The Role of Order Flow Imbalance in Predicting Reversals
Order flow imbalance compares aggressive buying with aggressive selling. This article explains why changes in that balance, not the buy/sell ratio alone, often show up before a reversal.
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Order flow imbalance compares aggressive buying with aggressive selling. This article explains why changes in that balance, not the buy/sell ratio alone, often show up before a reversal.
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Large candles exhaust the buyers defending a support level before price even touches it. When support finally gets tested, there's nothing left to hold it.
Market makers don't react to price - they classify order flow as informed or uninformed. That distinction drives every quote, hedge, and withdrawal decision.
Order flow is the live sequence of buy and sell orders hitting the market, and it is the mechanism every price change actually runs through. Not sentiment, not headlines, not chart patterns - those things change what participants intend to do, but price moves when the orders land. The distinction that matters is aggression. Every trade has a buyer and a seller in equal number, so the question is never who is more numerous. It is who is initiating, crossing the spread to fill right now, and who is sitting passive on a resting bid or ask waiting to be hit.
A directional move is an imbalance in that aggression. Market buys consume resting asks at each level until the cheap ones are gone and price climbs to find the next sellers. Market sells do the reverse. Depth decides how far each wave travels - a deep book absorbs flow without moving, a thin book lets the same size push price several percent. This is why low-liquidity altcoins lurch on modest volume, why walls hold until they are pulled, and why volume alone misleads when both sides cancel out.
These notes collect observations on how that flow behaves and who reads it. How aggressive orders interact with resting liquidity to set price. How market makers classify flow as informed or noise and widen spreads or step away when toxicity rises. How whales fake the signal through spoofing and engineered walls in thin books, and why news arrives after the flow has already positioned.
The framing is mechanical, not directional. Order flow does not forecast the next move - it describes the imbalance producing the current one. Notes here track aggression at the book, the informed-versus-noise split, and the moments liquidity providers retreat. Read it as field notes, not signal.