Traders Window
Order flow for crypto traders: taker buying, selling and large trades
Price tells you where the market went. Order flow tells you who pushed it there: the buyers and sellers who were willing to pay to trade right now.
Makers and takers
Every trade has two sides. The maker had an order waiting in the order book. The taker sent a market order, or a limit order that crossed immediately, and accepted the maker's price. Takers are the impatient side, and impatient money is what moves price.
- A taker buy lifts the offer: someone wanted in badly enough to pay the ask.
- A taker sell hits the bid: someone wanted out badly enough to take the bid.
Reading buy versus sell volume
Add up taker buys and taker sells over a short window and compare them. That difference is often called delta.
- Mostly buying while price rises: the move is driven by active demand.
- Mostly selling while price falls: active supply, sellers are in control.
- Heavy buying but price not rising: someone is absorbing it with large sell orders. This divergence often matters more than the direction itself.
Large trades
A single trade far larger than usual is a sign of a big participant, or of a liquidation being executed. A cluster of large taker buys or sells in the same direction is worth noticing.
Two limits of public data to keep in mind:
- Binance's public trade feed groups the fills of one taker order at the same price into one record. A big market order that sweeps several price levels shows up as several smaller records, so large orders can look smaller than they were.
- You can't tell who is behind a trade, or whether it opens a new position or closes one. Read it together with open interest.
Order flow in Traders Window
The thin bar under each coin's chart shows taker buying (green) against selling (red) on Binance futures over the last 5 minutes. When a single trade passes your threshold, $1M by default, a ▲ or ▼ badge shows its size and side for a minute. Change the threshold, or add a quiet sound for each large trade, in Settings → Alerts.
For information only, not financial advice.