Video Transcript:
Hey everyone, it’s Dale here. In this video, I want to show you how to properly set up volume footprints in TradingView so you don’t have to use the terrible default layout that looks like this. It is messy, hard to read, and not good if you want to trade footprints seriously. Instead, I’ll show you a clean, professional setup that looks like this, where the key information is clear, easy to read, and easy to trade from. It’s not just about colors it’s also about showing the right data the right way. So let’s get to it. First, what you need to do is have a TradingView plan so you can access volume footprints. You need the Premium plan, which costs around €50 per month. Once you have that, TradingView will allow you to add volume footprints to your chart, as you can see here. Let me now go to TradingView. Here is the TradingView platform. We have standard candles, but we’ll quickly change that. Click this button here and select Volume Footprint. It will change into this. Not exactly like this, because this is my layout the default layout looks a bit different but let me show you how to set it up so it looks like this. Right-click the chart and go to Settings. In the settings, you can adjust how the candles look. Those settings are not very important they only change colors and the canvas look so I would keep them as they are and move on to the more important footprint settings. The first important thing is the row size. You want it set to Manual. If you use Auto, it will adjust row size according to volatility, which means every footprint will look different. That’s not good. I use two ticks per row for currency futures. If you trade indices, you may want to change this, but for currency futures I use two. The next setting is Display, and I use Profile. If you switch to Cluster, it looks like this, which is the default in TradingView. The problem is that it doesn’t clearly show where heavy volumes were traded. I prefer Profile because it immediately shows where heavy and low volumes were traded. It also clearly shows where buyers or sellers were more aggressive, and you can see that at first glance. Regarding footprint type, I use Buy and Sell, which really means Bid and Ask. TradingView labels it in a simplified way for retail traders. The right side shows aggressive buyers and the left side shows aggressive sellers. It’s not perfectly precise terminology, but it’s acceptable for simplicity. You can also switch to Total, which looks like mini volume profiles and shows the sum of buy and sell volume. The delta settings are not very useful in my opinion. The ladder setting shows which side was stronger, but I don’t use it. I stick with Buy/Sell or Total. For colors, you can copy mine they are not default. I keep Value Area turned off. Value area makes sense for volume profile trading, not for order flow, so I don’t use it here. Summary info shows the data below each footprint. It displays delta and total volume for each bar. Delta shows whether buyers or sellers were more aggressive. Positive delta means buyers dominated, negative delta means sellers dominated. Total shows the full traded volume in that footprint. Both are useful, so I keep them on. You can show them below each footprint or in a table at the bottom. I prefer below each footprint. The rest of the table metrics are mostly noise and not needed. Next is imbalance. Imbalance compares diagonal cells. If one side is 300% or more larger than the other, it gets highlighted. That shows buying or selling imbalance. I keep the default at 300%. Stacked imbalance means three or more imbalances on top of each other. Those often act as support or resistance, so it’s useful to keep this on. I set it to three stacked levels. Minimal volume and Ignore Zeros are also imbalance settings. I keep Ignore Zeros off and minimal volume at zero. An imbalance is still valid even if the other side is zero, so there’s no reason to ignore it. The last important setting is Adjust for Contract Changes. When a futures contract rolls and price shifts, this setting adjusts historical data so there is no artificial gap. I keep this on. That’s how you set up the footprint chart in TradingView. I hope you found this useful. If you’ve done it, congratulations the first step is behind you. Now the next step is learning how to trade with order flow.
If you want that, go to my website, trader-dale.com, click Trading Course and Tools, and scroll down to the Order Flow Pack. It includes a 12-hour order flow course and my custom order flow software, which is more advanced than the TradingView version. It’s a one-time lifetime payment no recurring fees. If you’re interested, you can get it there. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time. Happy trading.
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