Open Interest

Open interest (OI) is the total number of perpetual contracts still open on the venue — every long has a matching short, and OI counts the pairs. When OI rises, new positions opened that bar; when OI falls, existing positions closed. OI delta is the bar-over-bar change in OI, and reading it next to the candle direction is one of the cleanest tells in derivatives: rising OI + rising price means long buildup (real buyers opening fresh longs); rising OI + falling price means short buildup (real sellers opening fresh shorts); falling OI in a rally is a short squeeze (shorts being stopped out, not new buying); falling OI in a sell-off is a long squeeze (longs being stopped out, not new selling). The Open Interest indicator plots that whole story in a sub-pane below the chart, classifies every bar into one of those four buckets, and flashes a halo on the candles where positioning surges hardest.

Settings reference

The Columns and Bars styles share the same Y-axis — both plot OI spread, i.e. how far the bar's OI sits above or below its recent rolling baseline, scaled as a percentage. The zero line is the baseline; positive bars mean OI is expanding, negative bars mean OI is contracting. The Candles style flips to absolute OI values instead, so its Y-axis shows raw open interest with wicks tracking the intra-bar high and low.

What it draws

The indicator paints in its own sub-pane below the main chart plus, optionally, two overlays on the candles themselves.

The sub-pane — Columns, Candles or Bars

Pick the style that matches how you read flow.

Every bar is flow-classified and coloured to match:

Sub-pane header and hover panel

Top-left of the pane prints mrD OI plus the current bar's raw open interest value and its percentage change vs the baseline — green when expanding, red when contracting. Move the crosshair onto any bar and the header switches to that bar's values; pull the crosshair off and it snaps back to the latest bar.

When the crosshair is over a bar, an OI Metrics tooltip appears in the top-right of the pane:

• OI — raw open interest at the hovered bar.
• OI Change — percentage above or below the recent baseline.
• Relative OI — the same change normalised against recent pivot extremes, so it compares apples-to-apples across symbols with very different OI sizes. Above zero = expanding harder than the recent norm; below zero = contracting harder.
• Flow — Bull Inflow / Bear Inflow / Bull Outflow / Bear Outflow / —, coloured to match the bar.
• Burst — Up Burst / Down Burst / None. The burst flag fires on bars where Relative OI jumped sharply enough to mark an extreme.

Burst signals on the OI pane

Bars classified as bursts get a small hollow ring at the column tip plus a short code printed above (up-burst) or below (down-burst):

Signals on chart (optional overlay)

Turn Signals on chart on and the same burst rings + codes mirror up onto the main kline chart — above the candle's high for up-bursts, below the candle's low for down-bursts. Useful when you want the OI tell printed right next to the price action you're trading.

OI spike halos (optional overlay)

Turn OI spike highlights on and bars classified as a Bull Inflow or Bear Inflow burst get a translucent halo wrapped around the candle — green for long buildup, red for short buildup. The +X.X% value inside the halo is that bar's OI expansion vs its recent baseline. Outflow bursts (squeezes) intentionally don't get a halo — squeezes are exit events, not entrapment events, and shouldn't share the same visual cue. The halo is the "trapped traders" tell: a sudden surge of new positions opening at the high or the low often marks an exhaustion pivot, because the late longs (or late shorts) who just opened are now sitting at the worst price.

How to read it

Start with the price-vs-OI matrix — the four flow buckets define the regime:

Then layer the burst signals on top:

• B-IN at a swing high — late longs piling in at the top. Watch for an exhaustion pivot, especially if the next candle fails to follow through. Pair with the spike halo for the visual confirmation.
• S-IN at a swing low — late shorts piling in at the bottom. Same pattern, mirror direction. A sharp wick rejection on the next bar with S-IN on the prior bar is the textbook short-squeeze setup.
• B-OUT mid-trend — longs closing into strength. Either profit-taking (healthy) or a real top forming (bad). Read the candle response over the next 2–3 bars to know which.
• S-OUT mid-trend — shorts covering into weakness. Same call.
• OI flat in a rally — positioning isn't taking sides; the move is being driven by spot or by short covering rather than fresh longs. Bias toward fade.
• OI Change diverging from price — price prints a new high but OI Change shrinks bar over bar. Conviction is draining; pullback risk rises. Mirror on the short side when price makes a new low and OI Change fails to grow.

Pair the OI read with CVD for who is paying (aggression) and with Funding for which side is paying to hold positioning. OI tells you the volume of open contracts, CVD tells you who is hitting which side, funding tells you what holding costs — together they triangulate the regime.

Common pitfalls

• Reading OI on a Spot symbol — spot markets have no open interest, so the pane comes up blank. Switch the chart to the perpetual contract (USDT-M or coin-M) to get OI back.
• Treating outflow bursts as reversal triggers — a B-OUT or S-OUT is a position-closing event, not a reversal call. Longs taking profit into strength is healthy continuation. Don't fade strength just because OI dropped — wait for price-action confirmation on the next bars.
• Calling a "real trend" off a single bar — one Bull Inflow candle doesn't establish a trend; it tells you longs opened on that bar. A clean trend regime usually shows several consecutive green columns expanding, not one lonely green bar surrounded by greys. Sustained expansion matters more than the single biggest bar.
• Confusing the rolling baseline for a true mean — the OI Change % is calibrated against a recent rolling baseline, so when OI sits at a fresh structural high for a long stretch, the bars eventually compress back around zero as the baseline catches up. That's the indicator working as designed, not a regime change. Pair with the Candles view to see absolute OI levels when you need the long-context read.
• Stacking the halo with the on-chart signals — together they double-paint the same bar and clutter the candles. Pick one: the halo for a visual "look here" cue, or the on-chart codes for the precise classification. Most traders run Columns + OI spike highlights and leave on-chart signals off.
• OI is venue-local — the indicator reads the active exchange's OI feed. For aggregated cross-venue OI you'd need an external tracker; this pane doesn't sum venues. If you're comparing two charts on two venues, OI levels won't match — that's the venue split, not a bug.
• Data older than the venue's retention window — derivative venues only retain OI history for a fixed window. Bars older than the window come up blank in the pane and the inline header reads — instead of a misleading zero. Drop to a shorter timeframe or load less history when the gap matters.

What's next

• OI / CVD Pattern — pairs OI flow with CVD aggression to auto-classify squeeze vs absorption regimes into named patterns.
• CVD — running buy-minus-sell volume; the aggression side of the order-flow story OI alone doesn't see.
• Funding — the cost of holding the positioning that OI counts.
• Aggregated Liquidations — what happens when the squeezes OI flags actually trigger forced exits.