Orderbook Heatmap (depth)

The Orderbook Heatmap is the flagship indicator on the platform — a live canvas painted behind the candles that visualises the resting depth (the volume of limit orders waiting at every price level) of the book. Each column is a time slice; each row is a price bucket. Bright cells mean stacked resting size — a bid wall below the market or an ask wall above. Cells that brighten then fade across the column are orders the market absorbed or sellers pulled before they were hit. The candles in front and the heatmap behind read together as a single picture of where liquidity sits and how it behaves when price arrives.

Settings reference

The settings panel groups exchange selection, palette, the optional Depth Profile overlay, and the wall-signal filters.

A Reset Defaults button at the bottom reverts every setting in the panel and clears the saved mobile-slider state. The footer line reminds you which book is feeding the heatmap — Aggregated orderbook depth across all exchanges when All is selected, or <Exchange> <Perp/Spot> orderbook depth only when a single venue is picked.

What it draws

The heatmap is one canvas, but two independent layers can sit on it:

Walls appear as bright vertical bars anchored at a price — a bid wall below the market (resting buy limit orders) or an ask wall above (resting sell limit orders). A bar that stays bright as price approaches and never fades is real defence. A bar that fades the moment price gets close is a pulled order — common with spoofing and never a level you want to trade off.

An iceberg is the special case where a small wall keeps being replenished the instant trades chip into it — the visible size stays small in the heatmap because the replenishment refills at the same brightness, but the total filled at that level is much larger than the bar suggests. The heatmap shows the current depth; an iceberg is read from the cell persisting through repeated hits rather than from its peak brightness.

How to read it

• Bright vertical bar — resting liquidity that price needs to consume to push through. Stronger / longer-lived bars are stronger levels.
• Wall fading as price approaches — orders are getting pulled (spoof / cancelled). Don't trade off it; expect price to slice through.
• Wall hit, partially eaten, still bright — real institutional limit orders that absorbed the trade and stayed. These usually flip into support / resistance after the test.
• Vacuum (dark space) between price and the next wall — no resting orders in between. Price tends to move quickly through vacuum zones, then react at the next wall.
• Symmetrical walls above and below — a range market. Mean-reversion trades anchor here; the level that's eaten first is usually the one that breaks.
• Asymmetric walls (heavy ask, light bid) — implied direction. Price often falls into the lighter side because the heavier side keeps it from going the other way.
• Wall that keeps replenishing at the same size — likely an iceberg. The trader behind it wants more fill than the visible top-of-book shows. Pair with the Large Trades tape to see who's eating it.
• Cells brightening on the All view but dim on a single-venue view — the liquidity is concentrated on another exchange. Switch the Exchange selector to confirm where the size actually sits.
• Heatmap and CVD diverging — price grinds against a wall while CVD keeps ticking against it. Classic absorption tell; the wall is winning and the move usually reverses.

Common pitfalls

• Reading the heatmap on a tight zoom — you need a decent run of columns to see how a wall behaves across time. Zoom out until you can see how the bright bars actually persisted; a 10-column window only shows the latest snapshot.
• Stacking the overlay with the Tick · Heatmap chart type — the chart-type variant is the depth view as the chart itself. Running both is double work and double clutter; pick one.
• Treating one bright frame as a wall — a wall is a price level that keeps resting size across multiple columns. A single bright cell that vanishes on the next print was a quote-flicker, not a wall.
• Mistaking a refilling iceberg for a small wall — the visible cell stays the same colour because the replenishment matches the fill rate. If trades clearly keep printing into the level but the cell never thins, treat it as size larger than it looks.
• Trusting wall marks on an unfamiliar venue — depth coverage and quality vary by exchange and by pair. Some venues stream a deep book in real time; others provide a thinner snapshot that may stall when the symbol is quiet. Watch the green live-dot on the Exchange picker — if a venue rarely lights up for your pair, the heatmap on that venue is less reliable than on the aggregated view.
• Forgetting to check the source line — switching from All to a single venue (or flipping the Profile Source) changes what the bars actually represent. The footer note under the settings panel always tells you which book is in front of you; read it before drawing levels.

What's next

• Liquidation Heatmap — companion view that paints projected liquidation clusters from open positions instead of resting limit orders.
• Large Trades — the per-trade tape showing who is consuming the depth, sized by notional.
• Trades & Orders — your own fills and resting orders pinned to the same chart.
• CVD — net buy-versus-sell flow over time; pair with the heatmap to spot absorption against the walls.