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A concrete breakwater at night beneath the waves, with a stretch of the wall collapsed in the distance and an amber backlight on the horizon.

The blobs on the book are not all the same. One is a target, the other is a wall.

Hi trader,

the first time I opened a liquidity heatmap I had exactly one thought: now what?

A screen full of colored blobs scrolling past, some big, some small, all of them looking like they were telling me something while telling me nothing.

It took me a while to figure out I was looking at the right thing with the wrong question.

Ok, vamos.

The misunderstanding that makes almost everyone quit

First, let’s get rid of the thing that makes people try order flow and give up after two weeks.

It’s not about clicking fast.

We’re not talking about reading the tape and pulling the trigger in the moment. That’s a different job, it takes pro-level reflexes every single day, and frankly it’s not mine.

Order flow is for something different and much calmer: choosing which level.

Because the chart tells you where the level is. The book tells you whether somebody is actually there behind it.

Two different pieces of information, needed at two different moments. The chart is enough to place an order. The book is there to decide which of the three levels you’ve marked is the good one.

And you do it beforehand, calmly, not while price is running.

How to read a heatmap, in three lines

Kept simple, because the first time it looks like alien stuff.

Time runs from left to right. What you see on the left is the past, the right edge is now.

Every horizontal row is a price. Always the same price, crossing the screen.

Color tells you how much size is resting at that price. Bright means a lot, dark means little.

That’s it, you already have everything. A bright, stretched-out blob means there’s been size resting at that price for a while.

And here’s the thing no other panel gives you

This is the reason you look at the heatmap first.

Of all the book panels, it’s the only one with time built in.

The ladder tells you what’s there now. Profiles tell you the cumulative picture. Only the heatmap shows you how long that wall has been there.

And that changes everything, because the distinction that really matters isn’t how big a block is. It’s how long it’s been there.

Schematic liquidity heatmap: a long trace, present long before, acts as a target and price goes to take it. A short trace of the same intensity, which appeared as price approached, acts as a barrier and price turns there.
Two traces on the same heatmap. A long one, there since before price started moving. A short one, appearing as price got closer. Same color intensity, opposite meanings.

The two blobs that look the same

Look at the figure above. Two blocks, same color, same size. They do opposite jobs.

The long trace was there before price started moving toward it. Somebody placed those orders when the market was somewhere else, and left them.

That’s historical liquidity, and I read it as a magnet. Price tends to go there. To me it’s a target.

The short trace showed up as price was getting closer. Somebody saw the market coming and parked there on purpose, right now.

That’s fresh liquidity, and I read it as a barrier. That’s where I expect real resistance.

Historical means target, fresh means wall. Two identical blobs on the screen, two opposite things to do with them.

Color fools you, and this is where people get it wrong

Now the counterintuitive part, the one that’s worth the whole article.

Color matters less than it looks.

It tells you how big that block is. It doesn’t tell you what job it’s doing.

And on top of that, the color scale is relative. The platform recalibrates it on its own, so the same red this morning and this evening can mean two different sizes.

A huge red trace screaming off the screen, if it’s old, to me it’s still a target. And selling into that wall just because “it’s massive, price will never get through” means risking the wrong trade while holding the right information.

It’s the most frustrating way to lose: you saw the thing, and you read it backwards.

The right question in front of a big blob isn’t “how big is it”. It’s “how long has it been there”.

“But it’s all fake anyway”

Now the objection everyone raises after a week, and it has to be dealt with because it’s half legitimate.

Yes, some of that size isn’t real. There are people who show orders they have no intention of getting filled, just to make it look like there’s a wall at that price, and then pull them before price gets there.

It’s called spoofing, it’s illegal on regulated markets and it gets prosecuted. In the US it’s been a crime since 2010, under Dodd-Frank. In Europe it’s banned by the MAR regulation. And this isn’t theory: in 2020 JPMorgan paid 920 million dollars for spoofing in metals and Treasuries.

That doesn’t mean it never happens anymore. It means it’s not the mechanism running the market day to day.

Because most cancellations aren’t manipulation. They’re people changing their minds, algorithms repricing, market makers updating their quotes all the time.

And pinning every cancellation on a conspiracy is the fastest way to stop thinking.

