What is Orderflow
Order flow is the practice of reading the auction as it actually happens. Instead of waiting on lagging studies or hoping a moving average catches up, you watch the live interaction between buyers and sellers — who is hitting the bid, who is lifting the offer, where size is willing to defend, where it pulls and runs. This post is the entry point to OrderFlow Labs' coverage of the topic: what order flow trading is, the core tools you use to do it, how those tools fit together, and where the discipline genuinely improves your trading versus where it doesn't.
What is order flow trading?
Order flow trading involves visualizing the interactions between the buyers and sellers in order to identify control of the current auction. The rawest form of that activity is the time and sales — the tape. As buy and sell volume enter the market, the relationship between how they interact gives you an edge: a map of who is controlling the auction, and who is most interested in aggressively pressing position.
Why use it? Because it is non-lagging. It is not a moving average, it is not a smoothed indicator, it is not derived from data that already happened a bar ago. It comes straight across your screen, in immediate time, from a centralized order book. In futures, that centralization matters. There are no hidden orders out there. Every working order is displayed on the depth of market in front of your face. That visibility is what lets you really gauge what is occurring in the current environment, instead of inferring it after the fact.
If price action is the outcome of the auction, order flow is the auction itself. You are no longer trading what already printed; you are trading what is happening at the level of trade execution.
The core order flow tools
This is a non-exhaustive list. There are more advanced tools, more derived studies, more proprietary builds out there. But these are the core seven, and they are available out of the box in every major charting platform. Each gets its own deep guide on this site. The summaries below are the orientation, and the link under each one is where you go to actually learn the tool. Read in order, they'll move you from raw execution data (the tape and the DOM) into structural reads (the volume profile and the footprint) and then into context tools (market profile, VWAP, RVOL) that tell you how to weight everything else.
In my opinion, these tools are absolutely essential to order flow trading. Utilizing them well requires the understanding of multiple nuances, and that understanding only comes with time, screen hours, and visualization. The summaries below get you oriented; the deep guides walk you through the mechanics.
Time and Sales (the tape)
The tape is the receipt of every executed transaction. You see the time, the size, the price, and — if your platform colors it — whether the trade hit the bid or lifted the ask. That last piece is what makes the tape valuable. It tells you which side was the aggressor on each individual print. The bid/ask split tells you who took the trade. Above-ask and below-bid prints — sweeps — tell you the taker was big enough or in enough of a hurry to clear more than one price level in a single shot. Out of that stream, three concepts emerge: aggression, speed, and absorption.
Read the full guide → /blogs/theblog/time-and-sales
Depth of Market (DOM)
The DOM is the live ladder of resting orders sitting on each side of the market. Bids stack on one side, offers on the other, and the gap between them is the spread. Because futures trade through a centralized order book, every working order is visible — there is no fragmented view, no hidden inventory, no synthetic depth feed. You can see whether the size is sitting in a few large orders or broken across many small ones, whether participants are pulling out as price approaches, or stacking into the move. That pull-and-stack behavior is one of the cleanest reads you get anywhere, and it does not show up on a candlestick chart at all.
Read the full guide → /blogs/theblog/trading-with-the-dom-depth-of-market
Volume Profile
The volume profile lays volume horizontally against price instead of stacking it under the candle. That single change reframes the question. A standard volume bar tells you how much traded inside a candle; the profile tells you where it traded. You see the price levels where the auction concentrated trade and where it diminished, where the market wanted to do business and where it didn't. Five anchors do most of the heavy lifting on a profile: the high volume node (HVN), the low volume node (LVN), the point of control (POC), the value area high (VAH), and the value area low (VAL). Together they map where the auction found agreement and where it skipped.
Read the full guide → /blogs/theblog/volume-profile-guide
Delta and the Footprint chart
Delta is the ask volume minus the bid volume. A negative delta of 230 means 230 more contracts hit the bid than lifted the offer over that period: a one-sided transaction in favor of sellers. Delta tells you which side was the aggressor; it does not, by itself, tell you which way price will travel. The footprint candle (also called number bars) maps that bid-versus-ask activity inside every candle, at every price level it traded through. Rather than looking at a hollow candlestick, you see the volume sitting inside it, and where the imbalances cluster. That is what surfaces absorption, stacked imbalance, and trapped initiative: the patterns a candlestick alone deletes.
Read the full guide → /blogs/theblog/footprint-chart-guide
Market Profile (TPO)
Market profile, or TPO (Time Price Opportunity), organizes the session by time rather than volume. Every 30-minute period prints a letter at every price it traded through, and the day builds out as a sideways histogram of letters. Where TPO earns its keep is in the structural reads it surfaces: single prints, the value area, where the day is one-time-framing, where the auction is rotating versus extending. It pairs naturally with the volume profile. The two are different lenses on the same auction, one weighted by time and the other by transactions.
Read the full guide → /blogs/theblog/market-profile
VWAP
VWAP is the volume-weighted average price: sum of price times volume, divided by volume. It is not a moving average. It is the auction's running fair-value benchmark, weighted by where size actually traded. There are three flavors worth knowing: full-session VWAP, RTH-only VWAP, and anchored VWAP from a specific swing high or low. Each answers a slightly different question. Where the market sits relative to VWAP, and how it reacts as it tags it, is one of the cleanest context reads you have on a chart, especially when you confirm the reaction with the tape.
