# Footprint Charts: Looking Inside the Candle A footprint splits each candle into its price levels and shows how much was bought and how much was sold at every one of them, so you can see who was pushing and where they ran out. ## What a footprint shows A normal candle gives you four prices and a volume bar. It cannot tell you whether the volume came from buyers chasing price up or sellers dumping into bids. The footprint can. Every trade has an aggressor, the side that crossed the spread with a market order. When a buyer lifts the offer, that volume counts as buying. When a seller hits the bid, it counts as selling. The footprint lists, for each price inside the candle, the selling volume on one side and the buying volume on the other. So a 5-minute ETH candle that ranged from 3,980 to 4,000 might show twenty rows, each with two numbers. That sounds like a lot to read. In practice you scan for a few patterns and ignore the rest. ## Delta Delta is buying volume minus selling volume. For one price row it tells you who was more aggressive at that price. For the whole candle it tells you who won the bar overall. A green candle with strongly positive delta is what you expect: buyers pushed and price went up. The interesting cases are the mismatches. A green candle with negative delta means price rose even though sellers were more aggressive. Usually that happens because passive buyers were absorbing the selling, which is a sign of strength. A red candle with positive delta is the mirror: buyers kept hitting the offer and price still fell, so someone was selling into them with limit orders. ## Imbalances and stacked imbalances An imbalance is a price row where one side heavily outweighs the other. The usual comparison is diagonal: the buying volume at one price against the selling volume one tick lower, because that is how a buyer moving up the book meets a seller below. If buying is three or four times larger, that row is a buying imbalance. One imbalance means little. Three or more in a row, stacked on consecutive prices, means buyers were lifting offers level after level with real urgency. Those stacked zones often act as support on a later retest, because the traders who bought there are motivated to defend their entry. Not always. Treat it as a level to watch, not a level that must hold. ## Absorption Absorption is when one side keeps hitting and price does not move. Picture BTC dropping to 98,000. At the low of the candle the footprint shows very heavy selling, 300 or 400 BTC hitting bids at 98,000 and 97,990, yet the candle closes well off the low. Sellers were aggressive, but a patient buyer took everything they offered. If the next candles cannot make a lower low, the sellers have spent their ammunition against a wall that did not break. ## Exhaustion at highs and lows Exhaustion looks different. At the very top of a rally, the footprint shows buying volume shrinking toward the extreme: 120, then 60, then 8, then 2 at the high tick. Buyers did not get stopped by a big seller. They simply ran out. When a push ends on almost no volume at the extreme, it often turns, because there is no one left to pay higher prices. The difference matters. Absorption is a fight that one side lost. Exhaustion is a side that gave up before the fight. ## Honest limits Footprints get noisy on low timeframes and thin markets. A single large trader can create an imbalance that means nothing about the crowd. Patterns that work on a trending day can fail repeatedly in chop. Use the footprint to confirm or reject an idea you already have at a level you already marked, not to generate trades from every coloured cell. In Market Open, footprint history is recorded for BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, BNB, HYPE and SUI since 14 Oct 2026. Other markets build the footprint live from when you open the chart. TPO and session Volume Profile have their own lessons: [Reading a TPO Profile](tpo-profile) and [Volume Profile](volume-profile). ## Try it on Market Open 1. Open ETH on the 5m chart and add the Volume Footprint layer. 2. Find the last swing high and swing low and read the top and bottom rows of those candles. Decide whether each one looks like absorption, exhaustion, or neither. 3. Open the Scanner and sort by stacked imbalance to find markets where one side is pressing right now, then check the footprint on each. 4. Watch the next two swings live and call absorption or exhaustion before the candle closes. Bar Replay switches the footprint off, so this one is done on the live chart. _Educational content, not investment advice. Leveraged trading can lose more than your margin._