Three ways a line vanishes from the book: eaten, with volume trading at that price; pulled, with nothing trading at that price; moved, reappearing a little further on with no volume at the original price. The question that tells them apart is whether volume traded.
The three ways a row disappears from the book, and the question that tells them apart. Eaten, pulled, moved.

Because a row can vanish from the screen for three different reasons, and on the screen all three look the same.

It got eaten, meaning filled. Somebody took the whole lot. How you spot it: volume went through at that price.

It got pulled, meaning cancelled. How you spot it: nothing traded at that price. The row goes away and not a single contract changed hands there.

It moved. It disappears from one price and shows up again a little further along, without any volume going through there.

The question that separates them is always the same, just one: did volume go through?

Just watch out for one thing: sometimes both happen at once. Some volume goes through, and the rest of the wall disappears. Then the question becomes: did as much volume go through as the wall was big?

You don’t need to read minds

Here’s the freeing part, because it takes a weight off your shoulders.

You don’t need to figure out anybody’s intentions.

You don’t need to know whether it was spoofing, an algorithm, or a fund that changed its mind at a quarter past ten. You’ll never know, and you don’t need to.

What happened at that price, on the other hand, you can see, it’s right there on the screen. Start from that.

I look at the book in the DeepDOM, but the reasoning works on any heatmap, Bookmap included: the graphics change, what you’re reading doesn’t.

Two lines of transparency, which feel owed: that above is an affiliate link. If you use it and subscribe I earn a commission, and you don’t pay a cent more.

What you do starting tomorrow morning

Open a heatmap and don’t look at the colors. Look at the lengths. For a week, just that. Write down which traces were there from before and which ones showed up at the last minute.

Then look at what price did. How many times it went to grab the old ones and how many times it turned on the new ones.

And when one disappears, only ask yourself whether volume went through. Don’t ask why it disappeared. That question has no answer and you don’t need it.

Color tells you how big that wall is. It doesn’t tell you what job it’s doing. How long it’s been there tells you that.

— tradingblog.itPosta su X

Let me close with the thing that made it all click.

For months I looked at the book searching for the biggest blob.

Then one day I stopped asking how big it was and started asking how long it had been there.

From that moment the screen stopped being full of colored noise, and became a map.

Suerte Amigo!

Tiziano Brunno

Tradingblog

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Disclaimer: purely informational and educational content. It does not constitute financial advice or an invitation to trade. Trading involves the risk of capital loss.

The trader of the future with the amber and violet visor looks at a monumental glowing vault door which, seen from the side, turns out to be a paper thin panel standing on nothing, with emptiness behind it

The exchange: where you buy, and what happens if it goes down

Hi trader,

last lesson we left off on a sentence that now needs explaining properly: on an exchange the keys are theirs.

If you missed the earlier pieces, keys and wallets is what you need to make sense of this one.

Today we look inside the box. What an exchange actually is, what happens when you click buy, and what happens to your money the day it shuts down. Because it is not a theoretical scenario: it has already happened, more than once, and people lost everything.

Ok, vamos.

The thing almost nobody has clear

An exchange is not the blockchain.

It is a company. With servers, employees, a legal department and, above all, a database.

And that is not a pedantic distinction, because it has an enormous consequence: when you buy on an exchange, nothing happens on the blockchain.

Zero. No row gets written on the public ledger. No network fee. No confirmation to wait for.

Two numbers change in their database: the euro one goes down, the bitcoin one goes up. And the bitcoin it shows you are not “yours”: they are a share of a pile the exchange keeps for all its customers together, and it holds the keys.

Comparison between buying on an exchange, where only two rows change in the company database without touching the blockchain, with no fee and no wait but the keys held by the exchange, and withdrawing, where the transaction is actually written on the public ledger, the network fee is paid, confirmation is needed and the keys become yours
The two things that look the same. On the left a purchase on an exchange: two rows change in the company database, the blockchain never notices. On the right a real transfer: the row gets written on the public ledger, with a fee and a confirmation time.

Inside, though, it is a real market

And this is where it gets interesting for somebody who trades, because you already know the mechanism.

Inside the exchange there is an order book, exactly like on futures: a list of who wants to buy and at what price, and who wants to sell and at what price.

