Order flow: buying and selling at every price of a candle

5 min read•Updated on 29 Oct 2026•by GeniAnalysis

How to read order flow on a chart: what was bought and sold at each price inside a candle, delta, the busiest price and imbalances.

A normal candle has four prices: open, high, low and close. You can see the range, but not where inside the range the trading took place.

Order flow shows that. Each candle is drawn as a column of prices. For every price, you see how much was sold there and how much was bought there.

This article explains where those two numbers come from, and how to read them on a GeniAnalysis chart.

Bid, ask, and how a trade is counted

When you look at a futures contract, there are always two prices:

• Bid: the highest price a buyer has an order waiting at.
• Ask: the lowest price a seller has an order waiting at.

The ask is always a little above the bid.

If you want to buy right away, you pay the ask. If you want to sell right away, you take the bid.

Order flow counts each trade by that rule:

• A trade at the ask is counted as buying.
• A trade at the bid is counted as selling.

Every trade has a buyer and a seller. Order flow counts the trade on the side of the person who took the other's waiting order.

Some trades print between the bid and the ask. These are compared with the trade before. If the price went up, the trade is counted as buying. If it went down, as selling.

Reading the ladder on the chart

Switch on Order flow from the Indicators menu. Each candle turns into a ladder.

1. Rows. Each row is one price. On a 5-minute chart, a row covers 2 points.
2. Left number, red. How much was sold at that price.
3. Right number, green. How much was bought at that price.
4. Shade. The darker the cell, the more traded there.
5. Amber outline. The busiest row of the candle.
6. Amber band, VAH and VAL. The rows that hold 70 per cent of the candle's volume.
7. Two figures under the ladder. Total sold on the left, total bought on the right.
8. Bottom row of the chart. Δ is the candle's delta. CΔ is the running delta for the day.

Move the pointer over any row. You see that row's price, the amount sold, the amount bought, and how many times bigger one side was.

One candle, step by step

Here is a 5-minute candle of the Nifty future. Rows are 2 points apart. To keep the numbers small, volume is in lots.

The chart shows units, not lots. One Nifty lot is 65 units. So 835 lots appear on the chart as 54,275.

Delta

Delta is total bought minus total sold.

For this candle: 835 − 410 = +425.

A positive delta means more was bought at the ask than sold at the bid. A negative delta means the opposite.

Cumulative delta adds each candle's delta to a running total for the day. It starts again at 9:15 the next morning.

At 10:10 the day's total was −150. The 10:15 candle took it to +275.

The busiest price and the value area

The point of control is the row with the most volume. In this candle it is 24,006, with 360 lots.

The value area is the group of rows around it that holds 70 per cent of the candle's volume. Here that is 24,002 to 24,006. Those three rows hold 960 of the 1,245 lots.

The value area shows where most of the candle's trading happened. The high and the low show how far price went. These are often not the same place.

Imbalances

An imbalance is a row where buying is much bigger than selling, or the other way round.

The chart compares buying at a price with selling one row below. Buying happens at the ask, which sits just above the bid, so these two face each other.

If buying is at least 3 times bigger, the cell turns solid green:

All three rows pass. Three or more in a row get a green bar beside the column.

Selling is checked the same way, against buying one row above. At 24,008, 90 lots were sold against 15 bought at 24,010. That is 6 times bigger, so 24,008 turns solid red.

You can change the ratio in the Order flow settings. A higher ratio shows fewer imbalances.

You can also set an alert. Right-click the chart with Order flow on, choose Order flow alert, and pick buying or selling, how many in a row, and the ratio. You are told when a finished candle has it.

Order flow on the NIFTY 50 chart

Nifty 50 is an index. Nobody trades the index itself, so it has no bids, asks or trades.

On the NIFTY 50 chart, the ladders come from the Nifty future. The future usually trades some points above the index. This gap is the futures premium.

GeniAnalysis moves each ladder down by that gap, so it sits on the index candle. The volumes are the future's. The price shown when you point at a row is also the future's.

If you want the ladders and the candles in the same prices, open the Nifty future chart instead.

What order flow does not show

• The reason for a trade. A buy at the ask can open a new position or close an old one.
• The full size of a big order. Large orders are usually split. You see the pieces, not the order.
• The next candle. Everything in the ladder has already happened.
• The same numbers on every platform. Each platform sorts trades in its own way. Totals can differ slightly.

Related

• Futures premium and the cost of carry
• VWAP, and what price above or below it describes
• Price alerts that fire on the tick
• The four build-up states, and what each one means