Reading footprint charts: a 10-minute primer

Most charting tutorials treat order flow like a black art. It isn't — it's just two columns of numbers per candle, plus a few visual conventions on top. This post walks through reading a footprint chart in Spectra, end to end, in about ten minutes.

What a footprint candle actually contains

Every candle on a footprint chart is a grid of price levels. At each level, two numbers: how much volume traded at the bid and how much traded at the ask. Spectra renders them side-by-side, with the cell shaded by total volume.

That's the entire data model. Three implications follow:

• A long candle that closed up isn't bullish if the volume sat on the bid all the way up. Buyers were lifting, sellers were filling — the move is being absorbed.
• A short candle with heavy ask-side volume at the highs is a failed breakout in disguise. The volume showed up, the price didn't follow.
• Imbalances at extremes are where reversals tend to start. Spectra highlights cells where the bid/ask ratio crosses 3:1 by default.

The three things a footprint shows that a candlestick can't

1. Where price paused, not just where it went. A 30-minute candle is one bar. The footprint inside that bar might tell you the price stalled for 25 minutes at a single level before the breakout — that level is now support.

2. Whether a wick was bought or sold. Long lower wicks that printed on bid-side dominance are buyers stepping in. The same wick on ask-side dominance is sellers exhausting.

3. The point of control (POC). The price level with the most volume in the candle. POCs cluster into volume nodes that act as magnets on the next approach.

Wiring it up in Spectra

Open any chart, press 3 for footprint mode (or right-click the chart background → Chart type → Footprint). The default settings work for most futures and crypto. For equities, lower the imbalance threshold to 2:1 because equity ticks are coarser.

// Chart type shortcuts:
//   1 = candlestick
//   2 = OHLC
//   3 = footprint
//   4 = heatmap
//   5 = TPO

Where to go from here

Pair the footprint with a DOM ladder on the right (Workspaces → Add panel → DOM ladder, or Cmd+Shift+D) and you've got the desktop order-flow setup serious tape readers run. The next post in this series covers reading the DOM next to the footprint — the two views answer different questions.