And there are the two ways of being in the market we covered in the order flow series: there is the one who places a limit order and waits at their price, and the one who sends a market order and pays to get in now.

If that feels familiar it is because it is: it is the exact same dynamic as bid/ask candles, aggressive against passive.

There is also a practical detail worth money, and it has to be stated precisely because it gets told badly out there.

Many exchanges apply two different fees: a lower one for whoever adds liquidity to the book and a higher one for whoever removes it. The jargon calls them maker and taker.

Careful though, because they do not coincide with limit and market. If you place a limit order inside the spread, it executes immediately against the book and pays the expensive fee, exactly like a market order. You only get the cheap fee if your order sits there waiting and somebody else executes against it.

And it is not a universal rule either: on some exchanges, including the most used one in the world, the two fees at base tier are identical, so that advantage does not exist at all. On others the gap is double. Go and look at your own fee table, it is a boring page that tells you what you are actually paying.

Why sending to another user is free

This also explains something that confuses a lot of people.

If you send crypto to somebody on the same exchange, it is often instant and costs nothing. If you send it out, you pay and you wait.

By now you know why: in the first case you are not using the blockchain at all. Two rows are just changing in their internal database, which costs them nothing.

In the second case the transaction really does have to be written on the ledger, and that is where you pay.

Custodial, and what it means for you

The exchange holds everybody’s keys, and it keeps them in two places: some in vaults connected to the internet, so it can serve withdrawals quickly, and most of it in vaults kept offline, far harder to drain.

As long as everything works, this does not concern you at all.

The day it stops working, this is the only thing that concerns you.

What happens if it goes down

Here we get to the serious part, and I will say it without dancing around it.

You are not a depositor. In practice you are much closer to a creditor.

When a bank fails, in Europe there is a deposit guarantee up to a hundred thousand euros. On an exchange that safety net does not exist: no guarantee fund, no compensation scheme, and it is not me saying it, it is the European authorities themselves in a consumer warning.

The European rules that came into force in recent years did introduce a real protection though, and it would be dishonest to leave it out: anybody authorised in Europe is required to keep client crypto separate from its own, so that its creditors cannot get their hands on it if it fails.

It is serious protection, and it did not exist before. But it depends on two things: that the provider really is authorised in Europe, and that it really did follow the rules. If it did not, you find out on the day of the collapse, and at that point you join the queue and wait for a court to decide who gets what, and over how many years.

Outside Europe there is often not even that. In the United States, in 2023, a judge ruled that the crypto deposited by customers of a failed platform belonged to the company and not to them: those customers ended up in line like every other creditor.

And it is not theory.

Mt. Gox, which in 2014 handled most of the world’s bitcoin trading, collapsed losing hundreds of thousands of customer bitcoin. Creditors waited more than ten years to see part of their money again.

FTX, in November 2022, was one of the three largest exchanges in the world, with sports sponsorships and famous faces. It collapsed in a week when it came out that customer money had gone where it should not have. The founder was convicted.

Neither of them looked at risk the day before. That is exactly the point.

And now the detail that can actually save you

When these things happen, the site does not shut down. Something sneakier happens: first they freeze withdrawals, and only then comes the bankruptcy. In between there are days or weeks in which your balance is right there on the screen, you can see it, and you cannot touch it.

It is not an impression, it is the documented sequence of every 2022 collapse: withdrawals frozen on 8 November, bankruptcy filing on the 11th. Another platform froze in June and failed in July, a month later.

So if one day you read that an exchange has “temporarily suspended withdrawals for maintenance”, that is not maintenance. It is the last warning, and it usually arrives when it is already late.

Table comparing a personal wallet, an exchange and a bank across four rows: who holds the keys, what you actually own, what happens if whoever holds the money fails, and how you can lose everything
What you actually hold in the three cases: crypto in your own wallet with your own keys, crypto on an exchange, money in a bank. For each one who holds the keys, what you legally own and what happens if whoever holds it fails.

How to choose one, and how to sit on it

I will never tell you which one to use, and be wary of anybody who does it lightly, because they almost always have an affiliate link in their pocket.

Here are the criteria.

Look at where it is regulated. Europe now has a framework of rules for anybody offering crypto services, and we covered it when it came into force, in the piece on MiCA and stablecoins. A provider authorised in Europe is not bulletproof, but it has obligations that one registered on an island does not.

