The most feature-rich footprint chart you can trade

A footprint chart shows you the one thing candles hide: the actual buying and selling at every price inside every bar. SabrTrader's footprint is not a stripped-down copy. It ships with fourteen one-click templates, per-price bid and ask, six kinds of imbalance detection, absorption, exhaustion, stopping volume and a dozen more order-flow signals, delta and cumulative delta, volume bubbles, and a ten-slot alert engine. If you read order flow, this is the footprint built for you.

Two bars can look identical on a candlestick chart and tell completely different stories underneath. One was bought up with aggressive market orders. The other was sold into the whole way and only closed green because a few large bids soaked up the selling. A footprint chart makes that difference visible. It splits each bar into price rows and shows the volume that traded at the bid and at the ask on every row, so you can see who was in control, where they got trapped, and where the aggressive side ran out of steam. This page walks through every feature and every setting of the SabrTrader footprint, so you can see just how deep it goes before you install it.

How to read a footprint bar

Once you can read a single bar, the whole chart opens up. Take one price row inside a bar. On the classic Bid/Ask template it shows two numbers, the volume that traded at the bid on the left and at the ask on the right. Buyers lift the ask, sellers hit the bid, so a row where the ask number dwarfs the bid is a row buyers were leaning on, and the reverse marks aggressive selling. Stack those rows up the bar and you can see exactly where the aggression was and where it dried up.

The Point of Control is the widest row, the price where the most traded, and it acts as the bar's center of gravity. The value area shades the range where most of the bar's business happened. A diagonal imbalance, where the buying at one price overwhelms the selling at the price just below, gets highlighted for you, and several of those stacked together is a footprint of a market being run in one direction. At the extremes you watch for exhaustion, where the aggressive side simply stops showing up, and absorption, where a wall of passive orders soaks up everything thrown at it without price moving. SabrTrader marks all of it, so you are reading signals, not squinting at numbers. That is the difference between a footprint you glance at and one you actually trade.

Why traders choose our footprint

Built for every kind of order-flow trader

A footprint is only feature-rich if those features map to how real traders read the tape. Ours meets you wherever you are.

Fourteen templates, one click each

This is the feature traders fall in love with first. The footprint has fourteen built-in display templates, and switching between them is a single click. Each one rewrites the cell contents, the background histograms and the relevant toggles for you, so you are never hand-building a look. Start from a template you like and tweak from there.

The screenshots throughout this page are all the same ES one-minute chart, switched between templates. Notice how completely the read changes while the underlying data stays the same. That is the quiet superpower of the template system: you are never locked into one way of seeing the tape. Scalping a fast open? Flip to Bid/Ask or Delta for the raw aggression. Hunting a level to fade? The volume-profile and imbalance templates show you where the size sits. Looking for the big orders? Big trades strips it down to just the fat prints and bubbles. One indicator, a dozen lenses, a single click between them, and every one of them fully editable once you find the look you love.

What each cell can show

The cell is the heart of a footprint, and ours is fully configurable down to the last detail. You are not stuck with one vendor's idea of what a cell should show. Choose independently what the left and right side of every price row displays, layer a background histogram behind it, and set the colors, so the read matches exactly how your eye works.

• Cell contents. Bid, ask, bid by ask together, delta, total delta, total volume, bid delta or ask delta, chosen independently for each side of the row. Want raw bid and ask for pure aggression reading? Done. Prefer net delta for a cleaner tape? One setting.
• Background histograms. Turn each cell or the whole bar into a horizontal histogram sized by volume or delta, in solid or gradient color, sourced from delta, volume, imbalance or neutral. This is what makes the heavy prices leap off the chart instead of hiding in a grid of numbers.
• Alignment and sizing. Center or left-align the profile, adjust font size, cell spacing and profile width, so the footprint stays crisp and readable whether you are zoomed out on a slow day or in tight on a fast open.

Six kinds of imbalance detection

An imbalance is where the aggressive buying at one price dwarfs the aggressive selling at the price diagonally below it, or the reverse. It is the clearest single sign of who is winning a price. One imbalance is a data point. Several stacked on top of each other is a story, the footprint of a market being run hard in one direction, and the zone they leave behind becomes support or resistance you can lean on. Get the imbalance read right and you are trading with the aggressor instead of in front of them. SabrTrader detects and marks the entire family, each with an adjustable ratio and minimum size so you tune it to your instrument.

