Single Prints – Last Buyer / Last Seller in Hidden Trade Locations

Markets turn when the last buyer has bought at a high or when the last seller has sold at a low. With traditional bar charts you only see the low of the bar or the high of the bar. You cannot judge the internal buying or selling that has been apparent inside the bar.

What is the importance of the last buyer / last seller?

It is important because it potentially signals the end of the move. No one wants to buy or sell anymore. The price has gone too high or too low. It is at an extreme.

Think of it in real life terms. Imagine you sell beer. There is a lot of demand so you raise prices, but people keep buying. At some point people have drank a lot of beer and don’t want to drink anymore and by now the price is too high. So you might get 1 or 2 more beer sales before everyone stops buying beer and you find yourself lowering the price to get more interest and get people to buy again.

One of the truths about the markets is that when prices go up but people stop buying, prices go down. Sometimes it is quite obvious. You can see it in the Orderflow generated charts.
It works both on short term and medium term charts. It can be used as a scalp trade or a swing trade.
Courtesy - Mike

Introduction of Unfinished Auction and Completed Auction

Unfinished Auction

An “unfinished auction”, sometimes called “unfinished business”, is the  term used to describe when the extreme price for a bar (either high,  low, or both) has both buy AND sell volume. This pattern is only  visible on a Footprint chart because you can “see inside the bar”,  allowing you to see things everyone else misses.

An unfinished auction that occurs on the high tick looks like the  example below. Notice there is both bid and ask volume at the  extreme (high price).

So while at each price there is a battle between buyers and sellers,  the unfinished auction pattern shows that buyers want to take price  higher but are being challenged by sellers. We have found this  pattern creates a huge target for the market to retest usually within  30 minutes. Whether it happens immediately or not, price tends to  come back and test or trade through where the unfinished auction  pattern occurred. That’s why we call this Footprint pattern an  unfinished auction.

Completed Auction

A “completed auction” is when the unfinished auction has been  satisfied. It is satisfied when the price of the unfinished auction  trades again. So the expectation is for price to return to the price  level of the unfinished auction. This typically seems to occur within  30 minutes. The first example below took exactly 30 minutes to  “complete”.