Why a footprint at all
A candle tells you where price went. A footprint tells you what it cost to get there: how much market selling and market buying was executed at every single price inside that candle. Two bars with the same shape can be built from completely different order flow — one absorbed by passive buyers, the other driven by aggressive ones — and only the footprint separates them.
The six things worth reading
Every element above is standard across footprint platforms, and the vocabulary is the same one you will hear from any order-flow trader: bid × ask for the two numbers in a cell, imbalance for a lopsided diagonal, POC for the busiest price, value area for the 70% band, delta for buys minus sells. Nothing here is our own invention — we simply compute it from the public trade stream and show it for free.
What to do with it
The single most useful habit: compare delta with the result. A strongly positive delta bar that closes near its low means aggressive buyers were fed by someone bigger — that is absorption, and it often marks the end of a push. The mirror case works the same way for sellers. Stacked imbalances in one direction, on the other hand, say the initiative was real and not just noise. Both patterns are detected automatically on the terminal and explained further in the footprint playbook.
Related: CVD patterns · Market structure · Position sizing