Footprint Charts: Inside the Bar

≈32 min read · Real gold futures examples with XAUUSD equivalents · Free

In this chapter: You will open up a single candle and look at every trade inside it. You will learn what a footprint chart is built from, how to read one cell ("bid × ask"), how to calculate row delta and bar delta by hand, which display layouts answer which questions, where the volume sits inside a bar (the bar POC), why bar delta and candle colour sometimes disagree, how diagonal imbalances and stacked imbalances are calculated, how two settings quietly change what you "see", and how to choose a sensible footprint set-up for gold futures. Just as important, you will learn what a footprint cannot show you, so you never mistake a detailed description for a prediction.

What Is a Footprint Chart?

A candle is a summary. It gives you four numbers — open, high, low and close — and nothing else. That is enough to tell you what happened to price over a period of time, but it says nothing about how it happened. Inside one busy one-minute candle on gold futures (GC), hundreds of separate trades may have taken place, at a dozen or more different prices, some started by impatient buyers and some by impatient sellers. The candle throws all of that away and keeps only four prices.

A footprint chart keeps it. It "opens" the candle and shows, for every price level inside the bar, how many contracts traded there and, of those, how many were traded by an aggressive buyer (a market buy order that lifted the ask) and how many by an aggressive seller (a market sell order that hit the bid). You learned the idea of the aggressor in earlier chapters: every trade has two sides, a passive side that was resting in the order book with a limit order, and an aggressive side that arrived with a market order and crossed the spread to trade immediately. The footprint is simply that aggressor information, sorted by price, for each bar.

Different platforms use different names for the same idea. You will see it called Numbers Bars (Sierra Chart), Volumetric Bars (NinjaTrader), Cluster or Footprint charts (ATAS), and other names elsewhere. The labels differ; the underlying data is the same.

The data a footprint needs

A true footprint needs tick data: a record of every individual trade, with its price, its size and — crucially — whether it executed at the bid or at the ask (or, equivalently, which side was the aggressor). On CME futures such as GC and MGC, that information can be derived from the exchange's market data feed, because every trade happens in one central order book and the exchange reports it.

If a platform only has candle data (open, high, low, close and total volume per bar), it cannot build a real footprint. Some tools "estimate" a footprint by spreading a bar's volume across its range or guessing buy and sell volume from whether the candle closed up or down. Whatever that is, it is not a footprint. It is a drawing that looks like one.

Gold note: This is one reason this book reads order flow on gold futures rather than on the XAUUSD CFD. A CFD broker runs its own price feed and its own internal book; there is no single central record of who hit the bid and who lifted the ask across the whole market. The footprint is a futures tool. If you trade XAUUSD, read the footprint on GC and translate the prices: XAUUSD has typically sat roughly $27–30 below the front GC contract, so a GC footprint level at 4210.6 corresponds to roughly 4181–4184 on XAUUSD. Always treat that gap as approximate and check it live, because it drifts.

What a footprint shows

A footprint shows executed trades: how much traded, at which price, and which side was the aggressor. That is three pieces of information a candle does not give you — who was pushing, where they pushed, and how hard.

What a footprint does not show

This list is just as important:

• Resting limit orders that never traded. If a seller had 300 contracts sitting on the offer at 4211.0 and nobody bought them, the footprint shows nothing at 4211.0. The order book (the DOM or a liquidity heatmap, covered in Chapter 10) shows resting orders; the footprint does not.
• Cancelled orders. An order placed and pulled before it traded leaves no footprint.
• Intent. A market buy might be a new trader opening a long position, or a short seller closing a losing position, or a hedger, or an algorithm rebalancing. The footprint records the aggressive buy; it cannot tell you why it happened.
• Identity. It does not show who traded. There is no "smart money" column.

Why it is useful anyway

The footprint lets you ask the questions from Chapter 7 (Auction Market Theory) at the scale of a single bar. When price touched yesterday's high, who was aggressive? Did all that effort — the volume and delta — produce a result in price? At the very top of the bar, did the auction finish, or were both sides still trading? These are good questions, and a candle cannot answer them.

