Orderflow Footprint

Asa Orderflow Footprint v3 — Product Description

Overview

Asa Orderflow Footprint is a professional-grade footprint chart indicator for MetaTrader 5 that renders real-time Bid/Ask volume (or tick count) at every price level inside each candle. Built for serious order flow traders, it goes far beyond a basic footprint by adding POC migration analysis, a one-glance order-flow dashboard, stacked imbalance detection, absorption flags, and naked Point of Control (POC) lines — all inside the main chart window with no sub-window required.

Designed and tested on Gold (XAUUSD) feeds, the indicator uses a flag-based tick classification engine to separate buyer-initiated and seller-initiated activity on feeds that provide aggressor data, and falls back gracefully to pure volume-by-price analysis on feeds that do not (see Notes).

Key Features

📊 Footprint Chart (Bid | Ask per cell)

    Displays sell-side (Bid) and buy-side (Ask) volume side-by-side at every price bucket inside each candle
    Cell size is freely adjustable via on-chart < / > buttons — no need to re-open settings
    Choose between Tick Count mode (legacy) or Real Volume mode ( volume_real with fallback to volume )
    Fixed-grid price bucketing: cells never shift position while the forming bar is updating
    Point of Control (POC) automatically highlighted per candle

🧭 POC Migration (NEW)

    Tracks how each candle's POC shifts versus the previous bars — the cleanest read of where "value" is actually moving
    Measured across three configurable look-back windows (e.g. 3 / 5 / 15 bars)
    Instantly reveals a healthy trend (POC stepping up/down), a stall (POC flattening), or a divergence (price makes a new high/low while POC fails to follow)
    Works on any feed — based on volume-by-price, not delta

📋 Smart Dashboard (NEW)

    A single, glance-able panel that distils the whole order flow — see direction, conviction, and key levels in one look
    Bias headline — overall direction from short-weighted POC migration (configurable weights), color-coded UP / DOWN / RANGE
    Conviction meter — strong / medium / thin, driven by relative volume, so you know whether a move has real participation behind it
    POC Migration meter — 3 / 5 / 15-bar windows with selectable display: net steps, up-down counts, or percent
    POC trail sparkline — the last bars' POC drawn as a mini-profile to read migration shape at a glance
    Naked POC readout — nearest unfilled POC above and below price, with distance and a proximity highlight when price approaches
    Last-candle character — profile shape (P / b / balanced) and absorption state (buy / sell)
    Built-in scale controls — the < / > cell-size buttons are folded neatly into the panel
    Fully movable — place the dashboard in any chart corner with custom X / Y offset; auto-repositions on chart resize

🔴🟢 Imbalance &amp; Absorption Detection

    Absorption Candle — flags candles where the dominant side's POC is skewed, marked with a colored diamond above/below the bar (green = buy-side, salmon = sell-side)
    Stacked Diagonal Imbalance — highlights consecutive price levels where Ask dominates the Bid one cell lower (or vice versa) by a configurable ratio, colored in distinct Buy/Sell imbalance colors
    Imbalance stack length and ratio are fully configurable ( ImbRatio × ratio, ImbStack minimum rows)

📌 Naked POC Lines

    Automatically draws a horizontal line at each bar's Point of Control (highest combined Bid+Ask cell)
    Lines extend to the right and disappear automatically once a subsequent candle's range touches that price level
    Fully customizable color, style, and width — act as magnets and dynamic support/resistance

🎯 In-Candle POC Marker (NEW)

    Optional marker drawn at the exact POC price, centered inside each candle, so you can scan the whole migration staircase across the chart at a glance
    Configurable glyph/text, color, and font size

📋 Per-Candle Summary Line

    Optional one-line summary below each candle: B: [buys] S: [sells] T: [total] [delta%]
    Gives instant at-a-glance context without reading individual cells

🔔 Smart Alerts

    Popup and/or push notification alerts for:
        POC migration alignment — fires when the 3 / 5 / 15 windows all agree on direction (a strong-trend signal) (NEW)
        Imbalance / absorption candle detection
        Delta sign flip on the just-closed bar (on feeds with aggressor data)
    Alerts fire once per closed candle — no repeated spam on every tick