Proof of reserves is not a promise of solvency. Many exchanges publish a check showing how much they hold. Careful though: it shows what they own, not what they owe, and at one precise instant. A company can have the reserves and have debts bigger than the reserves. It is useful, it is not a guarantee.

Turn on two step verification, but with an app, not with SMS. A phone number can be stolen by convincing the mobile operator to move it to another SIM, and it is a scam that has been going on for years.

And above all: keep on the exchange only what you need to operate. The rest you take out, where the keys are yours. This is the practical consequence of all three lessons so far.

Two clarifications though, because people make two opposite mistakes with this advice.

The first: it does not only apply to bitcoin. The balance almost everybody leaves sitting on an exchange is in euros or stablecoins, and the reasoning there is identical, with the added risk of whoever issues the stablecoin. Taking your crypto out and leaving the bulk inside in stablecoins is not securing anything.

The second: taking it out moves the risk, it does not delete it. Outside, the keys are yours, and so are the ways of losing them we saw last week. If you throw away the recovery phrase, there is not even a queue at the courthouse.

What you do from tomorrow morning

Two things, and the first one is a calculation that takes a minute.

Look at how much you have on the exchange and ask yourself: if they shut the site tomorrow morning, would this amount ruin me? If the answer is yes, that amount is too high, no matter how reliable the company seems to you.

Then make a small withdrawal to your own wallet. Not to move the money: to learn the procedure with pocket change, when you are not in a hurry and not scared. The day you actually want to do it will probably be a day when everybody is withdrawing at once, and that is not a good moment to learn.

And since it is the only irreversible thing I am asking you to do, three hard rules while you do it. Copy the address from the wallet, do not type it by hand. Check that the network selected on the exchange is the same one your wallet expects, because sending on the wrong network is the number one way money disappears on a first withdrawal. And after pasting, read the first and last characters again: there is malware that swaps the address in your clipboard while you copy it.

Where we go next time

So far we have talked about infrastructure: the ledger, the keys, the place where you buy. Next time we move on to what is inside, and to the first distinction that matters: bitcoin and ethereum are not two versions of the same thing, they are two different jobs.

On an exchange you do not have the keys. You have a company’s promise to give you your crypto when you ask for it.

— tradingblog.itPosta su X

Let me close with the thing that convinced me to take out the money I do not use.

It was not fear of a collapse, and it is not distrust of any company in particular.

It was a question I asked myself looking at the screen: if this site does not open tomorrow, what do I have in my hands?

The answer was: a screenshot. And the screenshot is not yours.

Suerte Amigo!

Tiziano Brunno

Tradingblog

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Disclaimer: purely informational and educational content. It does not constitute financial advice or an invitation to trade. Trading involves the risk of capital loss.

Bundle of amber light streaks hurled at high speed against a dark stone monolith that does not move an inch, the streaks bursting into sparks against its face while a few pass beyond it into the dark meeting nothing

CVD does not tell you who is buying. It tells you who is in a hurry.

Hi trader,

when I closed the order flow series I left one thing hanging.

I said that CVD, if we ever talked about it, deserved a piece of its own.

Here it is. And it is the one where I risk annoying you the most, because it touches the indicator everybody sticks under their chart and almost nobody reads for what it is.

Let me tell you straight away how I used it badly myself, so we get that out of the way.

I had put it under the price and I was drawing divergences on it the way I used to draw them on the RSI ten years earlier. I found dozens of them. You will find dozens too, if you do that.

After a few months the conclusion I had reached was that order flow does not work.

The right conclusion was a different one: I was using a measuring instrument as if it were an oscillator.

Ok, vamos.

The arithmetic, in three lines

In the first episode we opened the candle up and saw that every fill has a side: there is the one who was waiting with a resting order, and there is the one who went and took it, paying the spread.

Delta is the difference between those two, bar by bar: buy aggression minus sell aggression.

CVD, meaning cumulative delta, is the same thing summed over time. A line that rises when the hurry to buy is in charge, and falls when the hurry to sell is.

That is all. There is nothing else inside it.

And now the sentence that changes everything

CVD does not measure how many are buying and how many are selling.

