What is Exhaustion?

Exhaustion describes the idea that the aggressive side has "run out" at the end of a move. Price makes a new high, but at the very top rows of the bar almost nobody trades. The buyers who were pushing price up have stopped arriving. On a footprint, this shows up as very little volume in the extreme rows compared with the rest of the bar — for example, compared with the bar's POC row. Some vendors describe it as a drop-off in follow-through volume.