Market Flow

Market Flow is the real-time read on where buying and selling pressure is concentrated. Price tells you where a stock is. Flow tells you who's pushing it there, and whether they're still pushing.

Order-flow pressure across the tape, updating live.

What order flow tells you

A stock can drift higher on thin, half-hearted buying, or rip higher because real size is hitting the offer. Those look identical on a daily chart and behave nothing alike. Flow separates them. When the pressure behind a move is heavy and one-sided, the move tends to have legs. When price grinds up while flow leans the other way, you're often looking at a fade.

This is the difference between a breakout you can trust and one that traps the people chasing it.

Reading the view

The view ranks names by where pressure is building right now. For each one you can see which side is in control and how lopsided it is. Watch for a few things:

• Pressure that agrees with price. Heavy buying under a stock that's climbing confirms the move.
• Pressure that disagrees with price. Selling into strength, or buying into weakness, is an early tell that the current move is tiring.
• Shifts. A name flipping from sustained selling to sustained buying is often more useful than one that's been one-sided all day.

TIP

Use Market Flow as a confirmation layer, not a trigger. When a name from your watchlist or the daily brief lines up with strong flow in the same direction, that's your green light. When the flow contradicts your thesis, slow down and check why.

Flow is loudest around catalysts: earnings, halts, news. If a stock you're watching just printed something and the flow turned decisive, that's the market voting in real time.

Next: turn an earnings print into a trade in Earnings Analysis.