Key idea: A footprint is a description of aggression inside a bar. It is more information than a candle, not a crystal ball. Seeing more detail does not automatically mean predicting better.

Common mistake: "The footprint shows what smart money is doing." It shows executed trades sorted by price and aggressor side. It does not show who the traders were, what they intended, or the orders that sat in the book without trading.

Reading One Cell: Bid × Ask

The most common footprint display puts two numbers on each row, where each row is one price level. The format is Bid × Ask.

• The left number (Bid) is the number of contracts that traded at this price on the bid. Someone sent a market sell order and it hit a buyer's resting limit order at this price. In plain words: aggressive selling at this price.
• The right number (Ask) is the number of contracts that traded at this price on the ask. Someone sent a market buy order and it lifted a seller's resting limit order at this price. In plain words: aggressive buying at this price.

Here is a single row from a hypothetical one-minute GC bar:

Read it aloud: "At 4210.6, 22 contracts traded with an aggressive seller and 81 contracts traded with an aggressive buyer." The row volume is 22 + 81 = 103 contracts. The row delta is Ask − Bid = 81 − 22 = +59.

From rows to the whole bar

A full bar is just a column of these rows. Here is a small, complete, hypothetical bar so you can practise the arithmetic:

• Bar volume = the sum of every number in the bar = 130 + 201 = 331 contracts.
• Bar delta = sum of all Ask minus sum of all Bid = 201 − 130 = +71. You get the same answer by adding the row deltas.

Every buy has a seller

This is the single most important idea for reading footprints correctly, and it is the one most often misunderstood. Every trade has a buyer and a seller. For every contract bought, one contract was sold. So in the row above, the "81" does not mean 81 contracts of buying versus 22 of selling in the sense of "more buyers than sellers". It means 81 contracts in which the buyer was the one in a hurry and the seller was passive (resting a limit order), plus 22 contracts in which the seller was the one in a hurry and the buyer was passive.

So positive delta means "aggressive buyers were more active than aggressive sellers", not "there was more buying than selling". Total buying and total selling are always equal.

Key idea: Left = traded on the bid = aggressive seller. Right = traded on the ask = aggressive buyer. Row delta = Ask − Bid. Bar delta = ΣAsk − ΣBid. Delta measures who was aggressive, not "more buying".

A technical caution: classification is not perfect

Platforms must decide, for each trade, whether it happened on the bid or the ask. They normally use the exchange's aggressor flag where it is available, or compare the trade price to the best bid and best ask at that instant. In very fast moments — a major data release, for example — quotes change many times within a millisecond, and some trades can be classified on the wrong side. Treat footprint numbers as "very nearly right", not as perfect to the contract, especially in news spikes.

Common mistake: "Bid means buyers, so a big bid number means lots of buying." The opposite is true. The bid column counts aggressive selling into resting bids. Some platforms also let you swap the column order, so always check which side is which on your own software before you read anything.

Try it: A row reads 40 × 15 (bid × ask). What is the row volume and the row delta? (Answer: volume 55, delta 15 − 40 = −25. Aggressive sellers were more active at that price.)

Footprint Layouts: Bid × Ask, Delta, Volume, Profile

The footprint data is always the same — volume at each price, split by aggressor side — but platforms can display it in several ways. Each layout answers one question quickly and hides something else. Knowing what your current layout hides is part of reading it honestly.

1. Bid × Ask

Two numbers per row, as above. This is the most complete view: you can derive every other layout from it. It is required for spotting diagonal imbalances (later in this chapter) and finished or unfinished auctions at the bar extremes (Chapter 9). Its weakness is that it is busy and slow to read, particularly when a bar has thirty or forty rows.

Question it answers best: "Who was aggressive, and at exactly which prices?"

2. Delta per row

Only one number per row: Ask − Bid, usually coloured green for positive and red for negative. It shows at a glance where aggression was concentrated.