Read the full guide → /blogs/theblog/trading-with-vwap
Relative volume (RVOL)
Relative volume measures how today's volume compares to a baseline of recent sessions at the same time of day. It is a context tool. It tells you whether what you are looking at is happening in a participating market or a quiet one. Fading thin volume and pressing a market with strong participation are different trades, and RVOL is how you tell them apart before you size into either. Low, neutral, and high RVOL each carry different rules of engagement.
Read the full guide → /blogs/theblog/using-relative-volume-effectively
How these tools work together
None of these tools work in isolation. The DOM and the tape are the basis of order flow trading, but each one alone only tells half the story. The DOM shows the resting orders on the book — what participants are willing to do at each level. The tape shows what is actually being executed — what the aggressors are doing right now. Put them side by side and you see the full picture: who is sitting on the book, what is occurring at a particular level of interest, and where the auction may be reaching a point of exhaustion. Although it can seem overwhelming if you are not used to looking at this information, the side-by-side read tells a very clear story once you have spent some time on it.
The volume profile then lays a structural backdrop on that activity. If the tape and DOM tell you what is happening at this second, the profile tells you where the market has agreed to do business across the day, the week, the month. An aggressive print on the tape that lands inside a high volume node means something different than the same print lighting up at a low volume node. Volume by price gives you the inventory of the auction; the tape and the DOM tell you what is happening to that inventory right now. The footprint adds the next layer down: it tells you what was happening inside the candle that built the profile, and where the imbalances actually fired. Repeating activity, absorption, and trapped initiative all become visible there in ways a candlestick alone cannot show you.
VWAP, market profile, and RVOL set the context. VWAP tells you where the auction's fair-value line sits and how the day is leaning relative to it. Market profile tells you the structural shape of the day, whether you are rotating, breaking out, or one-time-framing. RVOL tells you whether the volume driving any of it is real participation or thin-market noise. The setups happen at the intersection. A footprint imbalance at a known liquidity zone, with the tape printing absorption, on a session running above-average RVOL, is a different trade than the same imbalance on a quiet Friday afternoon. The tools don't compete; they layer. Each one answers a question the others can't, and the read you get when they line up is the read worth trading.
Why order flow improves risk management
The benefit of order flow that matters most to me is tighter risk management. If I know the positioning of the other players in the market, I can not only gauge my risk against them in a very close manner, I know when I'm wrong. Knowing when you're wrong is the majority of the battle for a lot of futures traders. We have all heard of people holding onto trades that were not going in their favor, and subsequently doing real damage to their account — and emotional damage on top of it. The inability to gain confidence along the way, because of a lack of understanding of where to actually engage, creates a cloud over anybody's head. Tighter risk management is the cure to that, and these tools give a clear and concise understanding of risk in a way nothing else does.
Order flow gives a clear, concise read on risk because it gives a clear, concise read on intent. If you entered a trade because the tape showed aggressive buying lifting offers into a low volume node, your invalidation is when that aggression stops or flips. The exit is defined by what the market is actually doing, not by an arbitrary stop a fixed number of ticks away. You're trading what the auction is showing you in real time, and your stop is anchored to the same thing. That precision compounds across a sample of trades.
It also pairs with the math of position sizing. Once your invalidation is tight and clear, you can size to your real risk, not your worst-case fear, and the relationship between win rate and reward-to-risk does the rest of the work for you. Order flow is what lets the math actually be tradeable, because it is what lets you find low-risk areas to engage in the first place. For more on the math underneath that, see the math behind risk and reward.
What order flow is not
Now what is order flow not? It is not a holy grail. It is also not easy to learn or risk-free. So, knowing that you have the ability to gauge this type of information doesn't mean that you can plan on just hitting home runs every single time you press a button. It does take time to learn, it takes time to understand the interactions of the auction. If it were easy, then more people would be doing it. There are no holy grails in the market. There are always exceptions. And so what order flow trading does for me is it helps me stack the chips in my favor and place higher probability trades with tighter risk management and wider reward against my risk.
Where to start
If you are coming to order flow cold, the volume profile is the most productive place to start. It is the tool that most directly translates abstract market activity — interest, value, rejection — into a chart you can read at a glance, and it is the foundation that the footprint, the tape, and the DOM all build context on top of. Start with the Volume Profile guide, then move to the tape and the DOM so you can see the auction unfold in real time. From there, the footprint guide and the market profile extend the structural read.
For a worked, applied example of these tools driving a real setup, the liquidity zones guide is the canonical OFL setup. It pulls the footprint, the tape, and the DOM together into a single repeatable read.
In summary, order flow trading is the visualization of the interactions between buyers and sellers — price, volume, and time. Those three variables are visible on the resting orders in the book, on the executed orders on the tape, on the inventory across your volume profile, on whether a high volume area is weighted to the bid or the ask, and on the footprint chart that shows who is actually at play within each candle. Together, they create a cognitive map of the live intraday auction — the kind of read any serious futures trader needs. Order flow lets you use the relationships between all of this information to drive the tools you trade with. The deep dives on this site cover each one in turn.