05 Insights
Insights
Notes on microstructure, order flow, and the engineering standards trading software ought to be held to. No signals, no calls, no predictions. Every essay is written by Erianux.
Latest
What a line on a chart is made of
Drawings are anchors of time and price, not ink. Why rollover, timezones, non-time bars and session templates move them, and which objects quietly recompute.
Read more →The bar that is not finished
The rightmost bar is a running total, not a bar. What that does to an indicator, why history looks cleaner than it was, and how to keep a test honest.
What a footprint imbalance measures
The diagonal comparison, why the ratio is a setting rather than a law, what a single mark can and cannot mean, and why stacked marks are a different object.
The trading day has edges
The Sunday open, the daily maintenance halt, the cash session, and the thirty seconds that set settlement - and what each edge does to the levels on your chart.
Icebergs: how a refill shows on the tape
Display quantity, why the visible size understates the real size, the volume-against-displayed signature, and why price stalls until the refills stop.
Reading a market profile
Brackets, TPOs, the point of control, the seventy percent value area, single prints and the day shapes, explained from the ground up.
Scheduled releases thin the book
Who publishes the economic calendar, why quotes are pulled in the minutes before a number, and what a thin book does to market and stop orders.
Rollover: why your chart jumps four times a year
Quarterly expiries, the roll a week before them, the calendar spread that makes the gap, and what back-adjusting does to the levels on your chart.
What a point actually costs
Tick size and tick value for the contracts intraday traders use, why the same stop is not the same risk on two markets, and how to size from the stop.
Why yesterday's value area still matters
Seventy percent of yesterday's volume shows where recent positions were built. Acceptance, rejection, the point of control, and why the levels decay.
Delta is not direction
Delta counts who crossed the spread, not who was right. Read it as the cost of the move, why cumulative delta is fragile, and why an imbalance is a ratio rather than a signal.
Order blocks are inventory, not lines
The rectangle is the least important part. A block is a claim that a position was built there and is still open. Read it as inventory and the folklore falls away.
What an AI-written indicator cannot know
You can describe an indicator in a sentence and watch it appear. The code is usually fine. What it invents is the data definition, the decision it serves, and the test that would falsify it.
How to read a backtest
Four quiet assumptions — fills, data resolution, parameter selection, and the tested regime — each move a backtest the same direction: up. How to audit anyone's equity curve, including ours.
Stop runs are liquidity events, not conspiracies
Large orders need someone to trade with, and clustered stops are inventory. The mechanics of the sweep, why the event itself is neutral, and how its resolution — reclaim or acceptance — is the actual signal.
VWAP: the benchmark executions are measured against
VWAP isn't a support line — it's a benchmark many institutional executions are measured against, and that is exactly why price behaves around it. The honest use of the line and its sigma bands.
The opening hour is a different market
Volume has a clock, and it barely changes. Why 9:30–11:00 ET resolves questions the rest of the day can only ask — and why the same setup means different things at 9:45 and 12:30.
How to prove an indicator repaints
Repainting is one of the most common defects in retail trading software, and one of the easiest to hide. Here is how to test for it in ten minutes, without source code.
Absorption: when volume doesn't move price
Heavy volume with no progress is one of the most informative events on a chart, and the one most often mistaken for strength.
The book is not the tape
Depth and executed volume answer different questions. Confusing them is why so much order-flow analysis produces confident nonsense.
Equal highs are not resistance
A shelf of equal highs is not a wall. It is a pool of resting stop orders, and the distinction changes how you trade it.
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