Footprint order flow chart for crypto and Indian markets

What is footprint order flow?

An ordinary candle compresses a period of trading into four numbers: open, high, low and close. It tells you where price finished, and nothing at all about how it got there. A footprint chart opens that candle up and shows the volume traded at each price level inside it, separated into buying and selling.

That difference matters because two identical-looking candles can be built from completely opposite behaviour. A candle that closed up on thin, evenly matched volume is not the same event as one that closed up on heavy one-sided buying into a single price shelf, even though both print as the same green bar. Footprint is how you tell them apart.

What the AKQX chart shows at each price row

Inside every candle, each price row carries the numbers that describe what happened there:

• Sell × Buy volume — how much traded into the bid and into the ask at that exact price, side by side.
• Delta — buy volume minus sell volume, for the row and for the candle as a whole. Delta that disagrees with price direction is usually the interesting case.
• POC, the point of control — the price row that absorbed the most volume in that candle, which is often where price returns to later.
• Imbalance — rows where buying and selling are heavily lopsided rather than roughly matched, highlighted so you are not hunting for them by eye.

Beyond the footprint itself, the chart carries deeper order-flow views for traders who want them, including depth-of-market heatmaps, iceberg-order detection and absorption analysis. These are tools for reading activity, not signals, and none of them tells you what to do.

Crypto and Indian equities: what differs

Crypto. Footprint order flow runs on ten crypto pairs, tick by tick, across every timeframe from 1 minute to 1 day. Crypto is also the only market where AKQX supports real order execution, and then only through your own exchange account with your own API keys.

Indian equities. NIFTY 50, BANKNIFTY and NSE stocks have full charting and paper trading. Order-flow views for Indian equities are limited and still in beta, because the tick-level data needed for a true footprint is not equally available across these feeds. AKQX does not offer real-money execution for Indian equities at all.

Split view, drawing tools and alerts

Split view shows up to four charts at once, so a crypto pair and an Indian index can sit beside each other on one screen instead of in four browser tabs. How many chart tabs you get depends on your plan, starting at one on the free account.

Drawing tools include trend lines, Fibonacci levels, rectangles and a measure tool, and your drawings persist between sessions rather than vanishing on reload. A draw lock keeps you from dragging a level by accident while you are reading the chart.

Price alerts fire when a level you care about is reached, so watching a setup does not mean staring at it. Separately, Telegram safety alerts cover the operational side — stale market data, broker rejections, margin problems and strategy drift.

Trying it free, and the limits that apply

The Advanced Chart preview runs for 30 minutes a day with no account, on the real chart rather than a mock-up. A free account adds an order-flow trial of 60 minutes a day across 5 separate days, along with 1 paper algo, 10 backtests a month and 3 saved strategies.

The limits worth knowing before you start:

• Orders are never placed from the chart. Execution only ever happens through an algo you built, tested and deployed yourself.
• Footprint order flow covers ten crypto pairs, not every symbol on the platform.
• Indian order-flow views are limited and in beta.
• Market data comes from third-party exchanges and providers, may be delayed or inaccurate, and may not be copied or redistributed.

If you find a pattern in the order flow worth acting on, the next step is not to trade it by hand but to write it down as rules and test it with fee and slippage estimates, then paper trade it on live prices. That path exists precisely so that a chart observation has to survive two independent checks before any money is involved.

Questions about footprint chart

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