Order flow, explained by somebody who had to build it.
Most of what is written about footprints is written by people selling one. This is what the charts actually show, what they cannot show, and how to tell the difference.
What a candle throws away.
A candlestick keeps four numbers out of a whole bar: where it opened, how high it went, how low it went, and where it closed. Everything else is discarded. On a five-minute bar of a liquid contract that can be several hundred trades reduced to four numbers.
What goes missing is the part that tells you how the move happened. Two bars can have exactly the same open, high, low and close, and one of them was a steady grind higher while the other spiked and was sold into all the way back. On a candle chart they are the same picture.
A volume footprint keeps the whole bar: every price it traded at, and how much changed hands at each one. The candle is still there, drawn over the top — but now you can see where inside it the business was done.
Four things worth learning first.
The two figures in a cell
Left is the volume that traded into the bid — somebody wanted out badly enough to take the price on offer from buyers. Right is the volume that traded into the offer. They are not two halves of the same trades; they are two different kinds of aggression at the same price.
An imbalance is diagonal
The selling at a price is compared with the buying at the price above it, because those two met each other. Comparing the two sides of the same price compares two halves of one trade and always comes out even — which is why a platform that does it that way marks nothing useful, very confidently.
The point of control
The busiest price in the bar. It needs no inference at all — it is counted volume — which makes it the most reliable mark on the whole chart. Runs of them across bars are the levels price keeps returning to.
The profile is a different question
A footprint asks "what happened inside this bar". A market profile asks "where did the session spend its time". Use the footprint for the last twenty minutes and the profile for the day.
Where order flow on an Indian retail feed stops being exact.
This section exists because it decided how Fexora was built, and because you will not find it on a competitor's site.
The side of a trade is not in the feed
No Indian retail market-data feed tells you whether a trade was a buy or a sell. It has to be inferred by comparing the traded price against the order book at that moment: at or above the offer is treated as buying, at or below the bid as selling, and anything between the two is counted as neither. Measured against genuinely signed data, that rule is right about three quarters of the time — and less often when the market is moving fast, which is exactly when you are looking.
Not every trade arrives with a price
When several trades happen between two updates of the feed, only one price is reported. The rest is real volume with no level to put it at. A platform can either spread it across the bar — which invents a picture — or count it as unplaced and say so. Fexora counts it and prints the share on every bar.
How much that share moves
It is not a property of the instrument; it moves with how hard that instrument is trading. A quiet minute sends one trade per update and nearly all of it can be placed. A busy minute collapses many trades into one update and only the last price arrives. So the same contract can place most of a quiet stretch and a small fraction of its busiest one — and the busiest stretch is where the volume is.
What to do about it
Read the placed share before you read the delta. Where it is high the footprint is close to the truth; where it is low, the shape of the bar is still real volume at real prices, but the buy-versus-sell split underneath it is thin evidence. Treat it that way. A platform that never shows you the number has not removed the problem — it has removed your ability to see it.
Learning it properly takes screen time.
Reading about order flow gets you to the vocabulary. Recognising absorption at a level, in the moment, with money on it, takes sessions in front of the chart. Open one and watch a quiet instrument for an hour before you watch a busy one.