Orderflow Footprint

Asa Orderflow Footprint v2 — 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 beyond a basic footprint by adding stacked imbalance detection, 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 robust flag-based tick classification engine that correctly separates buyer-initiated and seller-initiated activity even on brokers whose tick flags deviate from the MT5 standard.

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

🔴🟢 Imbalance Detection

• Absorption Candle — flags candles where the dominant side's POC is skewed, marked with an arrow above/below the bar
• 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 threshold is 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

📋 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:
  • Imbalance candle detection
  • Delta sign flip (bullish → bearish or vice versa) on the just-closed bar
• 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

Input Parameters

How to Use

1. Attach the indicator to any chart and timeframe
2. Use the < > panel buttons (bottom-left) to increase or decrease cell size until each bar shows a readable number of price rows
3. Watch for cyan highlighted zones (stacked buy imbalance) and magenta highlighted zones (stacked sell imbalance) as potential institutional order clusters
4. Monitor the delta value shown below each candle — a parenthetical delta (value) indicates an absorption candle
5. Naked POC lines show unmitigated high-volume price areas that the market tends to revisit
6. Enable Alerts to get notified of imbalance 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
• Tick classification uses a broker-adaptive flag detection engine, validated on Gold (XAUUSD) feeds
• 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