Reading a Footprint Chart

Bid × ask at every price, and the candle's own point of control.

A footprint chart opens up each candle and shows the buying and selling that happened at every price level inside it — usually as a bid × ask pair per row.

Left = volume traded at the bid (sellers), right = at the ask (buyers). The heaviest row is the candle's POC.

Reading a footprint, you're looking for where volume concentrated and which side was aggressive:

Candle POC — the price with the most volume in that bar; a magnet and a reference.
Lopsided rows — far more buying than selling (or vice-versa) at a level hints at initiative.
Where volume dries up — thin extremes often mark exhaustion or a coming reversal.

Footprint cells, delta and CVD are genuinely live — readable on a forming candle at any moment — which is why they're the day-trader's bread and butter.

AlgoPloy's footprint uses a level-of-detail rule: zoomed out, cells become colour blocks; zoomed in, the numbers appear — so it stays readable and fast at any scale.