# Footprint chart > A candle opened up: per price level within each bar, the volume that traded — usually split by aggressor side — so the bar shows not just where price went but who paid to move it. - Canonical: https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/footprint-chart/ - Term set: https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/ --- A candle is a summary, and the footprint chart is the refusal to summarise. The construction: take each bar and keep its interior. At every price level the bar touched, record the volume that traded there — and split it by **aggressor side**, buyer-initiated against seller-initiated, so each level reads as a small ledger of who paid to cross the spread. The named objects follow from the split: **imbalances**, levels where one side's volume exceeds the other's by a declared ratio, often measured diagonally between adjacent levels; stacked imbalances read as initiative; volume evaporating at an extreme read as exhaustion. Ratio, geometry and bar size are elections, stated or the chart is a mood. The load-bearing machinery is the classification, and it deserves daylight. No print arrives labelled with intent: a trade at the ask is *attributed* to an aggressive buyer, a trade at the bid to an aggressive seller, and prints between the quotes need a stated rule. The attribution is usually reasonable and always a convention — identical prints under a different convention draw a different footprint, which is why serious tools name theirs. Every reading stacked on a footprint inherits the convention underneath it, the same way every profile inherits its window. In FX the provenance comes first. Footprints were born on centralised futures exchanges where the tape is the market and sizes are real. Spot FX has no consolidated tape, and much of it quotes without dependable per-trade sizes — so an FX footprint is a rendering of one broker's or one aggregator's business: a genuine record of a **partial** market, and a different record on a different feed. The site's own [quote and book measurements](/glossary/tick-data-provenance/) run on exactly this discipline, and the neighbouring vocabulary divides cleanly: the [volume profile](/glossary/volume-profile/) is the footprint with its clock removed, [cumulative delta](/glossary/cumulative-delta/) is its side-split summed into one line, and the [depth of market](/glossary/depth-of-market/) shows the resting intention the footprint's transacted history keeps being compared against. The readings — absorption at a level, initiative through it — are inferences, and the [two lenses](/glossary/the-two-lenses/) apply: the ledger is checkable, the story about who was trapped in it is not. ## Commonly confused with Neighbouring concepts that get used interchangeably, and the distinction that actually separates them. - **A candlestick** — A candle compresses a bar into four prices; the footprint keeps the interior — volume at every level, split by side. The candle tells you the journey's endpoints, the footprint who transacted along the way. Same bar, two resolutions. - **[Volume profile](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/volume-profile/)** — The profile aggregates a whole window onto the price axis and discards sequencing; the footprint keeps bar-by-bar, level-by-level detail. Stack a session of footprints by price and a profile appears — the profile is the footprint with its clock removed. - **[Depth of market](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/depth-of-market/)** — The footprint records volume that traded; the DOM shows size that rests. One is history at each price, the other intention — and intention can be withdrawn, which is why the two disagree precisely when it matters. - **[Cumulative delta](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/cumulative-delta/)** — Delta sums the footprint's side-split into one running number; the footprint keeps the per-price detail delta throws away. Delta answers "who has been more aggressive overall"; the footprint answers "at which prices, inside which bars". ## How to measure it in your own data A definition you cannot test is a definition you have to take on trust. This is the shortest honest route from the concept to a number you computed yourself. - **Records you need** — Per-trade data with price, size and an aggressor side per print — or the bid/ask context to classify one — plus, in FX, the feed's identity, because with no consolidated tape the footprint is a rendering of one book's business. - **What you compute** — Bucket each bar's trades by price level; within each level, attribute size to the buy or sell side by the stated classification — trades at the ask as buyer-aggressed, at the bid as seller-aggressed, with a stated rule for mid-prints. The classification convention is a parameter, and different conventions draw different footprints from identical prints. - **What the answer tells you** — Imbalanced levels — one side's volume dwarfing the other's at the same price — and their stacks are the footprint's headline objects, with volume drying up at an extreme read as exhaustion. Every one of those readings is an inference stacked on the classification underneath it. ## Questions and answers ### What does a footprint chart show? The inside of each candle: how much traded at every price level the bar touched, usually split into buyer-aggressed and seller-aggressed volume. It is the highest-resolution standard view of transacted business, one step above the tape itself. ### How is buying and selling volume determined? By a classification rule, not by revelation: trades printing at the ask are attributed to aggressive buyers, at the bid to aggressive sellers, with a stated convention for prints between. The rule is a parameter — change it and the same tape draws a different footprint, which is why a footprint without its convention is not checkable. ### Do footprint charts work in forex? They work as renderings of the feed that produced them. Spot FX has no consolidated tape and much of it quotes without per-trade sizes, so an FX footprint is built from one broker's or one aggregator's prints — a real record of a partial market, and a different partial market on a different feed. ### What is an imbalance on a footprint? A level where one side's classified volume exceeds the other's by a declared ratio — three-to-one in many tools — often compared diagonally between adjacent levels. The ratio and the geometry are elections; the predictive weight of the imbalance is a separate, testable claim. ## Related terms Derived from the links this entry makes and the entries that link back to it. - [Cumulative delta](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/cumulative-delta/) The running sum of buyer-aggressed minus seller-aggressed volume — one line tracking which side has been crossing the spread harder, accumulated trade by trade. - [Depth of market (DOM)](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/depth-of-market/) The visible ladder of resting limit orders — how much size is bid and offered at each price level away from the touch — as one feed displays it at one moment. - [Order flow](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/order-flow/) The stream of orders arriving at a market — aggressive orders consuming resting size and passive orders posting it — and, by extension, the discipline of reading that stream from book and tape data. - [The Two Lenses](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/the-two-lenses/) A framework in quantitative trading where every metric is evaluated through both its theoretical statistical properties and its physical microstructure execution constraints. - [Tick Data Provenance](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/tick-data-provenance/) The documented history of a market dataset: where each tick was captured, when, through what aggregation, and every alteration — cleaning, backfill, merge, adjustment — applied to it since capture. - [Volume profile](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/volume-profile/) A histogram of traded volume by price level over a chosen window — where the trading happened on the price axis, rather than when it happened on the time axis. ## Cite This Definition APA BibTeX HTML Hadal Instruments. (2026). Footprint chart. Hadal Glossary. https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/footprint-chart/ Version 6b39ebf, 2026-08-30. @misc{hadal_2026_footprint-chart, author = {Hadal Instruments}, title = {Footprint chart}, year = {2026}, url = {https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/footprint-chart/}, howpublished = {Hadal Glossary}, version = {6b39ebf}, note = {Pre-launch publication; version dated 2026-08-30} } Source: Hadal Instruments, Footprint chart. Original Research Copy Citation **Version 6b39ebf** identifies the commit that last changed this page in Hadal's content repository. That repository is not public, so the identifier does not resolve externally — it is published so a citation pins one specific state rather than a moving page. To obtain the exact version cited, use the [press and research route](https://hadalinstruments.com/press/).