Order flow from ticks: who is pushing, and who is absorbing

Price tells you where trades happened. Order flow tries to tell you who started them: buyers lifting the offer, or sellers hitting the bid. When aggressive buyers are in control, price usually rises; when it doesn’t, someone large is often absorbing them with passive sell orders.

How MoneyHQ estimates it

Kite’s live feed sends a snapshot of each stock about once a second: last price, total volume traded, and the best bid and ask. Between two snapshots, the new volume is assigned a side:

1. If the price is at or above the best ask, the volume counts as buying (someone lifted the offer).
2. If it is at or below the best bid, it counts as selling (someone hit the bid).
3. Otherwise the tick rule decides: a higher price than the last tick is buying, a lower one is selling.
4. If the price hasn’t changed, the volume keeps the side of the previous trade.

Each 5-minute bar then has estimated buy volume and sell volume. Their difference is the bar’s delta, and the running total through the day is the cumulative delta (CVD).

Reading it

• Flow confirms price: price rising with positive delta, falling with negative delta. Aggressive orders are driving the move.
• Flow disagrees with price: price rising while delta is negative, or falling while delta is positive. Large passive orders are absorbing the aggression. Treat such moves as fragile.
• Order book: MoneyHQ also shows what share of the quantity waiting in the book is on the bid side. A heavy bid under a falling price can mean support is being built, or simply that bids are being pulled and re-placed.

The limits, honestly

• It is an estimate. Snapshots arrive about once a second, so several trades on both sides can be merged into one step. Direction and disagreement are reliable; exact numbers are not.
• It exists only while the live feed is running. Kite’s historical candles don’t record which side started each trade, so bars from before the feed connected have no flow.
• Large orders are often split into many small ones, so flow shows pressure, not the identity or size of any single participant.

Where to see it

On a stock page, the Δ panel under the volume bars shows each bar’s delta, and the line is the cumulative delta. Movers → Order-flow leaders ranks the most one-sided stocks of the session. In the board’s hover card, flow appears as “+18% buying” or “−12% selling”, with the order-book split.

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For learning only, not investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

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