Chart BeyondToolsAboutFootprint Chart: how to read it
A footprint chart opens up each candle and shows how much was bought and sold at every price inside it.Sell volume is on the left of the candle, buy volume on the right, so you see which side was heavier at each level.
How to read it
Read one candle top to bottom
Each row is one price level. The left number is what sold at that price, the right number is what bought. The bar length shows the size.
Find the busiest row
The gold line marks the price where the most volume traded inside the candle. This is the point of control.
Turn on imbalances
Switch Imbalance on in the settings. Buying at each price is compared with selling one row below (diagonal). When one side is 3 times the other or more, the cell gets a solid outline; at 1.5 times, a dashed one.
Check the delta
The pill under each candle is buy volume minus sell volume, in US dollars. Green when buyers were heavier, red when sellers were.
Worked example
A candle closes higher. At 80,060 the left number reads 28K and the right number 72K: far more was bought than sold at that price. The pill under the candle reads Δ+$4.0K, so across the whole candle buyers were slightly heavier. In plain terms: buyers lifted the offers at 80,060 and the candle as a whole leaned to the buy side. It records what already traded, nothing about what comes next.
Common mistakes
- Reading one candle alone. Compare it with the candles around it.
- Mixing up the sides. Here sell is on the left and buy is on the right.
- Treating an imbalance as a prediction. It shows what traded, not what will happen.
- Comparing coins row by row. Row size follows the price of each coin, so read each coin on its own scale.
Where the data comes from
- Built from the full trade stream of nine markets: Binance, Bybit, OKX and Bitget (spot and perpetual) plus Hyperliquid (perpetual).
- Nothing is sampled or averaged. Each trade's dollar value is added to its price row as it happens.
- Rows are fine: about 0.01% of price, which is a $5 row on BTC. You can make rows wider in the settings; wider rows simply add up the finer ones.
- Values are in US dollars.
- Updates every second while the chart is open.