What is Order flow?
Order flow is the record of actual buy and sell trades as they execute, showing who was aggressive at each price rather than only where price ended.
What does Order flow mean in practice?
A candle reports four numbers: open, high, low and close. Order flow looks underneath it at the individual trades that built the candle, separated into those that hit the bid and those that lifted the ask. It describes what happened, not what someone intended.
Two identical-looking candles can be built from opposite behaviour: one on thin, evenly matched volume and one on heavy one-sided buying into a single price shelf. Order flow is how you tell them apart. It is a way of reading activity, and by itself it is not a signal about what to do next.
A worked example
Illustrative only: a candle closes up 0.4%. Order flow shows most of its volume was selling that was absorbed without price falling. The close alone shows none of that.
How to read or test it
Pick one instrument and one timeframe and watch it before drawing any conclusion. Compare what the volume did with what price did: where heavy aggressive volume produced little movement, someone absorbed it, and where light volume moved price easily, there was little resting liquidity. Write down what you expected before reading the numbers, then check. Over time this builds a feel for which patterns matter in that market and which are noise.
How AKQX handles Order flow
AKQX shows footprint order flow on ten crypto pairs from 1 minute to 1 day. Order-flow views for Indian equities are limited and in beta. Orders are never placed from the chart.
See Footprint order flow chart for the feature page.
A common mistake
Treating an order-flow reading as a prediction. It describes past trades and says nothing certain about the next one.
Educational only. This entry explains a term. It is not investment advice and does not recommend any trade, setting or strategy, and example numbers are illustrative, not results.
Related terms
Test the idea instead of taking it on trust
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