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Unfinished Auctions — Tape & flow, 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 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.
Related indicators
- Volume Z-Score — Tape & flow
- Session RVOL — Tape & flow
- Trade intensity — Tape & flow
- Tape speed EMA — Tape & flow
- Climax bars — Tape & flow
- Quiet bars — Tape & flow
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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.