What is Order Flow actually showing you?
A regular candlestick tells you four things about a time period: where price opened, where it went high, where it went low, and where it closed. That is it.
Order Flow goes inside the candle. It shows you, at every single price step within that candle, how much volume came through as aggressive buying versus aggressive selling. Instead of one bar, you see a grid - every row is a price level, and every row shows you the two sides of activity that happened there.
This is why it is sometimes called an Order Footprint chart. You are seeing the footprint of every participant who traded during that candle.
How does DEXT T3 build Order Flow
Step 1 - Where does the data come from?
Order Flow on DEXT T3 is built from tick-by-tick executed trade data that is received from the Stock Exchanges. Every single trade that gets matched on the exchange sends us a tick - a timestamp, a price, and a quantity. This is the same raw feed that powers your execution on DEXT T3. Nothing is aggregated or interpolated before it reaches the Order Flow engine.
Step 2 - How are ticks grouped into candles?
Ticks are assigned to time buckets based on the interval you have selected. A 5-minute candle, for instance, collects every tick that falls between 10:00:00 and 10:04:59 into the same bucket. The candle is built from all of those ticks together.
Step 3 - How does DEXT T3 classify each trade as buying or selling?
This is the single most important step in Order Flow - and the one that explains most of the differences you may see between platforms. It is worth understanding clearly.
The exchange does not tell us who initiated each trade. When a trade executes, the data we receive has a price and a quantity. It does not come labelled as “this was initiated by a buyer” or “this was initiated by a seller.” Every platform - every Order Flow tool anywhere in the world - has to infer this.
On DEXT T3, when bid and ask prices are available at the moment of a trade, we use those to determine which side was the aggressor. A trade closer to the ask side is classified as buying pressure. A trade closer to the bid side is classified as selling pressure. When bid/ask data is not available for a tick, we fall back to comparing the trade price against the previous trade price to determine direction.
This is our approach to DEXT T3 — and understanding it helps you read the numbers with confidence.
Step 4 - How are prices organised into levels?
Within each candle, prices are grouped into discrete steps - a price grid. Trades that happen within the same price step get combined into one row. The finer the grid, the more rows per candle; the coarser the grid, the fewer rows but more volume per row.
On DEXT T3, this grid step is configurable. If two platforms use different grid sizes, the volume distribution across rows will look different, even from identical raw data.
Step 5 - What is Delta?
Delta is the net of buying pressure minus selling pressure for a candle.
If more volume came through on the buy side, delta is positive. If more came through on the sell side, delta is negative. A strongly positive delta on a candle that closed red, for instance, is worth paying attention to - it says buyers were active but price still fell, which tells a more complex story than the candle body alone.
DEXT T3 also shows Cumulative Delta - a running total of delta from the start of your session. This helps you see whether buying pressure has been building or fading across the day, separate from what price is doing. Divergence between cumulative delta and price direction is one of the patterns experienced Order Flow traders watch closely.
Step 6 - What is the Point of Control (POC)?
The POC is the single price level inside the candle where the most total volume - buy and sell combined - was transacted. It is highlighted in yellow on DEXT T3.
Think of it as the price where the market spent the most energy during that candle. Both sides - buyers and sellers - were most active right there. Many institutional traders watch POC levels as potential areas of support or resistance when price revisits them.
One important note: the POC is always the single price step with the highest volume. When DEXT T3 visually groups adjacent rows together to keep the chart readable (because a candle with very wide range would otherwise have too many tiny rows to read), a grouped display row may appear to show more volume than the POC row. That is a display grouping - the underlying POC is still the individual price level where the most trading happened.
Step 7 - What is the Value Area?
The Value Area is the price range inside the candle where 70% of the total volume was transacted. It is calculated by starting at the POC and expanding outward - adding price levels above and below - until the accumulated volume reaches 70% of the candle’s total.
This gives you two boundaries: the Value Area High (VAH) and Value Area Low (VAL). The zone between them is highlighted subtly on the chart. Price trading within the Value Area is considered to be at “accepted” value for that period. Price outside the Value Area - above VAH or below VAL - is trading at a premium or discount to where the majority of activity occurred.
The 70% threshold is configurable on DEXT T3. Platforms using different thresholds - 68%, 75% - will show different VAH and VAL boundaries on the same data.
