What is a footprint chart?

A candle tells you four prices: where a bar opened, its high, its low and where it closed. It says nothing about what happened between them. A footprint chart opens each bar up by price. Every row inside the bar shows how much traded at that price, split by who was the aggressor: volume that sold into the bid and volume that bought from the offer.

What it looks like on the chart

In the close-up above, each bar is two columns of cells with a thin candle between them. The left cells are volume traded on the bid — sellers hitting resting buy orders — tinted red. The right cells are volume traded on the ask — buyers lifting resting sell orders — tinted green. The yellow row in each bar is its busiest price. Above each bar TapeHawk prints its volume (V), its delta (D, buying minus selling) and ratios at the high and low (R/H, R/L), so the bar at 15:30 reads V: 126, D: 31 — more aggressive buying than selling.

How traders read it

• Where the volume was done. A bar that closed up but did most of its trading at its low tells a different story from one that traded heavily at its high.
• Imbalances. A cell far larger than the one diagonally across from it shows one side overwhelming the other at that price. Several stacked on top of each other are often treated as an area of interest.
• The ends of a bar. Heavy selling printed at a high that price then left behind, or heavy buying at a low, shows where aggression ran into the other side.
• Delta against the candle. A green candle with negative delta was lifted by something other than aggressive buying — often sellers stepping away.

A footprint is dense by design. Most traders zoom into a few bars around a level rather than reading every cell.

On TapeHawk

Pick Footprint in the chart-type menu. It works on every symbol at 1m, 5m, 15m and 1h, with row grouping, value area and a statistics grid in its settings.