Big trade markers

Three shapes, three different facts about aggression. The rule they share: every mark is a real print, drawn where it happened.

Setting names are shown in English because that is how they appear in the Quantower settings window.

Does Quantower have a big trades indicator?

Yes, in the platform itself. Quantower ships Power Trades, which detects zones where a large volume traded in a short window, with display modes, a side table and an audible alert. What else ships with the platform, and the question of which licence includes it, is on What Quantower gives you free. What each Power Trades setting does is on Power Trades settings. If Power Trades already answers your question, you do not need an add-on for it.

OrderVane's big trade markers are a separate indicator, and the rest of this page is about them: a bubble for a large print, a cluster for back-to-back aggression, a bar for absorption, a size threshold you can watch before you let it filter, and a sound that never plays without a mark on the chart.

Every bubble is a print

A bubble (●) is a large print taken from the tape and drawn at the exact price and time it happened. Its size scales with the volume, and its colour with the side that was aggressing.

A burst of prints inside Time interval (sec) counts as one — a 300-lot order that filled as forty prints in 100 ms is one event, not forty bubbles.

Where the tape does not reach, there are no bubbles. Your broker's tick history has a limit (Historical tick lookback (h)). Past it the chart is simply empty of bubbles. That gap is deliberate: OrderVane will not draw an estimate in the shape of a trade. For those older bars, the volume shelf is what describes the levels instead.

The three shapes

Each shape answers a different question, which is why they are three shapes and not one with options.

A bubble is a single event. A cluster is several in a row in the same direction — many prints hitting the same side without a pause, which is a different fact from one large order. Absorption is the opposite of a result: volume above Absorb vol, concentrated within a narrow range, with price not going anywhere. Something met it.

The adaptive threshold

"Large" is not a fixed number. 60 contracts is a big print in one instrument and background noise in another, and the same instrument changes character between sessions.

Adaptive threshold derives the level from the market's own recent behaviour rather than from a number you guessed, and the HUD shows the value it settled on (Adapt 317). It has three modes:

The middle mode exists on purpose. Handing over a threshold to something automatic is easier when you have watched it agree with you for a few sessions first.

Fewer marks when zoomed out

Zoomed out, the honest number of qualifying prints is more than the screen can show as separate marks. OrderVane gives the screen an ink budget and draws the largest events that fit (Marker importance filter).

Two things this is not: it does not change detection (everything is still found and cached — only the drawing is filtered), and it does not apply to the most recent ten minutes, so a live event never disappears because the screen is busy.

Zoom in and the rest come back.

Sound

Bubbles can play a sound as they are detected. The rule is a strict one and worth stating: if it makes a sound, it draws a bubble. The audio gate and the marker gate read the same threshold, so you are never listening to something you cannot then find on the chart.

Honest limits

• Aggressor side comes from your feed. OrderVane uses the broker's aggressor flag where it exists and falls back to standard tick-rule inference where it does not. On feeds that report neither, the split is inferred, not read.
• A cluster is proximity, not intent. Consecutive prints in one direction is what the mark says. Whether it was one participant or several is not something the tape tells you.
• Absorption is an observation. It says size traded and price did not move. That is a description of what already happened — not a probability, not a signal, and not a recommendation.
• These marks are in every tier. Bubbles, clusters and absorption are the Lite core; Pro adds the footprint layer around them.

Related

• Absorption — the ▬ mark on its own: what it claims, and what it does not
• Volume shelf — what describes levels where the tape does not reach
• How to read a footprint bar — the per-price view of the same trades
• Bid/ask walls — resting size, as opposed to executed size
• What Quantower gives you free — Power Trades and the rest of what ships with the platform
• Power Trades settings — every Power Trades setting, its default, and what it changes
• All docs