• Diagonal imbalances highlighted right on the cells, the core read, with a ratio and minimum size you control.
• Stacked imbalances, several in a row, the strongest continuation and support/resistance signal the footprint gives.
• Multiple, oversized and big imbalances, size-filtered variants so you can isolate only the ones that carry real weight.
• Imbalance reversal and inverse imbalance, the exhaustion side of the read, where the aggression flips and a turn is brewing.
• Consecutive imbalances tracked across cells for run detection.
• Second-slot imbalances for a looser diagonal definition when your market needs it.

Every one of these is a toggle and a color, so you can run a clean chart that shows only stacked buy and sell imbalances, or a fully instrumented one that flags every variant. The stacked-imbalance zones in particular are worth their weight: mark them once and price will tell you, again and again, whether the aggressive side that built them is still in control.

Point of Control, value area and the structure of each bar

Every bar in the footprint carries its own volume structure, and you can surface as much or as little of it as you want. This is the layer that turns a footprint from a wall of numbers into a map of where each bar found value and where it rejected price.

• Point of Control. Up to three POCs per bar, the prices where the most volume traded, tracked across bars so you can see control migrate. Add consecutive-POC tracking to spot a trending series, bull and bear POC coloring to read direction at a glance, and POC-gap and POC-in-wick detection for the structural edge cases that so often get retested.
• Value area. The per-bar value area shows the range where the bulk of the bar's business happened. Engulfing value area and value-area-gap detection flag when one bar swallows another or leaves a gap, the acceptance and rejection reads that tell you whether a move is real or about to snap back.
• Prints. The single-price tells. Thin prints mark prices touched only briefly, fat prints mark unusually heavy single cells, zero prints mark one-sided prices, and exhaustion prints mark the blow-off tops and bottoms. Individually they are hints. Together they are a running commentary on where the auction is unfinished and where it just gave out.

Every order-flow signal, detected for you

This is the heart of the tool, and it is where most footprints stop short. Reading order flow by eye is hard and slow. The events that actually move markets, a level being absorbed, a move exhausting, volume that stops a trend cold, are subtle and easy to miss when you are watching a fast tape. SabrTrader detects them for you and marks them on the chart the moment they print, each one individually toggleable so you show only the signals you trade. Here is the full library, and what each one puts in your hands.

Absorption

Absorption is the fingerprint of a defended level. Price drives into a price and aggressive orders keep hitting it, but a wall of passive limit orders soaks all of it up and price simply does not move. That is a large participant quietly building or defending a position. When you see absorption at support or resistance, you are watching the level hold in real time, before the bounce. SabrTrader flags absorption automatically, with adjustable lookback and an outline that extends until the level is tested again, so you know exactly where the big passive orders sat.

Exhaustion

Every trend runs out of fuel eventually. Exhaustion is the print that shows it happening: aggressive activity into an extreme thins out, the buyers lifting the highs or the sellers pressing the lows simply stop showing up. Spotting exhaustion is how you avoid chasing the last tick of a move and how you position for the turn before price confirms it. The exhaustion print marker puts it right on the bar.

Stopping volume

Sometimes a move does not fade, it hits a wall. Stopping volume is a sudden surge of trade that halts a trend cold, the moment a large opposing order steps in and absorbs the drive. It is one of the earliest and most reliable reversal tells in all of order flow, and it is nearly invisible on a candlestick chart. The footprint marks it so you see the brakes go on as they happen.

Unfinished business

When a high or low prints with two-sided activity, buying and selling both still active at the extreme, the auction did not finish there. The market tends to come back and complete it. These unfinished highs and lows are some of the highest-probability magnets on the chart, and they make excellent targets. SabrTrader marks them so you always know where price has a reason to return.

Delta divergence and fading momentum

Price and the order flow behind it do not always agree. When price grinds to a new high but delta, the net of buying over selling, makes a lower high, the buyers driving the move are quietly stepping back. That divergence is a warning the trend is tiring, often well before price rolls over. The fading-momentum and delta-divergence markers surface it automatically, so you can tighten your stop or start hunting the reversal while everyone watching candles is still long.

Market sweeps and big delta

Not all orders are equal. A market sweep is an aggressive order tearing through several price levels in one motion, the signature of someone who wants in now and does not care about price. A big-delta print is an outsized imbalance at a single price. Both mark genuine intent, the footsteps of size in the market, and both are flagged for you so you can trade alongside the real money instead of guessing where it is.

