What is order flow?
Order flow is the stream of buy and sell orders that moves price. Reading it means looking at who is trading and how, not only at where price went.
Open chartsFree. No sign-up, no download.
Price moves because of orders
A chart shows where price went. Order flow shows why. Every price change on an exchange comes from orders meeting in the order book. If you can see those orders, you can see buying and selling pressure as it happens instead of after the candle closes.
Two kinds of orders
A limit order waits at a price you choose: “buy 2 BTC at 60,000”. It sits in the order book until someone trades against it or it is cancelled. Limit orders are passive. They provide liquidity.
A market order trades right now at the best price available. It takes liquidity from the book. Market orders are aggressive: the trader cares more about getting filled than about the price.
Every trade has one of each. When a market buy hits resting sell orders, the buyer was the aggressor. Order flow analysis counts which side was aggressive, at which prices, and how much.
The order book
The order book is the list of all resting limit orders: bids below the price (waiting to buy) and asks above it (waiting to sell). The gap between the best bid and best ask is the spread. When market buys eat through all the asks at one price, price ticks up to the next ask.
So price rises when aggressive buyers take more than sellers offer, and falls when aggressive sellers take more than buyers bid. Order flow is about watching that balance.
The main order flow tools
- Footprint chart: buy and sell volume at each price inside each candle.
- Order book heatmap: the resting limit orders over time, drawn behind price.
- CVD: the running total of aggressive buys minus aggressive sells.
- Volume profile: how much traded at each price over a range.
- DOM ladder and time and sales: the live book and every trade as it prints.
What traders look for
- Absorption: heavy aggressive selling at a level, but price does not fall. Someone with limit orders is soaking it up.
- Exhaustion: a push where each new high comes with less aggressive buying than the last.
- Imbalance: far more buying than selling at a price, or the other way round, often where moves start.
- Liquidity: large resting orders that price may stall at, and whether they stay or get pulled as price arrives.
- Divergence: price going one way while CVD goes the other.
Limits of order flow
Order flow shows pressure, not the future. Resting orders can be cancelled before price gets there. In crypto the same coin trades on many exchanges at once, so one exchange's flow can be misleading. That is why DM Charts can join trades and order books from several exchanges into one view.
Try it
Open the chart, pick Bitcoin, and press Ask, then type “bookmap look”. You will see the heatmap, big trades and price together. Next, read How to read a footprint chart.
Questions
- What is order flow trading?
- Trading based on how orders are being placed and filled: which side is aggressive, where large orders rest, and how price reacts to them.
- Does order flow work in crypto?
- Yes. Crypto exchanges publish every trade and their full order book, so order flow is easier to see in crypto than in many other markets.
- Is order flow better than technical analysis?
- They answer different questions. Indicators summarise price. Order flow shows the orders behind it. Many traders use both.
Updated 8 November 2026