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Stacked imbalance
A stacked imbalance is several imbalanced price levels in a row inside one bar, where market orders bought or sold straight through a run of prices. The indicator keeps each one on the chart as a zone until price comes back, and this page covers how traders use the retest.
Updated
Several imbalances in a row
An imbalance is a price level where one side traded far more than the other; in this terminal the default is three times more. One of them on its own tells you little, because a single lopsided cell can be one large market order and nothing else.
A stacked imbalance is three or more of them on the same side, one level after another, inside the same bar. Buyers did not just win at one price. They kept paying up through a whole run of prices, and the limit orders waiting there never slowed them down. A sell stack is the same thing the other way up.
The footprint already marks imbalances inside a bar, but once the bar is in the past it no longer points them out to you. Keeping them in view is what the Stacked Imbalance indicator is for.
From a bar to a zone
Each stack becomes a zone: two thin lines at the top and bottom of the run of prices, drawn from its bar to the right. Buy stacks are green and sell stacks red, with a faint fill between the lines that you can switch off.
A zone ends when price comes back to it. Extend zone sets what counts as coming back:
- Until touched (the default): the zone ends at the first bar that trades inside it.
- Until broken: it ends only when price trades past its far side, below a buy zone or above a sell zone. Use this to see how a zone holds up once it is tested, not just whether price got there.
- Always: it never ends.
With Show reached zones off, a zone disappears as soon as it ends, and the chart keeps only the zones price has not come back to yet.
How traders use it
The reasoning is that where one side paid its way through a run of prices with little in its way, the same side may step in again when price returns. A buy stack below the current price marks where buyers were in control the last time price was there.
The retest. Price comes back into a buy zone. If market selling arrives and price stops there, which is what absorption looks like, buyers are defending the zone again. Traders then place their risk against it: the idea holds while price stays above the zone. It is wrong once price trades through the zone and keeps going, and a zone broken on heavy market orders now works for the other side.
Inside a breakout. Stacks that form as price leaves a range are one of the signs of a breakout with buying behind it: market orders paying higher and higher prices, level after level. A breakout with no stacks behind it is the weaker kind.
As with everything in this guide, a zone matters most where it lines up with a level that already matters for another reason. A stack in the middle of a quiet range only tells you that one moment was busy.
Settings
The indicator uses the same rule the footprint uses to mark its cells, so a zone always sits on cells the footprint shows as imbalanced.
- Ratio: how many times more one side has to trade than the other. 300 % by default, the value most platforms use.
- Levels in a row: how many imbalanced levels make a stack. 3 by default.
- Compare: diagonally (buys against the sells one level below, which is how an order actually fills and the usual footprint rule), or the two sides of the same row.
- Minimum side volume: on every level of the stack the stronger side has to trade at least this much. On a thin level, three trades against one is not a side paying up, and this setting filters those out. 0 means no minimum.
- Strong imbalances (extra set): a second, stricter set of thresholds with its own colours (400 % by default). Where both sets find the same stack, only the strong one is drawn.
What it is not
It is not a forecast. We have not measured how often price reacts at these zones, so the terminal makes no claim about it. Judge each retest as it happens.
It is only as good as the rows it works from. A coarse Scale groups many prices into one row and changes which levels count as a stack, so compare zones on the Scale you actually trade on.
There is no alert on a zone yet. Alerts are checked on our servers while your browser is closed, and they do not look at footprint levels today.
This is how traders commonly use stacked imbalances, not a recommendation to buy or sell; the decision is always yours.