Candles show you where. Footprints show you who.
Bid × ask volume at every price, delta, POC, imbalances — the chart order flow traders live on. The one below is building itself right now, trade by trade, drawn by the real rendering engine on simulated data. Scroll it, zoom it.
Every trade, priced, sided, and put in its cell
Tick by tick, with the aggressor
Every trade arrives tagged: at which price, how many contracts, and who crossed the spread — buyer or seller. The footprint bins them into bid × ask cells at every price of every candle.
Computed, not guessed
Delta (buys − sells), POC (the most-traded price), value area, and 3× diagonal imbalances — every number on the chart is arithmetic on real prints, the same math you just watched run.
Your feed, not ours
The desktop reads the tick feed you already run: NinjaTrader (Apex / Rithmic accounts), Rithmic direct, or crypto exchanges — no proxy in between, no separate data subscription.
The grammar: three reads on one grid
New to the grid? How to read a footprint chart is the full theory guide — this page is the product.
The read candles can't give you: absorption
Absorption is defined by what does not happen: heavy aggression, and a price that refuses to move — because someone large is passively taking the other side. Drive the selling yourself and watch whether the wall holds.
The deeper dive: Absorption in trading.
This page is the demo. The desktop is the instrument.
The native desktop app (Windows, macOS & Linux) renders your live feed with desktop performance — footprint, depth, replay — straight from NinjaTrader, Rithmic direct, or crypto exchanges, with no proxy lag. It reads your broker; it never routes an order. One plan at $29/mo covers everything: footprint, heatmap, DOM and the GEX suite.
14-day free trial · no card to start · why we refuse to send orders
Frequently asked questions
What data does a footprint chart need?
Tick-by-tick trades with the aggressor side. The desktop app reads it from a NinjaTrader feed (Apex / Rithmic accounts), from Rithmic directly, or from crypto exchanges (Binance, Bybit, Deribit) — no proxy in between and no separate data subscription.
Is the chart on this page live?
No — it runs on simulated trades with a DEMO symbol. But it is drawn by the production rendering engine, not a mockup: the same cells, POC, imbalance highlighting and price scale you get in the desktop app, where it renders your real feed.
What is a footprint imbalance?
A diagonal comparison: ask volume at one price against bid volume one tick below. When one side is at least 3× the other, the level is flagged — aggressive buyers (or sellers) dominated that price. Stacked imbalances across several levels mark institutional activity.
Do I need the desktop app?
For real trading, yes: the desktop renders your live broker feed with native performance — footprint, depth and replay. It never routes an order to your broker; it reads. One plan at $29/mo covers everything: footprint, heatmap, DOM and the GEX suite.