Question it answers best: "Where was aggression concentrated?"

What it hides: total volume. A row delta of +10 looks identical whether the row was 15 × 5 (20 contracts) or 995 × 1,005 (2,000 contracts). The first is a small one-sided trickle; the second is an enormous two-sided battle that happened to end almost even.

3. Volume per row

Only the total traded at each price. This shows where activity and agreement were — the bar's own point of control.

Question it answers best: "Where did most of the trading happen?"

What it hides: direction. You cannot tell whether a heavy row was driven by buyers, sellers, or both.

4. Profile (histogram)

The volume of each row drawn as a horizontal bar beside the candle — a miniature volume profile for each bar — sometimes split into bid and ask colours.

Question it answers best: "What shape is the volume inside this bar? Is it heavy at the top, the bottom or the middle?"

What it hides: exact numbers, unless you hover or add labels.

Here is the same hypothetical bar from the previous section in three of these views side by side:

Notice how the Delta column makes 4210.6 jump out, while the Volume column shows that 4210.5 — a negative-delta row — was the second busiest price in the bar. Neither column alone tells the full story; the Bid × Ask column contains both.

Common combinations include "volume and delta" in two columns, or Bid × Ask numbers with the cell background shaded by volume. Most major platforms offer all of these views under their own names.

Key idea: One data set, several views. Learn on Bid × Ask because it hides nothing. Once you read it fluently, switch to Delta or Profile for speed — but always know what your current view has hidden.

Common mistake: Deciding from colours alone without looking at the numbers. A bright green cell on a row with 12 contracts and a pale one on a row with 1,200 contracts are not comparable. A more colourful or "professional-looking" layout does not contain more information; it contains the same information arranged differently.

The Bar POC: Where the Volume Sits Inside the Bar

In Chapter 5 you met the point of control (POC) of a volume profile: the price with the most volume, the place of greatest agreement. Every footprint bar has one too. The bar POC is simply the row with the highest total volume in that bar. Many platforms outline it with a box.

When you find it, ask: where did the main agreement in this bar happen?

Three common positions

POC in the middle of the bar. Volume is roughly symmetric around the centre. The bar was mostly two-sided rotation: price moved up and down through a central price where most business got done.

POC near the high of an up bar. Lots of trading happened at the top of the bar. There are two possible readings, and the POC alone cannot tell them apart:

1. Buyers kept transacting at higher prices and the market accepted those prices — trading volume built up there because both sides were willing to do business at the new, higher level.
2. Many aggressive buyers arrived at the top, and large passive sellers met them and soaked up their orders. That is the idea of absorption, which Chapter 9 examines carefully.

The next bars and the location (is this at a reference level?) decide between the two readings.

POC near the low of an up bar. The main volume was at the bottom of the bar, and the top of the bar was covered on thin volume. The move up happened, but it did not build agreement at the higher prices — price passed through them quickly without much trade.

Here is a small example of that third case:

The bar is green (suppose it opened at 4211.9 and closed at 4212.3), but most of its business was done at 4212.0, near the bottom. The top three rows together hold only 34 contracts.

POC migration

Look at bar POCs in sequence. If the POC of each successive bar is higher than the last, short-term value is moving up — a miniature version of the value migration you studied in Chapter 6. If several bars in a row print their POC at roughly the same price, the market has built a small, short-term area of agreement there.

Over five minutes the bar POC rose by 13 ticks ($1.30 on the price; about 4208.6 → 4209.9 on GC, or very roughly 4179–4182 on XAUUSD). That is a description of where agreement moved, nothing more.

Limits of the bar POC

• Row size and bar type change it. If you merge several ticks into one row (see the last section of this chapter), or switch from time bars to volume bars, the POC can move.
• Thin bars make it nearly random. In a one-minute bar with only 15 contracts, the "POC" may be the row with 4 contracts versus a neighbour with 3. That is not information.
• Near-ties make it jump. When two rows have almost equal volume, the POC can flip between them from one bar to the next. Don't read meaning into that flip.

