Order flow is not read on a candlestick chart. It is read with four tools, each showing something different: the depth of market, the footprint chart, the heatmap and the volume profile. Knowing what each one shows, and what it does not, stops you buying one for the wrong reason.
- The DOM shows resting orders, that is displayed intent, which can be pulled at any moment.
- The footprint chart shows executed trades, inside each candle, buyers against sellers.
- The heatmap shows the book over time, so what appears and what disappears.
- The volume profile shows where volume accumulated by price level, not by unit of time.
A candle summarises four numbers for a period: open, high, low, close. Everything that happened inside, who bought, at what price, against whom, vanished into the summary. Order flow tools exist to recover that lost information, and they do it in four different ways.
This article describes what each one displays, what it costs in attention, and which trading style it suits. It does not claim any of them makes you profitable: they are reading instruments, not signals.
What is DOM in trading? Depth of market explained
The DOM, short for depth of market, is the vertical display of the order book: at every price level above and below the market, the number of contracts or shares resting there. It is a photograph of displayed intent at a given instant, on a given instrument.
What the DOM does not tell you matters as much as what it does. A displayed order is not an executed order: it can be cancelled in a fraction of a second, and often is. That is the structural limit of DOM trading, and the reason an impressive wall of orders can vanish at the exact moment price reaches it.
Trading the DOM makes sense on futures, where the book is centralised and therefore complete. In retail forex there is no single book: what your broker shows is its own view, not the market. That distinction is worth knowing before building a method on it.
Footprint charts: what actually traded
Where the DOM shows waiting, the footprint chart shows execution. Each candle is opened into two columns: at every price level, how much was bought at the ask and how much was sold at the bid. It is the real trace of what happened, with no assumed intent.
Its main value is imbalance: when a level shows far more aggression on one side than the other, it marks a place where one group paid to get in. Those imbalances often leave a footprint that price comes back to, which makes them useful as reference points.
The cost of a foot print chart is attention. It is the densest tool of the four, and it requires knowing precisely what you are looking for, otherwise you stare at a wall of numbers with no conclusion. It earns its place on short timeframes and on few instruments at once.
How to read a footprint chart, in practice: pick one level at a time rather than scanning the whole candle. Compare the two columns at that price, note which side was the aggressor, and only then widen out. Traders who find foot print charts unreadable are almost always trying to read every level at once.
Heatmap trading: the book over time
A heatmap takes the order book and spreads it across time: the horizontal axis is time, the vertical axis is price, and colour is the size of resting orders. You watch dense zones appear and disappear, which a static DOM cannot show.
It is the tool that makes order pulling visible: a thick zone that fades just before price reaches it tells you something no candle tells you. Like the DOM it derives from, it needs a centralised book to mean anything.
Volume profile: where the market spent its time
The volume profile flips the question. Instead of asking how much traded at each moment, it asks how much traded at each price, over a chosen period. The result is a horizontal histogram whose bulges mark the levels where the market did most of its business.
Those levels work as reference points because they concentrate existing positions. A price where many people entered is a price where many people will react on the return. That is where the volume profile statistical edge sits, and it is a modest one: it gives areas of interest, not signals.
Unlike the other three, the volume profile is available on most consumer charting platforms and needs no real-time market data subscription. It is the most accessible of the set, and often the best place to start.
A volume profile strategy usually comes down to two ideas: trade away from the thin areas, where price moves fast because little business was done, and expect reactions at the thick ones. Any volume profile trading strategy built on more than that tends to be fitting shapes after the fact, which is the same trap as reading a trading heat map for patterns that were obvious only once printed.
Which one to choose, based on what you do
| Tool | What it shows | Where it fits | Attention cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| DOM | Resting orders, right now | Futures, scalping | High, continuous |
| Footprint | Executed trades | Short timeframes | Very high |
| Heatmap | The book over time | Futures, intraday | High |
| Volume profile | Volume per price level | All timeframes | Low |
A simple rule to decide: if you are not holding positions by the minute, the DOM and the footprint will give you little and cost you a lot in attention. The volume profile is read once a session and stays useful in swing trading. Starting there, and adding the others only if the need appears, avoids an expensive unused subscription.
What Tradoshi does, and what it does not
To be clear: Tradoshi provides no DOM, no footprint and no heatmap. Those are execution-platform tools, wired into a real-time data feed, and that is not the job of a trading journal.
What we do is what comes afterwards: journaling the trades those methods produce, then analysing them like any other, by time of day, by instrument, by size, with their maximum excursions. An order flow trader arguably needs that measurement more than most, because the method is fast and memory of a session is even less reliable than usual.
For the teaching side, the Oshi Academy covers the subject in a structured path, from understanding order flow through to market structure. And if you are after the definition first, it is in our article on what order flow is.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
What is DOM in trading?
The DOM, or depth of market, is the display of resting orders at each price level around the market. It shows displayed intent at a given instant, on both the bid and the ask side. A visible order is not an executed one: it can be cancelled at any time, which is this tool's main limitation.
What is the difference between the DOM and a footprint chart?
The DOM shows what is waiting, the footprint shows what was executed. The first describes revocable intent, the second a permanent trace. They complement each other: you watch the DOM to anticipate, the footprint to check what actually happened.
Does the volume profile give a statistical edge?
It gives areas of interest, not signals. Levels where a lot of volume traded concentrate existing positions, so probable reactions when price returns. It is a context marker, to be combined with an entry method, not a trading rule on its own.
Do these tools work on forex?
The volume profile does, with the caveat that displayed volume is your broker's and not that of a centralised market. The DOM and the heatmap much less: retail forex has no single order book, so what you see is one broker's view.
Which one should a beginner start with?
The volume profile, for three reasons: it is available on most platforms without a real-time data subscription, it is read once a session instead of demanding continuous attention, and it stays useful on higher timeframes. The DOM and footprint come later, if the method calls for them.
Do you need a paid subscription to read order flow?
For the DOM, the footprint and the heatmap, almost always yes: they rest on a real-time market data feed that is paid for, often on top of the platform itself. The volume profile is the exception and remains available on free charting tools.