Delta per Trade Indicator: Formula, Settings and How to Read It
Delta per Trade divides a bar's net delta by the number of trades in that bar, giving an average net contract count per execution. It separates order flow pressure from order flow activity: two bars can share the same delta while one was built by a few determined participants and the other by a crowd of small orders that nearly cancelled each other.
Senzoukria · Indicators · Updated September 2026
Delta per Trade ships with the Senzoukria desktop app, in the Delta group of the indicator catalogue. It is drawn in its own panel below the chart.
What Delta per Trade measures
Both terms are bar aggregates, used exactly as the application publishes them and never recomputed from the individual price levels, so the ratio stays consistent with average trade size, which divides volume by the same trade count. The unit is contracts per trade, and the sign always matches the bar's delta: the indicator rescales the magnitude of a known imbalance, it never contradicts its direction. A delta of +500 spread over 50 trades reads +10 per trade, while the same +500 over 5000 trades reads +0.1, and those two bars describe very different behaviour. When trade count is zero, as on a placeholder bar with no execution, no point is plotted, because a bar with no trades has no per-trade value.
The formula, as implemented
This is not a description of how the indicator is usually defined elsewhere — it is what the shipped code computes, documented next to the implementation:
Delta moyen par TRADE : value = totalDelta / tradeCount Les deux termes sont des agrégats de BARRE posés par le backend, consommés tels quels (canon : `totalDelta` n'est jamais recalculé côté catalogue) — le rapport reste donc cohérent avec `avg-trade-size` (volume.ts), qui divise le volume par le même dénominateur. POURQUOI : sépare la PRESSION de l'ACTIVITÉ. Delta +500 sur 50 trades (+10/trade) = quelques gros acheteurs déterminés ; +500 sur 5000 trades (+0,1/trade) = une foule de petits ordres qui s'annulent presque — même delta, conviction opposée. C'est la métrique qui distingue l'institutionnel du bruit retail sans jamais quitter le domaine des faits mesurés. tradeCount = 0 (barre placeholder sans exécution) → PAS de point : 0/0 n'est pas « 0 par trade », c'est l'absence de trade.
How to read it
- Compare the reading with the bar's raw delta rather than looking at it alone. A modest delta carried by few large trades is a different event from the same delta spread across thousands of small ones.
- Rising absolute values while delta stays flat mean fewer, larger executions are producing the same imbalance.
- Values collapsing towards zero mean the net imbalance became small relative to the number of executions, either because the two sides increasingly offset or because the same delta is now spread across far more trades.
- Judge the scale against the instrument's own recent readings. Contracts per trade depends on contract size, tick value and typical participation, so no figure is universally large.
- Reading it beside average trade size is often useful: the two share a denominator, so one shows how big the trades were and the other how one-sided.
Parameters and defaults
Positive and negative colours control the histogram only. Smoothing defaults to 1, meaning the raw series is plotted; larger values average the ratio over that many bars, which suppresses one-bar spikes, and those spikes are usually the reason to watch this indicator at all.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smoothing | number | 1 | 1 – 200 |
What it does not show
Trade count depends on how the venue reports executions. Some markets publish one message per aggressive order and others split or aggregate fills, so per-trade values are comparable within an instrument and feed but not across them. The indicator cannot identify who traded: a high value shows large executions, not an institution, and a single participant can fragment an order into many small trades to produce the opposite reading. It also carries no information about resting size or about where in the bar the flow occurred. Bars without executions produce no point, so the series can contain gaps in quiet periods.
Using it in Senzoukria
Add it from the Indicators panel of any footprint chart or candle chart. It runs on futures data from Rithmic or Databento and on crypto pairs from Binance and Bybit, on the same engine — the calculation does not change with the venue, only the data feeding it does. Market data subscriptions are billed by the provider, separately from the app.
Related indicators
- Delta % — Delta
- Session CVD — Delta
- Delta momentum — Delta
- Delta min/max — Delta
- Price/Delta Divergence — Delta
- Delta % Histogram — Delta
See the full indicator library, or start with the order flow guide if you are new to reading aggression, delta and absorption.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a good delta per trade value?
- There is no universal figure. Contracts per trade depends on the instrument's contract size, its typical order size and how the venue reports executions, so a value that is large on one future is ordinary on another. The practical approach is to compare a bar with the same instrument's own recent range rather than with an absolute threshold.
- Does delta per trade identify institutional orders?
- No. It shows whether a bar's imbalance was produced by few large executions or many small ones, which is a measurable fact about the trade tape. It says nothing about the identity or type of participant, and large orders are routinely broken into small fills, which would push the value down rather than up.
- How is delta per trade different from average trade size?
- They share the same denominator, the bar's trade count, but not the numerator. Average trade size divides total volume by trade count and is always positive, describing how big executions were. Delta per trade divides net delta by trade count, so it is signed and describes how one-sided the average execution was.