Common mistake: "The bar POC always acts as support or resistance." This is a popular claim, not proven. Sometimes price reacts there, often it does not. Treat it as context about where agreement formed, and test any claim like this on your own data before relying on it.

Try it: On your platform, find ten consecutive one-minute GC bars during the New York morning and note each bar's POC. Then do the same for ten bars in the middle of the Asian session. In which session do the POCs look stable, and in which do they jump around between rows with almost the same volume?

Bar Delta vs the Close: When They Disagree

The simple expectation is: a green bar (close above open) has positive delta, and a red bar has negative delta. Most of the time that is what you see. But not always. Sometimes a bar has positive delta and closes red, or negative delta and closes green. When that happens, the bar is telling you: one side was more aggressive, and it did not get the result.

How can that be? Because delta measures aggression, but limit orders move price too. Three mechanical explanations cover most cases.

Reason 1: passive orders absorbed the aggression

Aggressive buyers keep lifting the ask, but a large passive seller keeps refilling their offer at the same price — sometimes as an iceberg order that shows only a small part of its size at a time. Delta climbs; price does not. The buyers spent effort; the seller absorbed it.

Reason 2: liquidity was pulled

Price can also move without much aggression at all. If buyers who were resting limit orders on the bid cancel them, the bid side thins out, and even a small amount of aggressive selling can push price down several ticks. Delta is only slightly negative, but the move is large. The footprint sees the small aggressive selling; it does not see the bids that disappeared.

Reason 3: timing inside the bar

Bar delta is a total for the whole bar. Aggressive buying may dominate the first forty seconds of a one-minute bar, pushing price up, and then a burst of selling in the last twenty seconds may push price back below the open. The total delta is still positive, but the close is lower.

Here is a hypothetical bar that shows the disagreement:

Suppose this bar opened at 4215.1 and closed at 4214.9. It is a red bar with bar delta of +114. A lot of aggressive buying happened at 4215.1–4215.3, yet price finished two ticks below the open.

Delta high and delta low inside the bar

Because of the timing problem, many platforms also show the maximum and minimum delta reached during the bar (sometimes called delta high/low or max/min delta). If a bar closes with delta +80 but its maximum delta during the bar was +300, buyers were very strong early on and then gave most of it back. That tells a fuller story than the closing number.

What the disagreement is good for

This disagreement is the raw material for two ideas in Chapter 9: effort versus result and trapped traders. On its own, however, it is not a signal. Bars where delta and candle colour disagree are not rare in ordinary conditions, especially in thin bars where a handful of trades decides the sign. Before you interpret them, count how often they occur on your own GC data during a normal session. They earn attention only in context: at a meaningful reference level, on meaningful volume.

Key idea: Delta tells you who was aggressive. The close tells you where the last trade happened. When they disagree, aggression did not get its result — and the reason is usually passive orders, pulled liquidity, or timing within the bar.

Common mistake: "Positive delta means price should go up." Delta is not a direct predictor of price. Also avoid comparing raw delta numbers between the Asian session and New York without accounting for the very different volume: +60 in a quiet Asian minute and +60 in the busiest New York minute are not the same event.

Diagonal vs Horizontal Imbalance

An imbalance is a row where one side was much more aggressive than the other — for example, three times as much aggressive buying as aggressive selling. That sounds simple until you ask the obvious question: which two numbers do we compare? There are two answers, and they can disagree completely.

Horizontal comparison

The intuitive method compares the Ask at a price with the Bid at the same price. For a row reading 10 × 60, horizontal comparison says: 60 ÷ 10 = 6, a six-to-one buy imbalance.

It is simple, but mechanically it compares two different moments. Here is why. Gold futures usually trade with a one-tick spread. Suppose at some instant the best bid is 4210.4 and the best ask is 4210.5. At that moment, an aggressive buyer trades at 4210.5 (the ask) and an aggressive seller trades at 4210.4 (the bid). For a trade to happen on the bid at 4210.5, the whole market must have been one tick higher — bid 4210.5, ask 4210.6. So the Bid and Ask numbers in the same row were created at different times, under different quotes.

