Order flow
Order flow is the stream of executed transactions behind a price move: which trades hit the ask, which hit the bid, at what price and in what size. Reading it shows who was aggressive and whether they were met, rather than only where the candle closed.
Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026
What order flow actually contains
Every futures trade is a match between an aggressive order and a resting order. The aggressor pays the offer or hits the bid; the resting side was already in the book. Order flow is the record of those matches, tagged with the side that initiated them, the price, the size and the time. It is raw transaction data, not an indicator.
The word is often used loosely for anything derived from that data. Strictly, the order flow is the tape; delta, imbalances, absorption and cumulative delta are calculations on top of it. Keeping the two apart helps when a tool shows a number that the underlying data cannot support.
- Trades: price, size, timestamp, aggressor side (ask or bid).
- Depth: the resting bids and offers, when the feed provides a book (the trade tape alone does not).
- Derived values: delta per price, bar delta, cumulative delta, imbalances, profiles.
How it differs from a candle
- A candle keeps four prices and a total volume. Order flow keeps every trade and which side started it.
- Two bars with the same close can have opposite delta: one closed up because buyers lifted offers, the other because sellers stopped hitting bids.
- A candle cannot show absorption, where large resting orders take aggressive volume without price moving. Order flow can, because the volume and the lack of movement are both visible.
- Order flow does not predict. It describes what happened at each price and lets you judge whether the move was earned or fragile.
In Senzoukria
The footprint page is where order flow is displayed trade by trade, aggregated per price into bid × ask cells. The cell menu switches between Bid × Ask, Delta, Centered Delta, Volume + Delta and profile views. The same tape feeds the heatmap page, where executed volume can be shown in BID / ASK / DELTA columns next to the depth ladder.
The data itself is provided by the connected feed. A futures tape with aggressor side comes from the broker or data vendor and is billed by that provider; Senzoukria reads it and never fills a missing side with an assumption. Crypto pairs are available for analysis only, rebuilt from public trade archives into the same bid × ask format.
Common mistakes
- Treating a bar with no aggressor data as a bar with zero delta. Missing is not zero; the software leaves the field empty.
- Reading a single big print as intent. One trade tells you size, not who is behind it or what they will do next.
- Expecting a signal. Order flow is context for a decision you still have to make with your own plan and risk limits.
- Mixing feeds. Tick data from one vendor and bars from another rarely agree on aggressor side or session boundaries.
Related
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Frequently asked questions
- Is order flow the same as volume?
- No. Volume is a count of contracts traded. Order flow keeps the same contracts but splits them by the side that initiated each trade and by the price where it happened. Two bars can share a volume figure and tell opposite stories once the split is visible.
- What data do I need to read order flow?
- You need a trade feed that carries the aggressor side, typically from a futures broker connection or a market data vendor. Delayed or aggregated data without that flag cannot produce a real footprint. The data subscription is a separate cost from the charting software.
- Can order flow be used on crypto?
- Yes, in the sense that exchange trade streams carry a taker side, so bid and ask volume can be rebuilt per price. In Senzoukria, crypto pairs are available for analysis, not for order routing.