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Unfinished auction
An unfinished auction is a bar's high or low where both sides were still trading at the extreme. The indicator extends each one to the right until price comes back to it, and this page covers how traders use these levels.
Updated
Where an auction stops
An auction keeps going until one side stops trading.
At a bar’s high this is what it looks like on the
footprint: buy market orders
took the last offer, and no market order to sell traded at that price. The top
cell reads 0 × N, nothing on the sell side and something on the buy side.
Buyers found no one left to sell to them up there, and the auction was over. At
the low it is the other way round, N × 0.
When both sides were still trading at the extreme, the bar closed with business left unfinished at that price. It ended because the time ran out, not because one side did. Order flow traders call this an unfinished auction and keep the price on the chart as a level.
A line to the right
The Unfinished Auction indicator draws each unfinished high and low of a closed bar as a dashed line to the right, red for highs and green for lows, until a later bar trades at that level again. The bar that is still forming is never marked, because its high and low can still change.
- Extend level: Until touched (the default) ends the line at the first bar that trades at the level again; Until broken ends it only when price trades past it, above a high or below a low.
- Show reached levels is off by default, so the chart keeps only the levels price has not returned to. Switch it on and a few hundred bars of history turn into a comb of short segments.
- Minimum volume per side: both sides must trade more than this at the extreme. 0 means any trade on both sides counts.
- Unfinished highs and Unfinished lows can be switched on and off separately.
Scale matters
The classic definition looks at the exact extreme price. The terminal looks at the extreme on the chart’s cluster rows, and a row can hold many prices: BTC/USDT opens on rows ten dollars tall. Both sides trading somewhere in the top ten dollars of a bar is close to certain. At that Scale more than nine bars in ten have unfinished extremes, so the mark tells you little about any one bar.
The finest Scale comes closest to the classic definition, and on instruments where the finest row is one exchange tick it matches it exactly.
How traders use it
The usual idea is that price may come back to “finish” the auction, so traders treat an unfinished level as a possible target for a move already under way, or as a level to watch for a reaction.
The lines show where recent bars left business behind and where a reaction is worth watching for. What happens when price gets there you judge the usual way, from the market orders and limit orders at the level, as in the four common setups.
There is no alert on these levels 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 unfinished auctions, not a recommendation to buy or sell; the decision is always yours.