Diagonal comparison

The diagonal method compares the two sides that were facing each other at the same moment: the Ask at price p against the Bid at one tick below (p − 1 tick). Several major footprint platforms make this the default or the main option.

• Buy imbalance at price p: Ask(p) ÷ Bid(p − 1 tick) is at least the chosen ratio.
• Sell imbalance at price p: Bid(p) ÷ Ask(p + 1 tick) is at least the chosen ratio.

Same data, two different answers

Take these two rows:

• Horizontal at 4210.5: Ask 60 ÷ Bid 10 = 6:1. "A huge buy imbalance."
• Diagonal at 4210.5: Ask(4210.5) = 60 ÷ Bid(4210.4) = 40 = 1.5:1. Not an imbalance at a 3:1 ratio.

Same numbers, opposite conclusions. The diagonal answer is the one that reflects what buyers and sellers were actually doing against each other at the same instant.

A full worked example

Here is a hypothetical seven-row bar. We use a common textbook ratio of 3:1 and, for now, ignore minimum volume (next section).

Two buy imbalances (4211.0 and 4210.9). No sell imbalance: 4210.6 shows heavy selling at 70 contracts, but against 29 aggressive buyers one tick above it the ratio is only 2.4.

Now look at what horizontal comparison would have flagged: 4211.0 (46 ÷ 9 = 5.1), 4210.9 (52 ÷ 12 = 4.3), 4210.8 (33 ÷ 15 = 2.2, no), 4210.6 as a sell (70 ÷ 21 = 3.3, yes), 4210.5 as a sell (18 ÷ 6 = 3.0, yes), and 4211.1 (7 ÷ 0 — infinite). Two diagonal imbalances become as many as five horizontal ones: a different count, and a different story.

The edge rows have no partner

Notice the dashes. At the lowest row of a bar there is no row below, so a diagonal buy comparison has nothing to compare against. At the highest row there is no row above, so a diagonal sell comparison has nothing to compare against. These extremes need separate treatment — which is exactly what the "finished versus unfinished auction" idea in Chapter 9 does.

What an imbalance does and does not tell you

An imbalance says: "at this row, one side was clearly more aggressive." That is all. It does not tell you where price will go next, and it does not tell you whether that aggression succeeded or was absorbed.

Key idea: Horizontal compares Ask(p) with Bid(p) — two different moments. Diagonal compares Ask(p) with Bid(p − 1) for buying, and Bid(p) with Ask(p + 1) for selling — the two sides that actually met. Always know which one your platform uses.

Common mistake: Using horizontal imbalance without realising it, because it was a platform's default. A second mistake: "Every imbalance means big money arrived." A row can become an imbalance with a few dozen small contracts. A third: comparing imbalance counts between two platforms that calculate them differently.

Imbalance Settings: Ratio and Minimum Volume

Every footprint defines an imbalance with two numbers, and those two numbers decide how many imbalances you see. Change them and the "signals" on your screen can double or vanish, even though the market did exactly the same thing.

Setting 1: the ratio

The ratio is how many times larger the aggressive side must be than the diagonal opposite side. Common values range from about 1.5:1 to 4:1 (often written as 150% to 400%). Some educational material describes 2:1 as an imbalance and 4:1 as a strong imbalance; 3:1 (300%) is a very widespread default.

A lower ratio means more imbalances and more noise. A higher ratio means fewer, rarer imbalances — but also more cases where genuinely one-sided activity is missed.

Setting 2: the minimum volume

The minimum volume is the smallest size the aggressive side must have before the row is checked at all. Without it, a row with three aggressive buys against zero aggressive sells on the diagonal counts as an imbalance — "three to nothing".

The divide-by-zero problem

That "three to nothing" case is a real mathematical problem. If the opposite diagonal cell is zero, the ratio is 3 ÷ 0, which is undefined or infinite. Platforms must choose: either they treat any non-zero against zero as an automatic imbalance, or they skip the row. Either way, the minimum volume filter is what stops a few stray contracts from lighting up your chart. Find out what your platform does.