It cannot, and this is arithmetic, not opinion: in every single trade the quantities bought and sold are identical by definition. If somebody bought ten contracts, somebody else sold them ten. Always. There is no such thing as a candle where “they bought more than they sold”.

What is not identical is which of the two was in a hurry.

So:

CVD measures who is in a hurry, and which side they are on.

Read that again, because everything else in this piece descends from that line, mistakes included.

The right way to read it: it is the effort, not the result

If CVD is the hurry, then it is the effort. And price, which is the result, sits on the other side of the scale.

Taken on their own they say almost nothing.

They matter when they do not add up.

Table crossing CVD and price: when they rise or fall together there is nothing to read, while the two highlighted rows are the ones where CVD runs hard and price stays flat or goes the other way, meaning somebody is absorbing
The matrix between CVD and price. When they rise together or fall together there is nothing to read. When CVD runs hard and price does not move, or goes the other way, somebody is absorbing on the other side.

Look at the two highlighted rows in the figure, because they are the only two that count.

Lots of people in a hurry to buy, and price not going up.

At that point the right question is not “who is buying”. The question is: who is on the other side taking all of them?

The three reasons a divergence appears

And here we get to the part that makes reading this far worthwhile.

Price makes a new high, CVD does not. The famous divergence. On the internet they sell it to you as the signal that gets you the high of the day.

The problem is that the very same picture comes from three different situations, and only the first two are interesting.

One, real absorption. There is a big resting order sitting there taking all the aggression and reloading as they eat it. That is the one we care about, and it is the one we covered in the second episode. You check it on the book, not on CVD.

Two, the iceberg. A huge order shown in small slices. On the book it looks small, in reality it is a wall. Same dynamic as the first, except you cannot see it: you infer it from the fact that the level holds without showing size.

Three, and this is the one nobody tells you about: there simply is no aggression on the other side.

Price rises, CVD does not rise, and not because somebody is absorbing.

It rises because there is nobody selling.

The sellers got out of the way, the road is clear, and price drifts up without anyone having to pay to carry it there.

The three reasons a divergence between price and CVD appears, side by side: real absorption which you check on the book, an iceberg which you infer because the level holds without showing size, and simply no aggression on the other side, where there is nobody on the book and nothing to see
The three reasons a divergence appears, side by side: real absorption, iceberg, and simply no aggression. The first two get checked on the book, the third one is not a signal of anything.

That third one is the majority of cases, and it is why a divergence on its own is never enough.

Because the first two say “there is a wall”. The third says “there is nothing”.

And on the chart, under the price, they have exactly the same face.

A case of mine, and the mistake I made with it

ES, 6 August, two screenshots ten minutes apart.

I am telling you about it because I got this wrong first, and the mistake is exactly the one this piece is supposed to teach you to avoid.

At 12:10 price was at 7,756.25, with the book showing a fresh ceiling of sell orders just above, and further up the sellers pulling themselves out of the way.

Real screenshot of the ES order book on 6 August at 12:10, price at 7,756.25: in the A.PS column the fresh sell ceiling just above price, higher up the sellers pulling their size, and below price the floor being built in the B.PS column
ES, 6 August, 12:10. The real book: at the top the sellers pulling out, just above price the fresh sell ceiling, and below it the floor being built.

At 12:20 price was at 7,760.25. The ceiling had not held.

Ten points of upside. And underneath, cumulative delta was reading -239.

My first read was this one: CVD is negative, so nobody is buying aggressively, so that rise is not a push, it is a void.

It sounds good. And it is wrong.

Real screenshot on ES at 12:20: price has risen ten points to 7,760.25 while in the bottom panel the cumulative delta line stays negative at -239
The same screen ten minutes later. Cumulative delta reads -239, but its slope is rising: it came from below -400.

Look at the figure, and look at the slope instead of the number.

Between 12:04 and 12:07 CVD had sunk below the -400 mark. From there it climbs without stopping, and across the window of the rise it goes from roughly -380 to -239.

Which means that over those ten minutes delta was positive by a hundred and something contracts. Somebody was buying and paying the spread, very much so.

That -239 was not describing the rise. It was describing the selling from twenty minutes earlier, still sitting inside it, because CVD is cumulative and carries everything since the last reset.

The level tells you where you are coming from. The slope tells you what is happening now.

