Unfinished auction
An unfinished auction is a footprint bar extreme where the auction did not complete in the usual way: under the convention used by Senzoukria, the highest level of the bar has sell volume but no aggressive buy volume, or the lowest level has buy volume but no aggressive sell volume. Some platforms use the term for the opposite case, an extreme where both sides still traded, so the convention must be stated.
Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026
Two conventions for one name
The phrase comes from auction market theory, where a completed auction at an extreme means one side finally gave up and the other side stopped trading there. Platforms disagree about what an incomplete one looks like on a footprint.
Senzoukria keeps the historical convention of its own indicator: the high is unfinished when buy volume at the highest level is zero while sell volume is positive, and the low is unfinished when sell volume at the lowest level is zero while buy volume is positive. In other words, the extreme was reached without the aggressive side actually printing there. Other platforms, and many footprint tutorials, call an extreme unfinished when both bid and ask volume are still positive at the very top or bottom, reasoning that a finished auction should end with a zero on one side. The two definitions flag different bars, and neither carries a promise that price will return.
How to read a flagged extreme
- Note which convention produced the flag before comparing charts or reading someone else's rule.
- Look at the delta of the top or bottom ticks alongside it; a zero-side extreme with a strong opposite delta below it reads differently from one on a quiet bar.
- Treat the level as a reference to watch on later bars. Any claim about revisits must be measured on all flagged extremes, including the ones price never returned to.
- On thin overnight bars, a zero on one side at the extreme is common and carries less information.
In Senzoukria
The Unfinished Auctions overlay in the Tape & flow group draws a square on the bar's high or low when the condition is met, with a single colour parameter. Its indicator note in the app reads: at the high, buy = 0 and sell > 0; at the low, sell = 0 and buy > 0; some platforms use the term for both sides positive at an extreme; these are different conventions and this marker makes no promise of a retest. The catalog label lists it as Auction extremes with the zero-side convention. The detection reuses the existing definition of unfinished ends in the footprint code, so the marker and the footprint cells agree.
Common mistakes
- Assuming the marker means price must come back to fill the level.
- Mixing the zero-side and both-sides conventions in one set of notes.
- Reading the flag on a bar whose extreme level is a single thin print.
- Ignoring that the extreme of a bar depends on the bar type: a tick bar and a time bar over the same period end at different prices.
Related
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Frequently asked questions
- Which unfinished-auction convention is right?
- Neither is right in an absolute sense; they encode different ideas about what a complete auction looks like. The zero-side convention says the aggressor never printed at the extreme. The both-sides convention says trading was still two-way when the bar ended. What matters for a trader is to use one consistently, know which one the software implements, and test any revisit hypothesis under that convention.
- Does an unfinished auction imply a magnet or a retest?
- It is often described that way in tutorials, but the marker in Senzoukria explicitly makes no such promise. A retest claim needs a defined zone, a defined time window and a count of every flagged extreme, including those that were never revisited. Without that, the level is a hypothesis to watch, not a target.