Watching the settings change the picture

Here is a hypothetical bar and three settings. All three settings use diagonal comparison.

The market was identical in every line. Only the settings changed. Between the loosest and the strictest settings, the "buy imbalance" count goes from five to zero.

Why gold needs its own settings

GC and MGC show the same price, but their volumes are very different: GC is the deep, heavily traded contract; micro gold (MGC) trades far fewer contracts' worth of gold. A minimum volume that is sensible on GC during New York may filter out almost nothing on MGC, or almost everything, depending on the period. Settings copied from equity index futures (ES, NQ) are calibrated to completely different volumes and should not be pasted onto gold.

Volume also changes through the day. A typical GC row in the quiet Asian session holds a fraction of what a row holds in the first hour of New York trading. A fixed setting across the day means that an "imbalance" in Asia and an "imbalance" in New York are not the same thing.

The honesty rule: choose settings before you look

Pick your ratio and minimum volume before you look at the results, write them down, and keep them fixed. If, after watching a move, you nudge the ratio until an imbalance appears in the "right" place, you are fitting your settings to the past. Every chart will then seem to confirm your method, and none of that confirmation will mean anything going forward. Chapter 12 returns to this trap in detail.

Key idea: Ratio and minimum volume define every imbalance. Lower ratio = more imbalances and more noise. The minimum volume protects you from "3 against 0". Set them per contract and per session, before looking, and keep them fixed.

Common mistake: "300% is the best setting." That is a popular claim, not proven. It is a reasonable common default, nothing more. Changing settings after every trade "to see it better" is the same mistake in another form.

Stacked Imbalances

A stacked imbalance is a run of imbalances in the same direction on consecutive rows within one bar — for example, buy imbalances at 4210.6, 4210.7 and 4210.8. The number of rows needed is a convention, not a law of nature; three consecutive rows is the most common definition, and some tools start counting from two. A row with no trades, or a row that is not an imbalance, breaks the chain.

The logic

A single imbalance can be an accident — one large market order sweeping a price, for instance. But when one side was clearly more aggressive across several ticks in a row, it is more likely that you are looking at sustained initiative pressure: buyers who were willing to keep paying up, price after price.

Here is a hypothetical bar with a three-row buy stack, checked diagonally at a 3:1 ratio with a 20-contract minimum:

Buy imbalances at 4210.6, 4210.7 and 4210.8: a three-row buy stack. The zone 4210.6–4210.8 GC (very roughly 4181–4184 on XAUUSD, using the approximate gap) is where buyers pressed hardest inside this bar.

Two opposite readings — and how location separates them

The same stack can mean very different things depending on where it appears.

Reading 1: genuine initiative. The stack appears at the start of a move — for example, as price breaks above the initial balance high or leaves a multi-day bracket (Chapter 7) — and afterwards price stays above the stack zone. The market accepted the higher prices. Traders often mark such a zone as "the place where buyers showed up forcefully" and watch how price behaves if it returns there.

Reading 2: late buyers. The stack appears at the end of a long rally, right into a major reference level such as the previous day's high, and afterwards price falls back below the stack zone. Now the same aggressive buyers may be holding losing positions. This is the "trapped traders" idea in Chapter 9.

At the moment the stack prints, the two cases can look identical. What separates them is location in the larger structure and what the following bars do.

The frequency check

With a low ratio and a small minimum volume, stacks become very common. Before giving them any weight, count how many your settings produce on an ordinary GC day. If the answer is dozens per session, each individual stack carries very little information.

Key idea: A stack is several same-direction imbalances on consecutive rows. It describes sustained aggression in that bar. Location decides the reading: at the start of a move with acceptance, it suggests initiative; at the end of a long move with rejection, it may mark trapped traders.