⚡ Performance Optimized

    Incremental redraw: only the forming candle (shift 0) is recalculated on each tick; all historical candles are drawn once per bar open
    Object reuse: chart objects are updated in-place rather than deleted and recreated, keeping CPU usage low even with 100+ candles displayed
    Heavy work (naked-POC scan, migration) runs on bar close; only relative volume and proximity update intratick

Input Parameters

Main
    ShowFootprint — Show/hide the footprint cell text
    ShowSummary — Show per-candle B/S/Total/Delta% summary line
    TPointScale — Initial cell size (in points); adjustable live with dashboard buttons
    CountMode — Cell value = tick count or real volume
    OFPercent — Absorption candle threshold (%)
    CountCandle — Number of candles to render (up to 100)
    FontSize — Cell text font size
    MBidColor / MAskColor — Highlight color for max Bid / max Ask cells
    sameColor — Color when max Bid and max Ask are on the same cell
    NormalColor / BlankDataColor — Colors for normal and empty cells

Imbalance
    ShowAbsorbCandle — Show absorption candle diamond markers
    ShowImbalance — Enable stacked diagonal imbalance highlight
    ImbRatio — Minimum Ask/Bid ratio to flag a diagonal imbalance cell
    ImbStack — Minimum consecutive imbalance cells required to highlight
    ImbBuyColor / ImbSellColor — Imbalance zone highlight colors

Alert
    AlertPopup / AlertPush — Enable popup / push notification alerts
    AlertOnImb / AlertOnFlip — Alert trigger: imbalance candle / delta flip

Naked POC lines
    ShowPOC — Show naked POC extension lines
    POCColor / POCStyle / POCWidth — POC line appearance settings

POC marker in candle
    ShowPOCInCandle — Show the centered in-candle POC marker
    POCInText — Marker glyph/text
    POCInColor — Marker color
    POCInFontSize — Marker font size

Dashboard
    ShowDashboard — Show/hide the order-flow dashboard
    DashCorner — Dashboard corner (any of the 4 corners)
    DashX / DashY — Dashboard offset from the corner (pixels)
    MigMode — Migration cell display: net steps / up-down / percent
    MigW1 / MigW2 / MigW3 — POC migration look-back windows (bars), default 3 / 5 / 15
    BiasWgt1 / BiasWgt2 / BiasWgt3 — Bias weighting per window (short-weighted by default, 3 / 2 / 1)
    RelVolPeriod — Relative-volume averaging period (bars)
    RelVolStrong / RelVolMedium — Relative-volume thresholds for strong / medium conviction
    ProximityPts — Distance (points) at which a naked POC counts as "near"
    AlertOnAlign — Alert when the 3 migration windows all align

How to Use

    Attach the indicator to any chart and timeframe (XAUUSD M1 recommended)
    Use the < > buttons in the dashboard footer to increase or decrease cell size until each bar shows a readable number of price rows
    Read the Dashboard first: the Bias headline gives direction + conviction; the 3 / 5 / 15 migration meter and POC trail show whether the trend is healthy, stalling, or diverging
    Trade with the migration — enter on pullbacks to a prior candle's POC or a naked POC level that holds; reversal-watch when migration stalls/diverges or an absorption diamond prints against the trend
    Watch the Naked POC readout for the nearest unfilled high-volume levels above/below — natural targets and reaction zones
    Watch for cyan highlighted zones (stacked buy imbalance) and magenta highlighted zones (stacked sell imbalance) as potential institutional order clusters
    Enable Alerts to get notified of migration alignment, imbalance/absorption candles, or delta flips without watching the screen

Notes & Requirements

    Requires a broker that provides tick history via CopyTicksRange() — most ECN/STP brokers on MT5 qualify
    Delta-based features (Delta %, delta-flip alert, and CVD where applicable) require a feed that flags ticks by aggressor side (Bid/Ask). Some accounts — common on certain CFD feeds — send combined Bid+Ask ticks, which makes Delta read ≈ 0. On those feeds, the indicator still works fully via its Volume-by-Price, POC, POC Migration, Naked POC, and Relative-Volume tools, which do not depend on aggressor data.
    Real Volume mode requires the broker to supply volume_real in tick data; the indicator automatically falls back to tick volume if unavailable
    Recommend running on M1 to H1 timeframes for meaningful order flow granularity
    Set CountCandle conservatively (30–50) on lower timeframes to keep chart objects manageable
    This is an analysis tool — it does not place trades, and no indicator guarantees profit. Always use proper risk management.