Large Trades

Large Trades plots every individual execution above your size filter as a bubble on the chart. A large trade is any single market order whose USD notional sits inside the filter window; a whale print is one the feed tags as exceptionally outsized — same dot shape, slightly more solid fill so it still reads above the noise. (Some traders also call a whale print a block trade; in crypto the terms get used interchangeably.) Buy-side bubbles paint in cool teal/blue, sell-side bubbles paint in red, and the radius scales with size so a multi-million-dollar print dwarfs a six-figure market order. The view answers the question a candle can't: was that move one trader pressing the button, or thousands of retail orders piling up?

Settings reference

The volume slider is the one knob you'll touch every day — see Common pitfalls below for how to set it.

What it draws

• Buy bubble above or at the trade price — taker bought; cool teal/blue family on dark, deeper teal on light.
• Sell bubble at the trade price — taker sold; red family in both themes.
• Whale variant — same hue family as the regular bubble but a touch more solid, so the eye lands on the big print first when several bubbles overlap.
• Volume label inside the bubble — the trade's USD notional (1.2M, 450K, …) printed in the centre when the bubble is large enough to read. Smaller bubbles render unlabelled to keep the chart breathable.
• Hover — tooltip with the trade's side (Buy / Sell), type (Large / Whale), USD volume and exact price.

Bubble radius scales with trade size relative to the visible window: the smallest visible trade gets the minimum radius, the largest gets the maximum, the rest interpolate. That means a $2M bubble on BTC and a $2M bubble on a small-cap will not be the same size — each symbol's range rescales independently. The thing that's globally comparable is the number on the bubble, not the bubble's pixel size.

How to read it

• Cluster of teal bubbles at a swing low that doesn't break — buyers paying up to defend the level while sellers keep hitting them. Classic absorption — sellers exhaust, price typically releases upward. Cross-check with CVD to confirm the bias.
• One outsized red whale print at a swing high — single distribution drop. If price stalls or rolls over in the next few bars, the whale fade is real; if price keeps grinding higher, retail demand absorbed them and the move continues.
• Sweep of same-side bubbles in quick succession through a level — momentum take-out; the market is consuming resting depth. Pair with the Orderbook Heatmap to see whether the wall they're eating was real or pulled at the last moment.
• Big bubble, no price impact — someone paid heavily, and the price didn't move. The other side is absorbing them with passive limit orders. Mark the level; whichever side gives up first usually wins the next leg.
• Bubbles consistently on one side over many bars — a steady actor is working an order in slices. Less dramatic than a single whale print, but often more meaningful for the next session's direction.

The trade you're really hunting is a bubble that lands on a price level you already had a thesis at — an HTF support, a Session POC from CVD Profile, a heatmap wall. A whale print on a random patch of mid-range is data; a whale print right at a key level is a signal.

Common pitfalls

• Volume min set too low — the chart fills with five-figure retail prints and the actual whales drown in the salad. Drag the min slider up until you can see daylight between bubbles. As a rule of thumb the min should sit somewhere in the upper-tail of the symbol's trade-size distribution; you want roughly one bubble per significant price reaction, not one per second.
• Volume min set too high — you only see the very biggest prints and miss the build-up of medium-large orders that precede a real move. The visible bubble count drops below useful; widen the window back down until you see context around each whale.
• Comparing bubble size across symbols — each symbol scales the radius range to its own visible window. A "huge" bubble on a low-cap might be five figures; a "small" bubble on BTC might be a million. Always read the number on the bubble, not the pixel size, when comparing across markets or timeframes.
• Reading bubbles without orderbook context — a whale buy that doesn't move price means there was a wall waiting on the ask. Without depth you'll mis-classify absorption as exhaustion (or vice versa). Open the Orderbook Heatmap on the same chart and the picture sharpens.
• Treating every cluster as smart money — HFT and market-making strategies print bursts of large trades as part of normal flow. Cluster plus a clear price reaction is informative; cluster with no impact and no follow-through is usually noise. Read the reaction, not just the bubbles.
• Forgetting whale prints are still tagged by the feed — the "Whale" type comes from the data provider's classification of unusually big executions for that symbol. If you keep a tight volume filter, you'll see whale prints clearly; if you open the filter wide, regular large bubbles can crowd them out visually even though they're still there. Use the slider to give whales room.

What's next

• CVD — the aggregate buy-minus-sell view of the same trade flow; large prints are the per-event detail behind the CVD line.
• VPIN — order-flow toxicity score. When VPIN spikes alongside one-sided whale prints, the move has informed-trader pressure behind it.
• Orderbook Heatmap — the resting depth around each large trade. Tells you whether a print ate real liquidity or just printed against a thin book.
• Trades & Orders — your own fills overlaid on the chart, so you can see your entries next to whatever the whales were doing.