Step 8 - What are Imbalances?
Imbalances flag the rows where one side overwhelmed the other by a significant margin - specifically, where buying volume at one level was at least 3 times the selling volume at the level just above it, or vice versa.
These are the moments where the market showed a strong directional hand at a specific price. Experienced Order Flow readers often map these imbalance zones to see where price may return - imbalances sometimes act as magnets.
The 3× threshold is the default on DEXT T3 and is adjustable in settings. A platform using a 2× threshold will flag far more imbalances than one using 4×. Same data, very different visual output.
Step 9 - What is VWAP on Order Flow?
VWAP - Volume Weighted Average Price - is a running line calculated from the start of your session. It weights each trade price by its volume. It is the institutional benchmark: the price at which the average rupee of volume traded for the day. Traders and funds often use it to assess whether they bought or sold at better or worse than the market average.
What shapes the numbers you see on DEXT T3
Each of the steps above involves a deliberate choice — and those choices are what define the Order Flow you see on DEXT T3. Here is a quick summary of how our defaults are set, and what happens when you adjust them:
On buy/sell classification, DEXT T3 uses bid/ask data where available to determine the aggressor side — this is the most market-accurate method we could build with. Where bid/ask data is unavailable for a tick, direction is inferred from price movement.
On price grid size, DEXT T3 defaults to a fine grid that preserves detail at individual price levels. The grid is configurable — a coarser grid shows fewer rows with higher combined volume per row, which some traders prefer for faster-moving instruments.
On Value Area, we default to 70% — the most widely used standard across institutional Order Flow tools. You can adjust this in settings.
On Imbalance detection, the default threshold is 3×. Lowering it surfaces more imbalances; raising it surfaces only the most extreme ones. Neither is wrong — it depends on how you trade.
A word on live candles versus completed ones
When you are watching Order Flow build in real time, the ticks powering that live candle are arriving over the internet to your device. Internet connections - even a fast 4G, 5G, or broadband line - have brief moments of packet loss or a slight drop in data transfer speed. In those moments, a tick or two may not reach your device. The candle keeps forming, but with a small gap in the underlying tick stream. This is not unique to DEXT T3 - every platform that builds live charts or live Order Flow from a streaming connection faces this.
Now here is where the refresh behaviour makes sense. When you refresh - or when a candle completes and the next session opens - DEXT T3 fetches the data for past candles from our servers, not from your live stream. Our data servers sit in the same data centre as our streaming servers, continuously recording every tick that arrives from the exchange. They have no gaps. So when a past candle reloads from the server, you may notice it looks slightly different from what you saw forming live - the bid/ask values may shift a little, the delta may adjust, the POC may settle at a slightly different level. That is not the chart correcting an error. That is the chart replacing the live stream’s slightly incomplete picture with the complete one.
This is why if you are comparing Order Flow readings between platforms, past completed candles are a far more reliable basis for comparison than live forming ones. On live candles, each platform is independently processing a live tick stream that may have minor timing and receipt differences. On completed candles, both platforms are drawing from their respective stored data - which is much closer to complete, and much more stable.
What you can rely on
A few things are grounded in exchange reality and holds true on DEXT T3:
The total traded volume for a candle - if you add up all the volume across all rows - should match the exchange-reported volume for that time period. The OHLC prices - open, high, low, close - are sourced from the same exchange data and completed candles will broadly align. The concept of POC - whichever price level had the highest activity - will point to roughly the same zone, though the exact price step may shift with grid size.
A note on what Order Flow is, and what it isn’t
Order Flow is a tool for reading the strength or weakness behind price moves. It helps you understand whether a move up was accompanied by genuine buying pressure or was driven by sellers stepping away. It helps you see where volume clustered and where it was thin.
What it is not is a precise, objective measurement. The classification of every trade as buy or sell is always an inference. The readings are most useful for understanding structure and context - not as definitive signals in isolation. Traders who use Order Flow well use it alongside price action and other context, not as a standalone trigger.
We built Order Flow on DEXT T3 because we believe professional traders deserve to see the market’s internal structure - inside the terminal where they actually trade, not as a separate subscription on a third-party screen. We will keep building on this.
