Traded levels per bar
Traded levels per bar is the number of distinct price levels at which at least one trade executed inside a bar. It measures how widely activity was spread across prices, independently of how much volume it carried.
Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026
What counts as a traded level
A footprint bar is a list of price levels, each holding a bid volume and an ask volume. A level counts as traded when its total quantity is greater than zero. Levels that appear in the price grid between the low and the high but carry no volume were not traded: price jumped over them, and they are excluded from the count.
This distinction matters because the bar's range in ticks and its traded level count are different numbers. A bar spanning 12 ticks in which only 7 prices printed has a range of 12 and 7 traded levels. The 5 missing levels are a measurement of how thin the book was, not a display defect.
- A placeholder bar with no ticks at all has zero traded levels. Zero here is a measured value: the bar touched no price.
- Levels are counted by distinct price key, after prices are snapped to the instrument's tick grid.
- The count is independent of the footprint cell type; switching from Bid × Ask to Volume does not change which levels traded.
Reading the number against volume and range
Comparing traded levels with the bar's range in ticks exposes hollow bars, where price travelled far but printed at few prices. Comparing them with volume gives the density of the auction: the same volume spread over 3 levels or over 30 describes two different markets.
| Traded levels | Volume | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Few | Large | Locked auction: heavy trading at a handful of prices, rotation |
| Many | Comparable | Price swept through the range without being absorbed |
| Many | Small | Thin tape sliding level to level; movement was cheap |
| Few | Small | Quiet bar; little information either way |
In Senzoukria
The count is the Level Count indicator in the Volume group of the indicator catalog. Its histogram is always non-negative, so it uses a single colour, and a smoothing parameter averages it over N bars. Its companion, Volume per Level, divides the bar's volume by the same count to give the average volume per traded price; when the count is zero, Volume per Level emits no point rather than a zero, because a division by zero is an absence of information.
Spread Proxy (ticks) uses the count as its denominator too: rounded bar range in ticks divided by traded levels. A ratio near 1 means the bar printed at every tick of its range; above 1 means price skipped ticks between prints. The footprint reading guide covers the same idea visually when it describes rows with two numbers, bid × ask, one per price.
Common mistakes
- Treating range in ticks as the level count. Range includes prices that never traded.
- Comparing counts across bar types. A 1-minute bar and a 500-volume bar have no reason to hold similar counts.
- Reading a count across instruments with different tick sizes. Ten levels on ES cover a different fraction of the day's range than ten levels on NQ.
- Filling untraded levels with zero and counting them. That inflates the count and hides the hollow bars that the measure exists to find.
Related
- Level Count indicator
- Volume per Level indicator
- Spread Proxy (ticks) indicator
- How to read a footprint chart
- Range bars
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Frequently asked questions
- Is a bar with many traded levels bullish or bearish?
- Neither by itself. The count says how dispersed the activity was, not who was aggressive. Pair it with the bar's delta and with where the heaviest levels sat to read direction. A bar with many levels and a large positive delta describes buyers sweeping up through thin offers; the same count with balanced delta describes a wide two-sided rotation.
- Why is the traded level count lower than the bar's height suggests?
- Because the bar's height is its range, high minus low, and some prices in between did not execute. Fast markets and thin books both produce bars whose price skipped ticks. Those skipped prices are excluded from the count by definition; the Spread Proxy indicator reports the ratio between the two numbers directly.