And if you go back to the table from earlier, this case is not even a divergence: CVD rising, price rising, first row, normal, nothing to read. Effort and result added up.

It took me months to stop looking at the number and start looking at the tilt. If this piece saves you those months, it has done its job.

Two notes on this example, because I would be annoyed if nobody gave them to me.

These are two photographs, not a recording. They say the transition happened, not whether that ceiling was eaten or pulled.

And it was 12:20 in Europe, meaning US pre-market on the ES: thin book, few participants. Pulling size when there are few people around costs little, and the same read at 15:30 carries far more weight. Do not take the midday ruler and use it at the Wall Street open.

And the clean case of the third reason, the one where there really is nobody on the other side, I do not have in a single screenshot yet. When I capture it I will publish it. Better a hole I admit to than an example that proves something else.

The three traps, and all of them need saying

One. CVD depends on how it is calculated. Every platform decides in its own way how to classify fills, and the results are not identical. There is no “true” CVD and there is no best setting. What matters is knowing how your tool calculates it, and using one only. Comparing the CVD of two different platforms is like comparing two watches set by two different people.

Two. It is cumulative, so it depends on where it starts. A CVD starting at midnight and one starting at the cash open tell two different stories about the exact same afternoon. The absolute level means nothing: only the shape inside the window you chose matters. Pick one and keep it.

Three. On rollover days CVD is garbage. Volume splits across two contracts and the series stops making sense. It applies to volume, it applies to open interest, it applies here. Mark the quarterly rollover dates on your calendar and do not play doctor on those days.

And a note that concerns a lot of you: CVD is read on the future, where the volume is real and centralised. It is the structure I work with and I have always declared it: analysis on the future, execution wherever you trade. A CVD calculated on an instrument without centralised volume is not measuring what it thinks it is measuring.

“A sold rally”

Two words about this expression, which you will hear everywhere.

In the head of whoever says it, it means: price is going up but CVD is going down.

The fact itself can perfectly well be true. It is the conclusion they pull out of it, namely “so now it goes down”, that does not hold.

First, because it can be the third case: there is no aggressive selling, so CVD does not go up, but price goes up anyway because there is no supply.

Second, and more importantly: it is not an entry, because it does not tell you where to enter. An entry is a price. A divergence is not a price, it is a shape.

The line to take home

A divergence is not a signal. It is a question.

The question is “who is absorbing?”, and the answer is not on the CVD. It is on the book.

I look at the book in the DeepDOM.

Two lines of transparency, which feel owed: that above is an affiliate link. If you use it and subscribe I earn a commission, and you don’t pay a cent more.

If you look at the book and there is nobody there, the answer is “nobody”, and then there was nothing to see in the first place.

Used well, CVD is a confirmation that adds to a level you had already marked this morning. It is never the reason that level exists.

Which is also why, in my order of switching instruments on, CVD is the last one. Not the first.

What you do from tomorrow morning

Small homework and for a week you do not trade it, as always.

Mark down ten divergences. They do not need to be pretty, take the first ten you see.

For each one, at that same moment, look at the book and write one single word: was there real size on that level, yes or no.

Then wait and write down how it ended.

At the end separate the two groups and count them.

What almost always comes out is that divergences with size on the book and the ones without behave differently, and that the ones without are the majority.

After that homework you will never look at CVD on its own again, which is exactly the point. If you don’t have a place to keep the notes, the TradingBlog Diary is free and exists for this.

CVD measures who is in a hurry. The book shows who is standing still. Looking at only one of them is like listening to half an argument.

— tradingblog.itPosta su X

Let me close with the thing that saved me the most money in this whole story.

It was not learning to read CVD.

It was stopping asking it for what it cannot know.

It tells you who was running. Who was standing still on the other side, and whether they were big, that has to be told to you by a different instrument.

When two different instruments tell you the same thing, that thing stops being your opinion.

Suerte Amigo!

Tiziano Brunno

Tradingblog

Want to put your market reading to the test?

Compete and challenge other traders inside an Arena in a demo environment, with no real capital at risk. Discover the Performance Arena Events by The Thunder Trader.

Discover The Thunder Trader →


Disclaimer: purely informational and educational content. It does not constitute financial advice or an invitation to trade. Trading involves the risk of capital loss.