Bid/ask walls
A price level where an unusually large resting order sits in the order book. Everything else OrderVane draws is executed volume; this is the one thing that has not traded yet.
Setting names are shown in English because that is how they appear in the Quantower settings window.
What a wall is
A wall is a price level where an unusually large resting order sits in the order book. OrderVane draws it as a horizontal line — blue below the market for bid-side size, dark red above for ask-side size — with the size printed next to it. It is on by default.
This is the one marker in OrderVane that is not about executed volume. Everything else — bubbles, footprint cells, shelves, profiles — describes trades that happened. A wall describes an intention that has not been tested yet, and that difference matters when you read it.
Requires Level 2 (market depth) data. OrderVane reads the live order book from Quantower. If your broker or data plan does not include depth, no wall lines are drawn. There is no error message — the feature simply stays silent, and everything else keeps working.
How a level qualifies
Three tests, and a level has to pass all of them.
| Test | Default | Setting |
|---|---|---|
| Relatively large | At least 3x the average of the scanned levels | Wall size multiple (across Wall scan depth, 20 levels) |
| Absolutely large | A size floor, derived from the symbol's own book | Wall auto floor (off = fixed Wall min size, 15) |
| Persistent | Sitting there at least 5 seconds | Wall min age to show |
You can swap the first test for a percentile rule instead (Wall threshold mode).
The auto floor exists so you do not have to know the instrument. A relative test alone would flag a level in an empty book where every level is small; the floor asks whether the size is meaningful at all, and derives that from what the symbol's book actually looks like rather than from a number you had to guess.
Why five seconds
The age test is the one that changes the feature's character, so it is worth understanding.
Quotes appear and cancel constantly. A level that shows up and vanishes within a second or two is not something you can act on, and drawing it would fill the chart with lines that are gone before you read them.
Requiring the size to sit for five seconds filters that out. What survives is size that has been standing there — which is a different, and more interesting, fact than size that flickered.
What resting size does not tell you
Two things worth being blunt about.
Resting size is not a commitment. Limit orders are routinely cancelled, and a wall can vanish the moment price approaches it. OrderVane shows you what is in the book right now; it makes no claim about what will happen there.
Walls are live-only. There is no historical order book, so wall lines exist only for the current state of the market. You cannot scroll back and see where the walls were yesterday — that data does not exist to be shown. Where other markers thin out over history because your feed's tick history ran out, walls are absent over history by nature.
Honest limits
- No depth data, no walls. Silently, by design — the rest of OrderVane keeps working.
- Current state only. No history, and no record of a wall that has been pulled.
- It is a description, not a signal. A wall says large size is resting there right now. Whether it holds, gets filled, or gets cancelled as price arrives is not something the book can tell you in advance.
- Bid/ask walls are Pro. They are part of the DOM analysis layer.
Related
- Big trade markers — executed size, as opposed to resting size
- Session levels — levels built from what has already traded
- Volume shelf — a level defined by volume share, kept across sessions
- All docs
OrderVane draws this on your Quantower charts.
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