Trapped traders and volume sequencing

The most profitable moves often come from other traders being wrong. When a burst of aggressive buying at a high is immediately reversed, those buyers are trapped, and their stops become fuel for the move down. The trapped-traders and volume-sequencing markers spot these traps as they form, so you can be on the right side of the squeeze.

Bar markers and a full statistics panel

Beyond the cells, the footprint annotates each completed bar with a rich set of markers and a summary strip.

• Delta bar markers. Delta rise, drop, flip, reversal, tail, trap, sweep and slingshot, plus trapped traders, reversal and inverse imbalances, close-versus-min/max delta and continuous-POC markers, each toggleable.
• Bar statistics. Per-bar volume, delta, delta percent and much more surfaced above or below the bar.
• The summary panel. A bottom strip that runs Volume, Delta, Delta percent, Cumulative Delta and delta signals across every bar, color-coded, so the tape reads left to right at a glance.

Volume bubbles and big trades

Sometimes the story is not the whole distribution, it is one enormous order. A single institutional print can mark a top, defend a level, or kick off a run, and on a candlestick chart it is completely invisible. The footprint can overlay volume bubbles sized by trade size, with adjustable sensitivity, lookback and multiplier so you catch exactly the orders that matter for your market, and the Big trades template strips everything else away to show just the size and the fat prints. It is the fastest way on the platform to see where the real money hit, and to trade in its wake instead of against it.

Delta, cumulative delta and volume cluster

Delta, the net of aggressive buying over aggressive selling, is the pulse of order flow, and the footprint gives you every view of it. See it per cell to read who won each price, per bar as total delta to read who won the bar, and as session cumulative delta to read who is winning the day. Watch for the moments delta and price disagree, the divergences that front-run reversals, and the bars where delta flips hard against the prior trend. The bottom statistics panel keeps running Volume, Delta, Delta percent and Cumulative Delta across every bar, color-coded, so the balance of power reads left to right without you doing a single calculation. The Volume Cluster template turns each bar into a solid-block profile so the heavy prices glow like a heatmap, and you can color it by delta to see size and aggression in a single glance.

Up to ten configurable alerts

No one can watch every price on every chart all day, and the best signals often print in the seconds you looked away. The footprint carries ten independent alert slots, each of which you can point at any of the order-flow signals, a stacked imbalance, an absorption at a level, a stopping-volume event, a big-delta print and more, each with its own sound. Set them once and the platform watches the tape for you across every instrument, so you can trade more markets with less screen time and never miss the print that matters. It is like having a second set of eyes trained specifically on order flow.

The complete settings reference

Here is the full depth of the tool, grouped the way the settings are organized. This is what feature-rich actually looks like.

Templates and cells

Imbalances

POC, value area and prints

Order-flow signals

Bar markers and statistics

Volume bubbles, color and alerts

How to trade with it

All that depth exists to serve a handful of high-quality reads. Here is what the footprint is built to help you see.

Stacked imbalances for continuation

Several buy imbalances stacked on top of each other show aggressive buyers lifting every offer on the way up. Trade with them for continuation, and watch for the stack to stop, which is your early exit or reversal warning.

Absorption at a level

When price hits a level and a wall of passive orders absorbs the aggression without price moving, the level is being defended. The absorption marker flags it for you, and a failure of the aggressive side to break through is a high-quality fade.

Exhaustion and stopping volume at the extremes

A blow-off print into a high followed by exhaustion and stopping volume is the footprint of a move running out of fuel. Combined with a delta divergence, it is one of the cleanest reversal signals order flow provides.

Delta divergence

When price makes a new high but delta does not, the buying behind the move is fading. The footprint marks the divergence so you can tighten risk or look for the turn.

Unfinished business as a target

A high or low left with two-sided activity tends to get revisited. Use unfinished business as a logical target in the direction of your trade.

Works on every market and every timeframe

The footprint works anywhere there is real tick-level bid and ask data: index and commodity futures, stocks, ETFs and crypto. The screenshots on this page are an ES one-minute chart, the classic scalping view, but the same cells and signals read a tick chart, a volume or range bar, and higher timeframes just as cleanly. Because SabrTrader builds every cell from tick data through your own feed, the bid/ask split and the delta are the real thing, not an estimate.

How it compares

Frequently asked questions