Saw people asking in a few threads here what a "footprint chart" actually shows, so figured I would break it down properly instead of just linking a screenshot.
A candlestick only gives you open/high/low/close - it tells you where price ended up, nothing about what it cost to get there. A footprint (same thing gets sold as a "cluster chart" or "numbers bar" too) splits every price inside the bar into two numbers: how much traded at the bid (seller hit it) and how much traded at the ask (buyer paid up for it). A cell reading something like 142 x 96 means 142 contracts went through on the bid side and 96 on the ask side at that exact price.
Subtract one from the other across the bar and you get delta - a measure of who was more aggressive. The useful case is when delta is strongly positive (buyers paying up) but price still fails to make a new high. That is effort with no result - someone was absorbing everything the aggressive buyers threw at them. On a candle that shows up as a small wick. On a footprint it is obvious.
Quick terminology note since it trips people up: footprint usually means bid/ask shown split, side by side. Cluster usually means total volume per price, heat-colored, without the split. The split is the whole point though - if a tool only shows totals you cannot see who was absorbing, and absorption is basically the reason to bother with this chart type at all.
Here is the part that actually matters for most people on this forum: this only works with real exchange volume and tick-by-tick data, ideally Level II depth too. That is why footprint/cluster charts are common on futures platforms and basically nonexistent as a native, reliable feature for spot FX - your broker's MT4/MT5 feed is giving you tick counts from their own book, not actual matched trades on an exchange. Building a footprint on top of that is building it on a proxy, not the real thing. It is a big part of why this stays a futures-platform tool rather than something FX brokers offer out of the box.
Anyone here actually trading FX pairs that are also exchange-cleared (like 6E, 6B on CME) specifically to get real footprint data instead of MT4 tick volume? Curious how much of a difference people have actually found it makes in practice versus just reading price action.
(Wrote up the full breakdown with delta/imbalance/absorption examples here if useful:
https://icf-market.net/blog/cluster-charts-vs-footprint-charts)
Linkback: https://www.forex.zone/forex-education/29/footprint-cluster-charts-why-you-basically-never-see-them-on-spot-fx-charts/5130/
