Footprint
Bid × ask, delta and volume per price inside every bar, with imbalances, POCs and history on demand.
A footprint opens each bar up and shows what traded at every price inside it: how much hit the bid (sellers) and how much lifted the ask (buyers). Flowscope draws footprints over the whole loaded history, not just the live session.
Open a footprint
- Pick Footprint in the chart type menu, or
- add a footprint pane from Add pane → Footprint, or
- start from the Orderflow desk preset, which opens a 15-minute footprint of BTC on all venues.
A new footprint chart comes with naked POCs, a visible-range volume profile, VWAP, CVD and Bar Stats. The default bar width is 84 px so the cells have room for numbers.
Display and settings
Hover Footprint Standard in the chart’s upper-left legend to show its eye, settings and remove controls. The eye hides the footprint; remove returns the chart to candles. Footprint settings… is also available from the chart type menu.
Cluster draws equal-width cells. Profile draws horizontal bars proportional to traded size. Both keep sell numbers on the left, buy numbers on the right, and a narrow candle between them. Mode selects Standard (sell/buy), Delta or Volume. Numbers appear when the row is tall and wide enough to read.
The settings apply live and are saved with the chart. Save Settings and Close keep the live changes. Templates saves named configurations, including the row mode and colours; right-click a saved template to delete it.
| Section | Controls |
|---|---|
| Price Marker | Independent axis label, inline label, price line, countdown and line width |
| Display | Cluster/Profile; Standard/Delta/Volume; text content and visibility; rounding; gradient; global, coin or USD units; minimum volume; exclude filtered rows from grading; hide filtered rows |
| Header | Total, sell, buy and delta beneath each bar, with optional backing |
| Row / Scaling | Auto/Global/Custom row size, ATR length, and shading relative to a candle, visible range, custom lookback, day, week or loaded chart |
| Profile | Additional volume or delta profile beside each bar, with independent colours |
| POC | Colour, solid/dashed/dotted line, naked extension, outline and thickness |
| Value Area | Dotted upper/lower boundaries and arrows, colour and volume percentage |
| Imbalance | Buy/sell colours, skip zero comparisons, outlines and line style, coloured text, ratio, minimum volume, minimum contiguous stack and naked extension |
| Summary | Combined column, own display/mode or follow footprint, visible range or last N loaded bars, offset |
| Colors | Up/down, volume and POC colours |
| Candles | Visibility, up/down colours, centered or left position, hollow up candles |
| Aggregate | Markets whose trades contribute to the footprint |
New footprints use rounded numbers, candle-relative grading, a 70% value area and centered Standard candles. The header, extra profile, POC, summary and imbalance marks start off. The imbalance ratio starts at 10 and zero comparisons are skipped.
Imbalances
Standard mode compares diagonally: buys at one row against sells one row below, and sells against buys one row above. The ratio is a multiplier, so 10 means ten times the opposite volume. Stacked imbalances requires consecutive qualifying price rows; a missing price row breaks the stack. Naked extension stops when a later candle trades through the marked price, including a gap across it.
Scaling, anchored summaries and naked extensions use loaded footprint history. Missing historical footprint data is not invented.
Naked POCs
The Naked POCs study draws a dotted line from each bar’s point of control to the right, for as long as price has not traded through it since. Untested POCs are levels many traders watch.
Rows
Footprints are stored per minute in rows of about 0.005 % of the price. How many of those a cell holds is the chart’s Footprint rows setting, in the chart type menu (under Footprint) and in Footprint Settings → Row / Scaling:
| Footprint rows | Cells |
|---|---|
| Auto (default) | Merged so cells stay at least 14 px tall at the zoom you are using |
| 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 or 1000 ticks, or any number | That many ticks of the market’s price per cell, at any zoom: larger rows read without zooming in |
| Global | The market’s own value, Global ticks per row in the same section (0: automatic), shared with every profile set to Global |
A cell always holds whole stored rows, so a value finer than the stored row rounds up to one. Stacked imbalances and cluster search read the same cells. Sub-minute, tick, volume and notional bars are built from the raw tape and use the same cells.
With the row size on Auto, ATR length in the footprint settings makes rows from volatility instead of the zoom: each row is about a tenth of the average true range of that many bars, rounded up to a round number of ticks, so cells keep their price span when you zoom. 0 (default) keeps rows about 14 px tall at any zoom.
Where footprint history comes from
Footprint history is what the data hub recorded. Charts ask for the footprints of the range you are looking at, and the market loads them whole from the hub’s recorder, one request per day, newest day first. The browser app reaches the hub through the website at /hub; the desktop through FLOWSCOPE_HUB_URL. See History and data.
Footprints are never rebuilt from a venue’s trade history, and bars are never taken from a venue’s candles: before the hub’s recording begins, a chart has no bars.
make dev runs a data hub beside the app that records BTC and ETH on every venue by default. On a server, the hub records around the clock, so every chart opens with its footprints whole.
Minute states
Every minute, and so every bar, carries a state:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Full | Every print is known |
| Partial | Some prints: the session started mid-minute, a connection dropped, or a venue of an aggregate is missing |
| Loading | Being fetched |
| Unavailable | Nobody recorded it |
| None | Nothing known and nothing asked for |
Bars without footprint data show the hub’s candles, built from the same recording. While footprints of the visible range are still loading, the chart says how many bars are done.
On aggregated markets
The footprint of an aggregated market is the sum of the venues’ minutes. History is Partial where one of its venues was not recorded.
Hyperliquid positioning footprints
Three more footprint studies draw what Hyperliquid trades did to positions, per bar and price: Footprint Hyperliquid OI, NL (net longs) and NS (net shorts). See Liquidations.