Trade Count Indicator: Formula, Settings and How to Read It
Trade Count plots how many individual trades printed inside each bar, independently of the quantity those trades carried. It separates two situations the volume histogram shows identically: the same quantity done in a handful of large transactions, or in hundreds of small ones.
Senzoukria · Indicators · Updated September 2026
Trade Count ships with the Senzoukria desktop app, in the Volume group of the indicator catalogue. It is drawn in its own panel below the chart.
What Trade Count measures
The value is a raw count taken from the trade stream, one increment per print the feed delivers, with no normalization of any kind — the scale belongs to the instrument and the bar interval. Its practical use comes from the ratio with volume: a bar's volume divided by its trade count is the average trade size for that bar. Volume rising much faster than the count means fewer participants doing more size each; the count rising faster than volume means the same business arrived in more, smaller pieces.
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:
Nombre de trades par barre — la granularité brute du flux (un volume égal en 3 trades ou en 300 ne raconte pas la même chose).
How to read it
- Read it beside the Volume pane. The divergence between the two panes is the observation, not the count on its own.
- Volume up while the count stays flat means the average order got bigger.
- The count up while volume stays flat means activity fragmented into smaller trades, which is common when resting liquidity thins and orders get sliced.
- A high count on a narrow range describes a busy but contained auction; the same count on a wide range describes a market moving through many participants.
- Compare counts within one instrument and one timeframe only — the number has no cross-market meaning.
Parameters and defaults
Color and a smoothing window are the only inputs; nothing changes what is counted. Smoothing defaults to 1, which plots the raw count. Values up to 200 average the count across bars, which reads more clearly as the activity trend of a session but hides the single busy bar that usually raised the question in the first place.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smoothing | number | 1 | 1 – 200 |
What it does not show
Trade counts depend heavily on how the feed reports fills. Venues and aggregators differ over whether one incoming order matched against several resting orders arrives as one print or as several, so counts are not comparable across data sources for the same instrument and changing provider shifts the whole series. Algorithmic order slicing inflates the count without any change in real participation. The count carries no direction and no aggressor side. Market data is billed by the data provider, separately from the application subscription.
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
- Volume — Volume
- Buy/Sell Volume — Volume
- Average Trade Size — Volume
- Volume ROC % — Volume
- Relative Volume — Volume
- Level Count — Volume
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 the difference between volume and trade count?
- Volume is the quantity that changed hands; trade count is how many separate transactions produced it. The same quantity done in ten prints and in a thousand gives two identical volume columns and two very different count columns. Dividing volume by trade count gives that bar's average trade size.
- How do I see average trade size per bar?
- Run Trade Count alongside the Volume pane and read the ratio between them: volume divided by count is the average size of a trade in that bar. The indicator has no separate averaging step, because the two raw series already give the figure.
- Why does trade count differ between data providers for the same market?
- Because providers differ in how they aggregate a single incoming order that matches several resting orders. Some report one print, others one print per match. The quantity is identical either way, so volume agrees while counts do not. Compare counts within one feed only.