Common mistake: "A stacked imbalance zone will act as strong support or resistance later." This is a popular claim, not proven. Sometimes it does; often it does not. Do not treat it as a rule without testing it on your own data. Also avoid counting stacks in thin Asian-session bars as if they meant the same as stacks in the New York open.

Footprint on Gold: Tick Size, Volume and Choosing the Bar

Everything so far applies to any futures market. This section makes it specific to gold.

The basic numbers

Gold futures move in ticks of $0.10. On the full-size contract (GC, 100 troy ounces) one tick is worth $10 per contract; on the micro contract (MGC, 10 troy ounces) one tick is worth $1 per contract. (These were the CME specifications as of October 2026; always re-check the current contract specifications on the CME website.)

With one tick per row, each footprint row is one $0.10 price step. A bar that covers a $5 range therefore has 50 rows. During a major data release gold can cover $10 or more in a single minute, which means hundreds of rows — and a footprint you cannot meaningfully read in real time.

GC or MGC?

GC and MGC track the same gold price, but the GC order flow is far deeper and reflects much more of the large, professional participation in the market. MGC is useful for trading smaller size, but its footprint is thinner and noisier. A sensible approach is to read the footprint on GC even if you trade MGC (or the XAUUSD CFD). The information is in the deep contract.

Gold note: If you trade XAUUSD, you can watch a GC footprint alongside your CFD chart and convert levels using the live gap. A stack at 4210.6–4210.8 on GC, with a gap of about $28 at the time, sits around 4182.6–4182.8 on XAUUSD. The gap moves with interest rates and time to expiry, so measure it each session rather than memorising a number.

Bar type

Time bars (for example 1-minute or 5-minute). Simple, and they line up naturally with time-based references such as the initial balance, session opens and data releases. Their weakness is uneven volume: a one-minute bar in the middle of the Asian session might hold a small fraction of the volume of the one-minute bar at the New York open. Imbalances and POCs in those two bars are not comparable.

Volume bars (one bar every N contracts). Each bar contains the same volume, so footprints are much more comparable with each other. The cost is that the link to clock time is lost: in busy periods bars form very quickly, in quiet periods very slowly, and lining them up with session times becomes awkward.

Range bars and tick bars. Range bars close when price has moved a fixed distance; tick bars close after a fixed number of trades. Some styles find them useful, but the footprint inside them means something slightly different, because the bar's own construction shapes where it starts and ends.

Common mistake: "One special bar type gives more accurate footprint signals." This is a popular claim, not proven. Each bar type trades one weakness for another.

Ticks per row

Many platforms let you merge several ticks into one row (for example 2–5 ticks per row). That makes the footprint far easier to read during fast moves. But it changes the meaning of the diagonal imbalance: the comparison is no longer "the ask against the bid one tick below at the same moment", but a comparison of aggregated blocks. The logic from the diagonal-imbalance section is weakened. If you merge rows, be aware that your imbalances now mean something coarser.

A sensible starting set-up (not a rule)

As a starting point for learning, many traders use:

• Contract: GC.
• Main footprint: 1-minute time bars during the New York session, one tick per row.
• Context chart: a 5-minute chart (footprint or plain candles) for the bigger picture.
• Imbalances: diagonal, with a common ratio such as 3:1 and a minimum volume chosen from your own measurements.

Before you rely on any of this, measure the average volume per bar in each session on your own data. A small table like this, filled in with your own numbers, tells you where a sensible minimum volume sits and how differently a bar should be read in each session:

Then keep your settings fixed so that today's footprint can be compared with last week's.

Try it: Take one 30-minute stretch of GC during the New York morning. View it four ways: 1-minute time bars, 5-minute time bars, volume bars, and 1-minute bars with three ticks per row. Count the buy imbalances in each version. Write down how much the count changes — that difference is entirely created by your settings, not by the market.

Common mistake: Reading a footprint on MGC and drawing conclusions about "institutions". And reading one-minute Asian-session footprints with the same expectations as the New York open.

