Unfinished Auctions Indicator: Formula, Settings and How to Read It

Unfinished Auctions marks bars that ended at an extreme without trade on both sides of the tape. A high is flagged when the highest traded level of the bar shows selling but no aggressive buying, and a low is flagged when the lowest level shows buying but no aggressive selling.

Senzoukria · Indicators · Updated September 2026

Unfinished Auctions ships with the Senzoukria desktop app, in the Tape & flow group of the indicator catalogue. It is drawn on the price chart.

What Unfinished Auctions measures

The test looks only at the outermost price level of the bar and only at which side of the tape traded there. If the top level recorded aggressive selling and zero aggressive buying, the high is marked; the mirror condition marks the low. A square is drawn at the bar's high or low, following the original display convention of the series, and because the two tests are independent a single bar can carry a marker at both ends. The reading rests on a common auction interpretation: an extreme that traded on both sides is generally described as a completed auction at that price, while an extreme that only traded one side is described as unfinished business.

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:

Marqueurs d'enchère inachevée — RÉUTILISE la définition existante du repo (`barUnfinishedEnds`, unfinishedEnds.ts) : high inachevé quand le niveau le plus HAUT n'a AUCUN acheteur agressif (buy=0, sell>0) ; low inachevé quand le plus BAS n'a aucun vendeur agressif. Carré posé sur bar.high / bar.low (la convention d'affichage d'origine de l'indicateur).

How to read it

  • A square on top of a bar means buyers never traded aggressively at the highest price of that bar before it closed.
  • A square under a bar means the reverse at the lowest price: no aggressive selling printed there.
  • Traders commonly watch whether price later returns to an unfinished extreme; the marker records the condition of the bar and says nothing about when, or whether, a revisit happens.
  • Several consecutive markers in the same direction describe a sequence of bars each ending at its extreme without a two-sided print, which is ordinary in a fast one-directional move.
  • A marker belongs to a bar, not to the session: the high of a five-minute bar is not the high of the hour, so change the timeframe and the marked extremes change with it.

What it does not show

The indicator needs level data split by aggressor side. A source that provides only open, high, low, close and volume cannot produce it, and that data is part of what your market data provider bills separately from the application. Where liquidity is thin, a single print at the extreme decides the outcome, so a marker can appear or disappear on very little activity. It also ignores size: one contract of aggressive buying at the high is enough to leave the bar unmarked, whatever traded below. And it makes no prediction, so treating every marker as a target to be filled is reading more into it than the rule contains.

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.

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 an unfinished auction in orderflow?
It describes a bar whose extreme price traded on only one side of the tape: buyers lifting offers without sellers hitting bids at that price, or the reverse at the low. The usual contrast is with an extreme that traded both sides, which is read as an auction that completed there. The concept comes from reading the bid and ask footprint, not from price alone.
Does an unfinished high always get revisited?
No. The marker is a description of what did or did not trade at that price inside that bar, and it carries no timing and no guarantee. Some unfinished extremes are revisited within minutes, others are never traded again.
Is an unfinished auction the same thing as a single print?
No, the two come from different tools. A single print belongs to Market Profile and describes a price touched by only one time bracket of the session. This marker is read from the footprint of one bar and looks at whether both sides of the tape traded at its outermost level. They can point at the same area of the chart, but they are measured from different data and over different units of time.

Keep reading

Strategy researchTest a trading strategy, from observation to challenge rulesDefine an observation, question it with the copilot, write a rule and explore costs, drawdown and fictional challenge limits in an interactive example.Quant · Start hereQuant trading for beginners: from idea to backtestDefine a testable rule, choose suitable data and evaluate later periods after costs.Order flow · HubOrder flow trading: the complete guideThe hub. What order flow is, what it shows — aggression, delta, imbalance, absorption, liquidity — and the tools that read it, each linked to a full guide.