A footprint chart splits every candle into the individual prices traded inside it, and shows how much volume executed at the bid and at the ask at each of those prices. Instead of one bar telling you where price opened and closed, you see the transactions that produced it. ATAS calls them cluster charts.
This is the tool that changes how people see markets, and it is also the one that overwhelms them first. There are a lot of numbers on screen. Most of them do not matter.
What you are looking at
Take a normal candle. Inside it, price visited a range of levels. At each of those levels, some contracts traded because a buyer crossed the spread and hit the ask, and some traded because a seller hit the bid.
A footprint chart displays those two numbers, side by side, at every price:
- Left column, bid volume. Contracts sold aggressively into the bid.
- Right column, ask volume. Contracts bought aggressively at the ask.
- Delta. Ask volume minus bid volume, either per price or for the whole candle.
One point that trips people up constantly: every trade has a buyer and a seller. The footprint is not counting how many buyers versus sellers exist. It is counting which side was the aggressor, meaning which side was impatient enough to cross the spread and take the price on offer rather than waiting.
That distinction is the entire value of the tool. Passive participants sit and wait. Aggressive participants pay up. Knowing which one is dominating at a given price is information a candle cannot carry.
A single large ES footprint candle, zoomed in enough to read the numbers clearly, with callouts labelling the bid column, the ask column, the per-price delta and the candle total delta. This is the orientation image, so clarity matters more than the setup being interesting.
The four display types
Platforms offer several ways to render the same underlying data. They suit different questions.
| Type | What it shows | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Bid and ask | Both raw numbers at each price | Learning, and spotting imbalance ratios directly |
| Delta | The net figure only, colour coded | Fast reading once you know what you are looking for |
| Volume | Total traded at each price, no split | Finding where size traded inside the bar |
| Profile | A histogram of volume within the candle | Seeing the shape of participation at a glance |
Start on bid and ask. It is the slowest to read and the only one that teaches you what the others are summarising. Move to delta once the ratios are obvious to you without arithmetic.
Reading one, step by step
1. Look at the shape before the numbers
Where did the volume concentrate inside the candle? Top, bottom, middle? A candle with all its volume at the low and almost none at the high tells a different story from one with volume spread evenly, before you have read a single figure.
2. Find the extremes
What happened at the very top and very bottom of the bar? Heavy buying at the absolute high of a candle that then closed lower means those buyers are already offside. That is usually more useful than anything happening in the middle.
3. Check delta against the close
Positive delta with a candle that closed near its high is unremarkable. Buyers were aggressive and price went up. Positive delta with a candle that closed near its low is worth stopping on: buyers were aggressive and got nowhere, which means someone was selling into all of it.
Delta disagreeing with the candle is the most reliably interesting thing a footprint shows you.
4. Then look for the specific patterns
Only once the above is habit. The named patterns, absorption, exhaustion and stacked imbalances, are covered in detail in their own article, because they deserve more space than a section here.
Where footprints work and where they do not
They work on liquid, centrally cleared instruments. ES, NQ, CL, GC and the rest of the CME complex all produce clean footprint data because the exchange reports every transaction.
They do not work properly on thin contracts, where a handful of trades makes every number look dramatic, and they do not work on spot forex at all, for the reason covered in futures vs forex: nobody has the total volume, so the split you are reading is one broker's fragment presented as if it were the market.
A footprint built on incomplete data is worse than no footprint, because it looks authoritative.
Choosing a candle interval
Time based candles are a poor fit for footprint reading. A five minute bar at the open and a five minute bar at lunch contain wildly different amounts of information, and the footprint of the quiet one is mostly noise.
Volume bars or range bars work better, because each bar contains a comparable amount of activity regardless of when it printed. On ES I generally read footprints on volume based bars for that reason. It is not a rule, and plenty of good traders use time bars, but if your footprints look empty half the session this is usually why.
The mistakes new readers make
Reading every candle. Most bars are unremarkable. The skill is ignoring them. If you are finding something significant in every bar, you are pattern matching on noise.
Treating imbalance as a signal. An imbalanced print at a random price in the middle of a range means very little. The same imbalance at a value area edge or a prior high volume node means a great deal. Location first, footprint second, always.
Forgetting the passive side. Big ask volume means aggressive buyers. It also means somebody was willing to sell them all of it. Whether that seller was overwhelmed or comfortably absorbing is the actual question, and the number alone does not answer it. Price behaviour does.
Using it without context. A footprint chart with no volume profile and no view on the day type is a very high resolution picture of nothing in particular. Build the context first, using volume profile, then zoom in.
Frequently asked questions
What is a footprint chart?
A chart that shows the volume traded at the bid and the ask at every individual price inside each candle. Instead of a single bar summarising a period, you see the transactions that built it, which lets you tell whether buyers or sellers were the aggressive side at each level.
What is the difference between a footprint chart and a cluster chart?
Nothing. They are the same thing under different names. ATAS uses cluster chart, most other platforms and most educational material use footprint chart. You will also see them called order flow charts or numbers bars.
What does delta mean on a footprint?
Delta is the volume traded at the ask minus the volume traded at the bid. Positive delta means aggressive buyers dominated, negative means aggressive sellers did. It is shown per price level, per candle, or as a running session total called cumulative delta.
What is a good imbalance ratio?
Most platforms default to 3 to 1, meaning one side traded at least three times the volume of the diagonal opposite. That default is reasonable. What matters far more than the exact ratio is where the imbalance appears. A 3 to 1 print at a key level beats a 10 to 1 print in the middle of nowhere.
Can I use footprint charts on stocks?
Yes, on liquid ones, since equities trade on exchanges that report volume. Thin stocks produce unreliable footprints because a few trades distort every reading. Futures remain the cleanest environment because liquidity is concentrated into a small number of heavily traded contracts.
Which timeframe is best for footprint charts?
Volume bars or range bars usually beat time bars, because each bar then contains a similar amount of activity. Time based bars produce rich footprints during active periods and near-empty ones during quiet periods, which makes them harder to read consistently.