Footprint & Tape Reading

The footprint chart and the tape show you what the price chart hides: exactly how much traded at each price, on the bid versus the ask, tick by tick. Footprint & Tape Reading is where order flow gets concrete. These guides cover reading the footprint, cumulative volume delta, absorption and exhaustion, spotting large trades on the DOM, and interpreting the bid-ask imbalance that precedes turns. This is the closest a retail trader gets to seeing institutional activity in real time. If you want to know whether a breakout is backed by real buying or just running stops, this is the category that answers it — one printed trade at a time.