actually crossed. The threshold is a setting the trader chooses, often a ratio of around three to one. A buying imbalance says aggressive buyers dominated that price.

Stacked imbalances. Several imbalances on consecutive prices in the same direction suggest one side pushed through a zone with conviction. Traders often treat the zone as potential support or resistance if price returns to it.

Absorption. Heavy aggressive selling at the lows that fails to push price lower suggests passive buyers are absorbing it with limit orders. The same logic applies at highs. Absorption is a sign that the aggressive side may be running out of road.

Unfinished auctions and exhaustion. A bar's extreme normally trades thinly, because price probed there and found no interest. When the high or low shows meaningful volume on both sides instead, some traders read the auction as unfinished and expect price to revisit it. Very thin volume at an extreme after a long move can point to exhaustion.

Illustrative scenario, not a trading rule. Say an index future has sold off into the previous day's low, a level many traders are watching. On a candlestick chart you see a long lower wick and a close back above the level. The footprint adds detail the candle cannot:

• At the lowest few prices of the bar, volume at the bid is heavy, far heavier than at the ask. Aggressive sellers were hitting bids into the level.
• Despite that, price did not trade much lower. The selling was being absorbed by passive buyers.
• Higher in the same bar, buying imbalances appear on two or three consecutive prices as price lifts off the low.
• The bar's delta is negative, but the close is near the high: effort from the sellers, result for the buyers.

A trader reading this might treat the absorption zone as the place their idea is wrong, placing a stop just beyond it, and look for the next bars to hold above the stacked imbalances. If the following bars trade back through the zone with fresh selling imbalances, the read has failed, and the stop does its job. The footprint did not predict anything; it gave a clearer reason to act, and a clearer place to be wrong.

• Context matters more than any single number. An imbalance in the middle of nowhere means little. The same imbalance at a prior day's high or at the value area edge means much more.
• Passive orders are invisible. A footprint shows trades that happened, not the resting orders that were waiting. For those, traders look at the depth of market or a liquidity heatmap.
• Aggression is not direction. Heavy buying can mark the top of a move when late buyers chase and get absorbed.
• Timeframe changes the story. Footprints are most useful on short bars. On a daily bar the detail blurs.

Most traders pair the footprint with cumulative delta to see whether aggression across bars agrees with price.

Mizora Pro has a footprint view in its order flow workspace, alongside delta, imbalances, a liquidity heatmap, a DOM ladder, time and sales, and signals for stacked imbalances, absorption and large prints.

Be clear about what it is: the workspace is in Beta and it is modelled from live prices, not exchange depth or tick data. It gives a structured read of pressure around price, and the terminal labels it as modelled on screen. It is not a feed of real exchange trades, so use it as a guide alongside levels on the chart, not as a record of what the exchange printed.

You can practise reading it on a free $50K practice account, and step back through past sessions in bar replay. Mizora Pro accounts trade simulated capital.