Chapter summary

• A footprint chart opens a candle and shows, for every price in the bar, how many contracts traded with an aggressive seller (bid) and how many with an aggressive buyer (ask).
• It needs real tick data with the aggressor side; footprints "estimated" from candle data are not footprints.
• It shows executed trades only — not resting orders, cancelled orders, identity or intent.
• In Bid × Ask, left is aggressive selling into the bid and right is aggressive buying from the ask. Row delta = Ask − Bid; bar delta = ΣAsk − ΣBid.
• Every buy has a seller; delta measures which side was aggressive, not "more buying".
• Layouts (Bid × Ask, Delta, Volume, Profile) show the same data; each hides something. Learn on Bid × Ask.
• The bar POC is the busiest row. Its position adds context; its migration describes where short-term agreement moves; in thin bars it means little.
• Delta and close can disagree because of absorption, pulled liquidity, or timing inside the bar. Delta high/low helps.
• Diagonal imbalance compares the two sides that met at the same moment (Ask(p) vs Bid(p−1); Bid(p) vs Ask(p+1)); horizontal comparison mixes two moments and can give the opposite answer.
• Ratio and minimum volume define imbalances; changing them changes what you see. Choose them before looking, per contract and per session.
• A stack is several same-direction imbalances on consecutive rows; location and follow-through decide whether it reads as initiative or trapped traders.
• On gold: tick $0.10 ($10 on GC, $1 on MGC). Read the footprint on GC. Every bar type and row size is a trade-off. Measure volume per session first.

Checklist

• My platform builds the footprint from tick data with aggressor side, not from candles.
• I have confirmed which column is Bid and which is Ask on my software.
• I can calculate row delta, bar delta and bar volume by hand.
• I know what my current layout hides.
• I find the bar POC and ask whether the bar has enough volume for it to mean anything.
• When delta and candle colour disagree, I check delta high/low and the location before interpreting.
• My imbalances are set to diagonal, and I know how my platform treats zero on the opposite side.
• My ratio and minimum volume are written down, chosen before looking, and separate for GC and MGC.
• I have counted how many imbalances and stacks my settings produce on an ordinary day.
• I read the footprint on GC, convert levels to XAUUSD with the live gap if needed, and measure average bar volume per session.

Quiz

1. Which of these can a footprint chart not show you? (a) Volume at each price (b) Aggressive buys versus aggressive sells (c) Limit orders that were cancelled before filling (d) Bar delta
2. A footprint row reads 40 × 15 (bid × ask). What is the row delta, and which side was more aggressive at that price?
3. A one-minute GC bar closes red with bar delta of +120. Give the most likely mechanical explanation, and name one other possible explanation.
4. Using diagonal comparison, a buy imbalance at price p compares which two cells? Using the rows 4210.5: 10 × 60 and 4210.4: 40 × 15, is 4210.5 a buy imbalance at 3:1?
5. Why is it sensible to read the footprint on GC even if you trade MGC or the XAUUSD CFD?

Quiz answers

1. (c) The footprint records executed trades only. Cancelled limit orders (and resting orders that never traded) leave no trace on it; you need order-book tools for those.
2. Row delta = Ask − Bid = 15 − 40 = −25. Aggressive sellers were more active at that price.
3. Most likely: passive sellers absorbed the aggressive buying — buyers kept lifting the offer, but resting sell orders kept being refilled, so price did not rise. Other possibilities: the timing inside the bar (strong buying early, selling late pushed the close down) or liquidity being pulled on the bid side.
4. Diagonal buy imbalance compares Ask(p) with Bid(p − 1 tick). Here: Ask(4210.5) = 60 ÷ Bid(4210.4) = 40 = 1.5:1 — not an imbalance at 3:1, even though the horizontal comparison (60 ÷ 10 = 6:1) would have flagged it.
5. Because GC has much deeper order flow and reflects far more of the market's large participation. The price is essentially the same, but the GC footprint contains much more information; you can translate its levels to MGC directly and to XAUUSD with the approximate live gap.

Education only. Not financial advice. Trading involves substantial risk of loss.