Order Flow

How do order-flow tools explain market activity?

Order-flow analysis connects the orders waiting in a market with the transactions that actually occur. Heatmaps retain a history of displayed liquidity, footprints organize executions inside bars, and ladders bring current depth closer to an execution decision. A volume profile summarizes trading across prices. Understanding those differences is more useful than treating every bright band or large print as the same signal.

Choose the research task first: reviewing liquidity changes, examining participation within a move, or practicing order management. Then match the instrument, venue coverage, feed depth and session settings. Recording, historical depth and simulation also serve different purposes. These guides show how the main displays fit together and what to verify before building a workspace around them.

How to choose

• Decide whether the missing evidence is resting liquidity, executed transactions, session distribution or the mechanics of order management.
• Match the exchange, contract, depth coverage and data connection before attributing differences between two displays to the software.
• For review and practice, distinguish recorded history, reconstructed depth and simulated fills rather than assuming they reproduce identical conditions.

Start here

• Bookmap: liquidity history and executions

  Understand what a heatmap retains and how waiting orders differ from the transactions shown beside them.

• ATAS: footprints, profiles and depth

  Explore how transaction detail inside bars complements profiles, tape and the current order book.

• Bookmap vs Jigsaw daytradr

  Compare a liquidity-history workflow with ladder, tape and execution-centered decision making.