Order Flow Indicators

Four built-in indicators read order flow — not what price did, but who pushed it there. Every trade on an exchange has a taker, the side that crossed the spread, and all four are built from that side as the exchange reports it. Two of them measure pressure over time. Two of them measure volume by price.

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Delta Volume

Delta Volume draws each bar’s delta as a column around a zero level: above zero when takers bought more than they sold, below zero when they sold more, colored by sign. It can also show buy and sell volume as two opposite columns, so you see the size of each side and not only the difference. On the chart and in alert sources it appears as Delta Vol. Reading it:

• A large delta with little price movement means one side was absorbed — aggressive orders met resting liquidity that did not give way.
• Shrinking delta while price keeps going points to exhaustion: the move continues on less and less aggression.

The indicator follows the chart’s timeframe on minute and hour charts; on daily and longer charts it uses daily, weekly or monthly bars.

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CVD

CVD keeps a running total of delta. Each bar adds its delta to the total, and the total starts over from zero when a new period begins. View — how the running total is drawn:

• Line — one value per bar, the total at the bar’s close.
• Candles — every bar is a candle of the running total: it opens where the previous bar closed (at zero after a reset), closes at the new total, and its wicks mark the highest and lowest the total reached inside the bar. Rising candles and falling candles are colored differently.

Reset — when the total starts over:

• None — it never resets and accumulates over the whole loaded history.
• Trading day — at the start of each trading day of the exchange.
• Session — at the start of a session type you choose, on instruments with trading sessions.
• Week or Month — at the start of each calendar week or month, counted in UTC.

Source — what is summed:

• Volume (default) — traded volume, the usual CVD.
• Trades — the number of trades instead of their size, which shows whether the pressure came from many orders or a few large ones.

Reading it:

• Divergence — price makes a new high while CVD does not (or a new low while CVD holds up): the move is happening without matching aggression behind it.
• Trend confirmation — price and CVD rising together means buyers are driving the move, not just lifting thin offers.

Within one reset period, the difference between two neighbouring CVD closes equals that bar’s Delta Volume — the two indicators are the same data at two zoom levels.

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Session Volume Profile

SVP turns the chart on its side. Instead of one value per bar it counts how much volume traded at each price, and draws the result as a histogram beside the bars — one profile per trading session, so each session’s volume is counted on its own and you can compare them along the chart. Each profile marks its Point of Control, the price row where the most volume traded, and its value area, the band that holds the share of the session’s volume you set. The label beside a profile reports the session’s totals: Vol., Delta, Buy and Sell. Type — how a price row is drawn:

• Total Volume — one bar per row, as long as everything that traded there.
• Buy & Sell — the row is split into the volume takers bought and the volume they sold.

Delta profile — each row shows buy minus sell for that price instead of the amount traded, colored by the side that was larger. Off by default. Value Area % — the share of the session’s volume the value area covers. 70 by default, which puts the boundaries at the usual VAH and VAL. Row Size — how tall a price row is. Auto, the default, makes the rows as fine as the instrument’s price step allows; Auto Merge groups rows together where there is no room to draw them all; Manual lets you set the height yourself. Levels per Row — how many price levels are merged into one row. 1 by default; raise it for a coarser profile on a long session. Include pre/post market — whether extended-hours trading counts toward the session. Off by default, so a session is its regular hours. Total, Buy and Sell — the three colors, used according to the Type and Delta profile settings above. Reading it:

• Price opening outside yesterday’s value area says the market has repriced overnight; whether it comes back inside is the first question of the session.
• A session with its POC far from its close left unfinished business at that price — volume was accepted there and then abandoned.
• Two sessions building their POC at the same price mark a level the market keeps agreeing on, which is worth more than a level touched once.

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Periodic Volume Profile

PVP draws the same profile against a fixed window rather than the instrument’s calendar. The period is a setting, not a session, which makes it the one to reach for on instruments that trade continuously, and for comparing like-sized windows on any instrument. Everything SVP offers is here too — Type, Delta profile, Value Area %, Row Size, Levels per Row and the three colors all behave as above. Two settings replace Include pre/post market, and together they set the window:

• Period — the unit each profile covers: Minute, Hour, Day, Week, Month, or Auto, the default.
• Count — how many of those units go into one profile. 1 by default, so Hour with a count of 4 gives you a profile every four hours.

Reading it:

• Comparing equal windows is the point: four-hour profiles down a day show where acceptance moved, without a session boundary deciding it for you.
• A profile that is tall and thin was a trend — price passed through and little volume stayed. A fat one was a balance, and its edges tend to matter later.